by John Jorgensen on December 5, 2008
- UPDATE: Amazon has sent a takedown notice to the Netherlands students that created this plugin, and they’ve complied. The students said it was an “artistic parody” and a “practical experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture.” The plugin can still be found around the web.
- You know all those Somali pirates who have been hijacking ships on the open seas? Well, now you can play your part by hijacking games, TV shows, movies and mp3s from Amazon’s website thanks to a new Firefox extension.
- The extension cross-references products on Amazon with Pirate Bay’s torrent database. If the torrent is there, a “Download 4 Free” link will display on the Amazon product’s page.
- The extension made the Digg front page.
- This could be the type of thing that might push torrents into the mainstream. Outside of techies, most people my age (20s) and up aren’t frequent BitTorrent users. If they could bypass the search engines and hit a button on Amazon I bet they would be a lot more likely to download a movie.
TorrentFreak, CNET
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by Jason Wilk on November 18, 2008
- Last week in a raid of a Shenzen, China warehouse, Chinese officials discovered the first ever seen fake copies of high definition Blu-Ray movies.
- The pirates are ripping high-def movies (cracking Blu-ray’s AACS and BD+ encryption in the process) and re-encoding them using AVCHD, which offers a 720p picture.
- Because of the reduction in resolution, file sizes are smaller and can be burned to regular DVDs, but quality is still extremelly high.
- More importantly, the fake Blu-Ray disks can be played in a Blu-Ray player and according to this guy, these disks have been floating around since July. A little slow on the reporting WSJ.
- The going price for a fake Blu-Ray disc is around $1.25 compared to a standard DVD price of $0.80
- The Motion Picture Association International is not thrilled.
Ars-Technica
by Jason Wilk on November 12, 2008
- Technorati founder Dave Sifry has launched his new Travel Guide startup, OffBeat Guides.
- He came up with the idea while visiting Dalian, China, one of my favorite places in the world. He was looking for a guidebook and was surprised to find limited info about Dalian, and an influx on major attractions like The Great Wall and Terracotta Warriors. He wanted to change this.
- Concept: Once you to enter your name, travel plans, and where you are staying on OffBeatGuides.com, the system crawls various sites such as weather, professional travel sites, notes and articles by professional travel writers, etc. and displays essential guide book info about the area you are headed.
- The info is displayed in a Wikipedia style format and let’s you choose what kind of information you would like to include in your persona travel book (eat, sleep, attractions, dangers, etc.). If you know about the area already, then you can hide the history section, or if you already know what to see, you can hide the attractions section.
- Once you’ve built your book, you can download it as a PDF for $9.95 or purchase it in physical form for $24.95, which also includes the PDF. You can always refer back to it online need be.
- I don’t exactly know how Dave thinks he can compete in this arena. As an experienced world traveller, I can tell you that Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and more dominate the travel book industry. If I wanted to purchase one of those, I could do so online, buy it on Amazon used, or just pick one up when I go to my destination. Any non-westernized country will also have knock-off editions of all these travel guides that are around $5 once I get there. In addition, there are so many user generated travel resources out there, that I can print out myself if I wanted and make it into a nice little book. Wiki Travel guides, Bootnall Travel Network, Travel Blogs, Lonely Planet’s UG section, TripAdvisor, and so many more can give me this info for free. Come on, $24.95 for a printed version or $9.95 for a PDF? Sounds like you should have talked to a few more travellers before launching this thing. I just don’t see the appeal here. Nice functionality and design, but I give it a 2 on execution. Sorry.
TC
by Jason Wilk on September 22, 2008
- Music and Movie streaming is supposedly about to break out.
- Thepiratecity.org, even though they claim no affiliation with The Pirate Bay (yeah right) is said to be lanching the P2P stream service in the next couple weeks.
- The site is currently down, likely due to a leak and then a massive amount of traffic to a lone server the developers are working with.
- P2P streaming would be devastating for the entertainment industry, especially the new MySpace Music ad-supported music streaming coming soon. (who wants that?)
- But this has to be the next step in Piracy, due to regulations popping up about broadband download caps put on users that download a lot of P2P content.
- With streaming, there is no risk of going over the cap and everyone besides the content creators are going to be happy.
Made tiny from: TechCrunch.com
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