On June 25th 2005, the homepage of the EliteTorrents.org tracker displayed an ominous message. Thousands of members trying to log in to get a sneak peak at a leaked copy of Star Wars: Episode 3 were surprised and confused in equal numbers. Had the FBI really raided one of the largest BitTorrent communities and put up a badly made Word document, or

Historically, the EliteTorrents case is an important one. Many BitTorrent trackers used to be hosted in the United States, but had been essentially scared or pressured to leave, largely due to direct or indirect MPAA pressure. Right up until the…

A look back to when and why Yahoo rocked my (and other people’s) world.

In what I feel is a great example of the Yahoo approach to excel in user experience is their Search Assistant. As I enter my search into Yahoo Search they automatically provide me with suggested auto-complete phrases. When the search runs, I…

Just one and a half weeks since we started using the bge, and the progress has been insane. Theres way too much for one post.
GLSL is now integrated in the BGE, just enable it in the game menu to preview it in the 3d view, and itll look exactly the same when you press P. Support for nodes, multiple uv layers, all blending modes …

This could be done by having a rocky edge poking through the grassy edges of platforms, which enable the player to grab hold of and climb up. That way, that grassy edges become areas where it is too slippery to climb up. A simple difference, but…

Have you ever wanted to own door numbers from Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa? How about a pillow, comforter, or drapes from the Polynesian Resort. Well, although you can buy surplus items from Disney while you’re in Orlando, you can also find these items on E-bay.

The Polynesian and Grand Floridian are undergoing renovation and much of the furniture and soft treatments are ending up online. Now, I presume many of these items are well used - as one would expect of surplus items from a hotel/resort….

O'Reilly Media is running an interview with Gordon Mohr, Chief Technologist for the Internet Archive (archive.org). If you've ever wondered how pages are selected for archiving, or just how they manage such a huge quantity of data, the answers are here. The interview also touches on the problems of intellectual property in archives.

GM: Absolutely; and that's by a couple of different ways in which that could be covered a whole lot more, one of which is simply anyone's broad crawl including Alexa is very sensitive to sites that are highly in-linked. So things that…

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have plugged in to Flickr to create a database of over 6 million images tagged with geographic and text information. Using their software, they could take a random picture and identify where it was taken, give or take 200km, at a rate 18 times better than chance.

To get a computer to approximate this capability, the authors needed to provide it with a large database of outdoor scenes that have geographic information associated with them. That's where Flickr came in. At the time of the research, it…

Chris Brogan on social media sites he uses to monitor what folks are saying about him/his sites/products.

When I first read this, I thought that exploring listening as a first step in an SN strategy was sort of putting the cart before the horse, by making the assumption that your company or organization is already “out there,”…

The search giant rankles the right by declining to commemorate certain holidays.

Perhaps the most extreme condemnations come from the editors of the populist WorldNetDaily.com, who have all but accused Google of advancing the cause of godless communism. “Google consistently ignores patriotic American holidays such as…

The Firefox 3 beta robot is back for an encore, this time in celebration of the software’s impending release.

* If you’re a fan of this art, we’ll soon be adding it to the Mozilla Store as a limited edition 18×24″ poster. More details on that to come… * For a behind-the-scenes look at the early…

Oh my. First your slicing cake with the MacBook Air, then you’re looking to steal its market share. Lenovo, you can’t afford to be smug either. Voodoo’s $2,099 Envy 133 isn’t a gaming rig. It is a 13.3-inch ultra-portable with LED-backlit display, 1,280 x 800 resolution, HDMI, hard disk or SSD option, instant-on Voodoo IOS mode that let’s you surf

the prices people are (apparently willing) to pay for these things make the mind boggle. To me it's a case of severely diminishing returns beyond $700 in the notebook market (for my needs).*eSATA powered by the USB……

It’s the sort of news that ought to scare the pants off Comcast executives. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has proposed the commission auction off a portion of the 25 megahertz spectrum with a free provision — meaning that whoever licenses the spectrum must provide internet access to people for free.

Free? There is no such thing. If its ad supported then there is an agenda to get people paying for more crap they don't need, that is not FREE. I used to live in the UK where we have the BBC. The BBC is not free it is supported by a licence…

The first public demonstration of Windows 7 was made at the D6 conference, showing off Windows 7’s multitouch features. Notably absent from the demo was anything new.

As a demonstration of what to expect from Windows 7, this left a lot to be desired. Multitouch is fun to play with, but it doesn't appear any more useful today than it did when Surface was first demoed. In devices with limited form factors…

Prosecution looms for creating a fake MySpace profile

Now she has been charged with “accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress”, because she broke MySpace's terms of use, which forbid “impersonating or attempting to…

Lined up in Jonathan Ive's studio in Cupertino, California are four chunky Black Pencils. That's capital B and capital P, because these are no ordinary pencils.

If you read the Jonathan Ive cuttings file not a big book, he rarely gives interviews you'll find the same few scraps of information over and over: Jonathan is shy, he's modest, he's private. The boy from Chingford who became the…