The Pirate Bay Gets Bought…

In a truly bizarre turn of events following the denial of a retrial to The Pirate Bay (which still challenges the judges in both the original trial and the attempt to attain a retrial with being biased), it turns out that The Pirate Bay has been acquired by a company called Global Gaming Factory X AB.

Publically traded piracy?

Naturally, things are still a little up in the air, but Global Gaming Factory X has issued a press release detailing the purchase of The Pirate Bay, which weighed in at around $7.8 million. They’re quick to point out that it’s not quite as insensible a purchase as it initially seems; The Pirate Bay is, after all, one of the 100 most visited web pages on earth. The initial response was one of disbelief, with users quickly jumping across to ThePirateBay.org to see if they could get any more news on the situation.

Fortunately, there seems to be a lot more detail coming from The Pirate Bay’s side of the affair. The torrent tracker’s blog is headed with the simple words, “TPB Might Change Owner,” which seems a little less clear cut than the press release from Global Gaming Factory X. However, a quick read of the post outlines very clearly the fact that TPB has indeed changed owner pretty much definitely. Of course, there’s been a flood of comments lamenting what many users consider to be the death of a service that had for years provided them with illegal access to copyrighted material.

Europe edges closer to standardised phone charger

After literally decades of having to scrabble through drawers full of cable to find the right charger for whatever brand/generation of phone you need to pull data from or just receive calls to, it looks like we’re finally getting some agreement from manufacturers on the “universal charger” idea.

Image courtesy of GadgetReview

For the moment, the big names backing the standardised charger include Apple, Nokia, RIM (that’s the Blackberry people, for those of you who hadn’t twigged) and Sony Ericsson. What’s particularly odd about the announcement is the news that the universal charger they’re touting will only work on European models of these manufacturers’ handsets.

Google Tries to Convince Us It’s Not Unassailable

You may remember a story we wrote last week about whether or not Google was genuinely worried about Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, or if it was bluffing about the whole affair to make itself seem that bit more vulnerable in case of an anti-trust scenario.

That campaign seems to be continuing with the news today that Google has been downplaying its own seemingly unshakeably position to anyone who’ll listen. The latest comes from Google’s senior competition counsel, Dana Wagner, who says that competition is just ‘a click away’.

Europeans to pay twice as much for Windows 7

Hot on the heels of the whole debacle concerning the combination package of Windows and Internet Explorer, Europeans can expect to be charged significantly more for the pleasure of picking up Microsoft’s new OS, Windows 7.

The cads!

ComputerWorld is reporting that European customers could be expected to pay up to twice as much as our friends across the pond for the most popular version of the software. They’re using Windows 7 Home Premium as the benchmark for these comparisons; it launches at €119.99 in Europe and $119 in the US. We had remarked when pricing was announced that we’d likely see a return of the infamous €1:$1 pricing ratio, but we’d still held some hope that the whole affair might pan out a bit better.

Mozilla Relases Firefox 3.5 RC3

Mozilla has made available the third Release Candidate of its oh-so-popular Firefox browser. This comes after the strange situation they’d already entered with the not-quite-normal beta last week.

You may have read earlier in the week that Firefox 3.5 now performs about 250% faster than previous versions, which means that, while it’s much better for Firefox, there aren’t any massive changes in the “fastest browser” stakes. The new release is now available for Mac, Linux and Windows here.

The Pirate Bay Denied Retrial

In what’s beginning to look like a pretty dreadful week for internet pirates, Swedish based The Pirate Bay has been denied its requested appeal to its copyright infringement trail.

It's both sad and strangely fitting that the ship appears to be sinking now...

Naturally this is bad news, but it’s also an interesting turn of events. The reasoning behind The Pirate Bay’s move for a retrial had been based on the discovery (after the case had come to a close) that the judge had been a member of prominent pro-copyright groups. Moreover, not just a member but on the board of directors of one such group, lobbying for harsher copyright laws, a fact that we might well understand to colour his judgement just a touch against groups like The Pirate Bay. The only problem now is that the court of appeals has ruled unanimously that the judge in the previous trial was not biased… which leaves fairly few avenues for the infamous pirates.

Windows 7 Officially Priced

It’s been a long time coming, but Microsoft has finally made official mention of its pricing scheme for Windows 7. For those of you who remember the Windows Vista launch, we’re looking it at a relatively simple affair.

Those of us who are running Microsoft’s new OS’s beta have just been told to update to the RC or our machines will switch themselves off, so given that they seem to be able to do whatever they want to us through their OS, it’s a very good thing that MS has finally dropped us some details on how much we can pay for the privilege.

Microsoft Forcing Windows Updates?

It’s come to light, through the medium of Windows Sectrets’ Brian Livingston, that Microsoft may have been forcing updates on Windows users who have actually sat down and taken the time to select whatever options there are to stop automatic updates from being installed.

Makes you wonder who really has control over your desktop...

The story, as it’s unfolding, is that Windows users who have manually selected not to have their OS updated automatically do whatever it is they want to do for the duration of a session and, when they go to switch off their machine, are treated to the familiar “Windows is now installing updates” screen. This is happening to users of both Windows XP and Vista who have set their updates to “Download but don’t install”, which seems a little strange.

Rapidshare Ordered to Actively Police Content

TorrentFreak is reporting that a German court has ruled that Rapidshare must be made to “proactively filter content” after performance rights group GEMA (Society for musical, performing and mechanical reproduction rights) took them to task for offering free downloads for somewhere in the region of 5,000 tracks.

A more wretched hive of scum and villainy you're not likely to find.

Naturally Rapidshare has agreed to delete the offending content and to ensure that it will re-delete them should its users upload the same tracks again. Until now, we’re informed, Rapidshare had been suing file hashes to identify the offending copyrighted tracks, but clearly this hasn’t been working out as well as GEMA would have liked.

Intel part of €100 million Irish WiMAX Project

The Sunday Business Post is reporting on a joint venture between Intel and “an Irish broadband provider” including the setup of €100 million worth of WiMax network.

For those of you unfamiliar with WiMAX, it’s essentially an incredibly long ranged WiFi setup. WiMAX has been used widely in countries like Korea to supply high-speed internet access to sparsely distributed rural populations, eliminating the particularly costly need to lay miles of cable. WiMAX has been reported to work (albeit with low connection speeds) at distances of up to 50km, which means that practically all of Ireland could be covered without too much expense to the provider.