Red Fox - Credit: mikebaird on Flickr (CC BY)

Firefox 3.5 has been released.  Of much importance to free culture, it supports the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags.

Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet.

Firefox 3.5 brings with it entirely new and much faster rendering engines for both static web pages and the JavaScript code that powers today’s complex web-based applications. There are new privacy features, new capabilities for playing video and audio files and improved search tools. There are also a handful of other new features that should prove useful for both Firefox devotees and newcomers alike.

Yay FF.

• Web Monkey

Watterlogged Pirate - Credit: Aak Ook on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The Pirate Bay has announced that it will close its tracker and remove its torrents prior to being acquired.

Perhaps even more significant for the BitTorrent community is the thus far unreported decision to close down the BitTorrent tracker. Up until today Pirate Bay’s public tracker connected more than half of all BitTorrent users but this is about to change.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize TPB even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

For now it remains a mystery what GGF CEO Hans Pandeya meant with “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” That’s worrying to say the least.

In addition, GGF also acquired Peerialism who apparently have developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. How this related to the new tracker and external torrent hosting remains unknown.

Half of me thinks this is a late April Fool’s joke.

• TorrentFreak

Electronic Waste (Credit : takomabibelot on Flickr CC-BY)

Top mobile telephone suppliers have agreed to back an EU-wide harmonization of phone chargers, the European Commission said on Monday, hailing the pact as good news for consumers and the environment.

“People will not have to throw away their charger whenever they buy a new phone,” said EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen, estimating that unwanted phone accessories accounted for thousands of tons of waste in Europe each year.

What about the data transfer and headphone? Doesn’t every second mobile buyer buys/gets a headphone?

• Reuter
• Slashdot

Rockbox

Rockbox 3.3 has been released.

The Rockbox project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Rockbox 3.3. Over the last three months, we’ve been adding a number of new features which includes but is not limited to USB support on many PortalPlayer based devices, JPEG album art support and a support for the LUA scripting language. With this release you will be able to use external JPEG album art as created by many popular desktop media players without the need to convert. And you can sync this album art, music and of course any other file to the player within Rockbox on more players than ever before. The list of new features also includes the ability to start and control the playback from within the fancy PictureFlow plugin.

Hmm…Sadly my Gigabeat S is still not completely supported.  Maybe it will work a bit better this time though.

• Rockbox

Video Bay - Credit: thevideobay.org

The Pirate Bay has launched a public beta of VideoBay.  It runs on HTML 5 video tags (no flash) with ogg videos.

Well, this should make the Pirate Bay’s court appeal interesting. For the last couple of years, the guys have been working on an anything-goes, censor-free haven for online video sharing called VideoBay, and it’s now gone into “Beta Extreme.”

“This will be an experimental playground and as such, subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly,” the site’s front page currently warns.

I can’t wait for <video>/<audio> tags to become more popular and for ogg to become a more recognisable format.HTML 5 standards.

• Gizmodo

United States Court House - Credit: jamidwyer on Flickr (CC BY SA)

Many newspapers are having a really difficult time these days. Also they are now facing competition from many online news sources and their classifieds business has been crippled by websites like craigslist.com. A judge makes a controversial suggestion on how to save them:

“Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.”

I think this idea is completely ridiculous. davester666, a commenter from Slashdot, couldn’t have put it better…

“This sounds like a “new methods are making an old business model obsolete, so we should outlaw the new methods type thing.”"

• Slashdot

Freedom of Speech (CC-BY Credit : danstrange on flickr)

In a dangerous judgment for British bloggers and whistleblowers, a British court has ruled (absurdly) that because blogging itself is a public activity, bloggers have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their identities, and newspapers are allowed to publish their identities if they can find them by fair or foul means

Something similar happened in India few months back. The question remains should internet really be anonymous?

• Slashdot
• Times Online

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seal - Credit: U.S. government (Public domain) http://www.uspto.gov/

The nature of innovation and technology has changed a lot but patent law may not be keeping up with the changes. In this Wall Street Journal opinion piece, L. Gordon Crovitz, argues that patent reform is long due because in their current form they maybe causing more harm than good for innovators.

The last time the Supreme Court heard a case on what kinds of innovations deserved patents was in 1981 — the year IBM launched the first personal computer using a disk operating system from a young Microsoft. The Internet as we know it was still years in the future.

This month, the Supreme Court agreed to reconsider what can be patented. At stake are tens of thousands of existing patents and a rethinking of why we have patent protections in the first place.

I hope the Supreme Court opens its eyes to the disaster that is patent law in the United States. Hopefully this also the beginning of the end of software and business methods patents.

Why Technologists Want Fewer Patents

Donald Knuth: Mathematical Ideas, or Algorithms, Should Not Be Patented

Malta - Credit: marfis75 on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Microsoft is going to quit production on Microsoft Money.  (MSN Money/MoneyCentral will continue)

Microsoft announced in August 2008 that it would no longer sell Money through retail stores. The company said at that time that plans to release a Money Plus 2009 release were cancelled.

I asked Microsoft for further information on the phase out. Adam Sohn, a Director with Microsoft’s Online Business Services unit, said customers will be able to continue to use Microsoft Money until January 31, 2011 — or “a bit longer if they have bought it recently.” Check your End User License Agreement (EULA), which will hav an end date, which, for some customers, could be as late as June, 2011, Sohn said.

After that date, “the software will still work, but all the online services backing it up will be decommissioned — meaning no automatic flow of account, stock market, tax data, etc.  So people can import that stuff by hand if they want to keep using the product.”

I’m a little surprised.  I thought it was a popular app.

• ZDNet

Triangle - Credit: Irene2005 on Flickr (CC BY)

Linux 2.6.30, has been released.

After eight release candidates and a rather short development cycle, Linus Torvalds has released Linux version 2.6.30, dubbed “Man-Eating Seals of Antiquity”. As with its predecessors on the main development line of Linux, it introduces a host of innovations.

The majority of the code changes in this release focus on data storage. Some of the changes, for example, improve the data security of the still evolving Ext4 file system at the expense of performance – sharp-sighted critics may remark, however, that changes to the Ext3 code in 2.6.30 may produce the opposite result if users aren’t careful when configuring the kernel.

Version 2.6.30 of the Linux kernel now supports two additional file systems and offers more flexibility for reconfiguring software RAIDs. Some of the changes to the crypto code aim at increasing the data throughput in encrypted storage media. Kernel image and initramfs can now be compressed with Bzip2 or LZMA and require less storage space. After two only moderately successful attempts to increase the kernel’s start up speed, by simultaneously initialising various subsystems, this feature has finally been given the go ahead.

Sorry I haven’t posted in ages. I have a job now, so keeping up with this is going to be a little more difficult. Thanks to matt for keep up with some of the slack. If you’d like to help out, please email me!

• H Online