The High Court of the United Kingdom has officially ruled that The Pirate Bay must be blocked by all local Internet service providers, cutting it off from a potential user base of over 50 million people. This ruling came after a February decision that the site was in fact infringing copyright laws in the United Kingdom. The UK entertainment industry has actually applauded the ruling.

“Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists,” the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said in a statement.

However, not everyone was so happy. Digital and civil rights groups hated the decision. “Blocking the Pirate Bay is pointless and dangerous,” said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group said in a statement. ”It will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for Internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism. Internet censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the effect desired. It simply turns criminals into heroes.”

Source: Ars Technica

Dotcom will receive $614,000 in cash that had been confiscated from his previously, along with his Mercedes-Benz G55AMG worth $204,000 with the license plate “POLICE.” Dotcom will also receive $16,000 a month in living allowance off of the interest of his $8.19 million of government bonds. His wife, Mona, who recently gave birth, will receive her living expenses and medical bills paid and will be able to use her seized 2010 Toyota Vellfire, worth $49,000.

Dotcom has also been involved in some political heat in New Zealand.

The New Zealand Herald reported on Monday that Dotcom claimed to have donated approximately $41,000 to John Banks, the head of the ACT New Zealand political party and the current minister for Small Business and Regulatory Reform, during his 2010 campaign for mayor of the city of Auckland. He went on to explain that Banks had asked him to divide the payments into two installments of $20,500 each so as to conceal their origin, and that the local politician called him personally to thank him. Banks denied calling Dotcom for the mayoral donations, adding: “I could not have, as any such contribution was anonymous.”

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key stepped into the heat over the weekend, stating that he trusted Banks. He also added that the police should investigate any potential wrongdoing.

Source: Ars Technica

Barnes & Noble announced back in January that they were looking for a “strategic separation” of its digital business. The formation of Newco, who will handle the company’s digital and college textbook businesses, could be a simple step toward spinning off its digital business entirely.

Representatives for both Microsoft and Barnes & Noble were thrilled to be able to use the Windows 8 Nook application. Andy Lees, president at Microsoft, stated that the Nook app will “accelerate e-reading innovation across a broad range of Windows devices,” while William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble, stated the partnership will “bring world-class digital reading technologies and content to the Windows platform.”

There is already a Nook for PC app, as well as apps for Android, iOS, and Mac. However, with the stake from Microsoft, this suggests that the Nook app for Windows 8 may have more functionality than just being an e-reader. This new subsidiary has people thinking that Microsoft and Barnes & Noble may be looking to compete with Apple in the e-textbook market.

As a result of the partnership, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble have settled their patent disputes. From now on through the life of the partnership, Barnes & Noble, along with Newco, will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its Nook e-readers and tablets.

Source: Ars Technica

With Firefox 12 already released, Mozilla has turned its focus to polishing Firefox 13, which is due out six weeks from now. If you don’t want to wait that long, you can download the Firefox 13 beta now.

The newest and biggest feature in Firefox 13 is “tabs on demand.” When Firefox restarts when you have multiple tabs open, Firefox will now only restore the currently selected tab; background tabs are not loaded. With tabs on demand, you won’t have to wait for all of your tabs to load. Instead, they will still be shown as a tab, but only load once they are selected.

Firefox 13 will have a New Tab page similar to Opera’s Speed Dial, which Google Chrome’s new tab page was also was inspired by. The default home page will now have links to menu items like Bookmarks, History, Settings, Add-ons, Downloads and Sync Preferences.

Firefox 13 will include support for Google’s SPDY protocol, which improves on HTTP and in many cases can reduce page load times by quite a bit. SPDY’s other main advantage over HTTP is that all traffic is encrypted. The majority of desktop browsers on the web will support SPDY once Firefox 13 and Opera 12 are released in their final versions.

For more details on everything that’s new in the developer tools and the rest of Firefox 13, check out Mozilla’s release notes.

Source: Ars Technica

The changes to the algorithm will go live within the next few days across all languages, said engineer Matt Cutts. It will affect approximately 3.1% of queries in English “to a degree that a regular user might notice.”

Cutts added that the changes are to crack down on sites engaged in tactics such as keyword stuffing, or “unusual linking patterns” where unrelated links are put into a fake article. While sites that do this are harder to recognize than other black hat SEO practices, Google engineers think that targeted sites “are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.”

Google’s “Panda” algorithm was introduced last February, and has already had over nine major updates, not to mention all of the minor tweaks. Sometimes, innocent sites were harmed in their results, but this change is promising to affect a much smaller set of visible search results. Some of the tactics that Google does not like and considers black hat includes hidden text or links, pages with irrelevant keywords, cloaking, and the presence of malicious software. Cutts pointed out that white hat techniques are still fair game and can improve the usability of a site, “which is good for both users and search engines.”

Source: Ars Technica

The iPad has nearly taken over the iPod as the average household’s first Apple product, according to market research firm NPD. The iPod has been considered one of Apple’s most successful products, so it is quite impressive that it is already nearly being passed by the iPad, which has only been out a few years.

The iPad is very popular among those who already own Apple products, but it is quickly growing as people’s first Apple device. More than a quarter of current iPad owners have stated that it is their first Apple product. While the iPod first-time ownership is at 69%, the growth factor of the iPad is still worth noting. According to NPD, the iPad will be passing the iPod in the next couple years if it keeps going the way it is. iPod’s will slowly keep dropping and iPad’s will keep rising, balancing them out and eventually having iPad be the dominant first-time Apple device.

“iPad sales are growing much faster than any other Apple product has this soon after launch,” NPD Director of Industry Analysis Ben Arnold said in a statement.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made a statement during Apple’s second quarter conference call. Cook pointed out that Apple has sold approximately 67 million iPads in the 2 years since the iPad’s introduction. “It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, 5 years to sell that many iPods, and 3 years to sell that many iPhones,” he said. “iPad is a profound product and the breadth of it is incredible.”

Source: Ars Technica

VMware has announced a leak of source code from their ESX hypervisor. A hacker, who goes by the handle “Hardcore Charlie,” posted the code on Pastebin on April 8. VMware states that there is a “possibility that more files may be posted in the future.” Apparently, the code posted dates from 2003 to 2004. The VMware ESX is still used regularly, but VMware is shifting customers to a newer hypervisor called ESXi, which is designed to be more secure.

“The fact that the source code may have been publicly shared does not necessarily mean that there is any increased risk to VMware customers,” the company said. “VMware proactively shares its source code and interfaces with other industry participants to enable the broad virtualization ecosystem today. We take customer security seriously and have engaged internal and external resources, including our VMware Security Response Center, to thoroughly investigate. We will continue to provide updates to the VMware community if and when additional information is available.”

The source code from VMware was stolen from Chinese military contractor CEIEC, the China National Electronics Import-Export Corporation. VMware wasn’t the only target, either. The hacker, Hardcore Charlie, told Reuters earlier this month that he had hacked into CEIEC seeking information on the US military campaign in Afghanistan. He also stated that he was a friend of Hector Monsegur, the LulzSec “leader” who was caught by the FBI and pleaded guilty to criminal hacking charges.

Source: Ars Technica

It was rumored for quite a few years, but it’s finally here. Google Drive was released today, giving users 5GB of free storage to sync across computers. Drive gives a viable competitor to Dropbox, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Apple‘s iCloud, etc.

Google Drive is now available at drive.google.com. This application makes a special folder in your computer’s file system. Any file that you put in the folder will sync across devices. Google Drive is readily available for Windows, Mac and Android. Google stated that they are currently “working hard” on a Drive app for iOS devices.

Each user will get 5GB of free storage, as mentioned earlier. Dropbox offers 2GB, SkyDrive 7GB, and iCloud 5GB. An upgrade to 25GB will cost you $2.49 per month, 100GB is $4.99 per month, and 1TB is $49.99 per month. If you’re feeling crazy, there are options all the way up to 16TB for $799.99 per month. By purchasing any paid account, Google will also upgrade your Gmail storage to 25GB.

File size limits are also an important aspect of cloud storage. The individual file size limit is 10GB with Google Drive. The process for installing Google Drive works the exact same on Windows and Mac. Once you have installed the 68MB application, you will go through a few screens to set Drive up on your computer.

Google bragged up both Docs and Drive a little, saying “Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.”

Search is also a big part of Google Drive, and Google even promised great improvements.

Users can “search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more,” Google Chrome Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai wrote. “Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.”

Source: Ars Technica

Anonymous, the world’s most infamous hacking group, has had help from the People’s Liberation Front to create a data-sharing site called AnonPaste. This site is meant to paste code and messages without any moderation or censorship. The server does not see anything, as the data is encrypted and decrypted in the browser using 256 bit AES. AnonPaste takes donations via WePay or BitCoins.

The plan for AnonPaste is for it to be an alternative to Pastebin, which has been facing a lot of negative rep due to the malicious code and stolen data that gets pasted. Pastebin owner Jeroen Vader has stated that Pastebin is occasionally filtered and that the site has complied with law enforcement requests to turn over data.

Even though many are worried about the content, Anonymous has stated that “because the data on our servers is unreadable by us (or anyone), the responsibility for the legality or appropriateness of any paste lies solely with the person posting. So there will be no need for us to police this service, and in fact we don’t even have the ability of deleting any particular paste.”

Source: Ars Technica

Verizon Wireless has upgraded its private wireless network service. They have combined their service with their already existing 4G LTE network. By doing so, they have created a “highly secure, high-speed” offering for businesses. In the past, Verizon’s Private IP Wireless network was offered over the EVDO (Evolution-Data Optimized) network only, reaching 190,000 customers. However, in January, Verizon began its upgrades to 4G LTE technology.

“With the new service, customers with LTE smartphones and tablets and LTE modems for their laptops can access the nearest cell tower and will then be routed to an enterprise gateway in one of many Verizon switching centers,” Computerworld reported. “Data routed to and through the enterprise gateway is encoded, but not encrypted, and kept totally separate from the public Internet. Encryption of the data can be added, if desired.”

In order to create a mobile private network, business will have to pay a $500 one-time charge in addition to the wireless data costs. While most wireless carriers are complaining that they need more spectrum, it appears that Verizon may have plenty. Verizon has announced that after they buy spectrum from Comcast and Time Warner, they will auction off their 700 MHz A and B spectrum licenses, as they are not necessary for Verizon’s 4G network.

Source: Ars Technica