Wayne Williams

While other file sharing sites have come and gone, closed down by the authorities or voluntarily removed by the owners, The Pirate Bay remains a constant. Sure, if you live in the UK your access to it is now blocked by court order, but the site is still up on the web, still serving links to infringing content, and seemingly unstoppable -- even though plenty of people have tried to stop it.

A forthcoming documentary, TPB AFK, charts the "away from keyboard" true-life story of The Pirate Bay and is set to be released this spring, timed to coincide with a "major film festival". The new trailer for the film, up on YouTube, has already racked up over 1.3 million views, and its success has spurred Simon Klose, the director, into trying to make a little money from it.

Continue reading →

ASUS waited until after CES to take the wraps off its MeMo Pad, and what it lacks in specs the Nexus 7 lookalike makes up for in price. With a wallet-friendly MSRP of $149, the MeMo Pad runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and is powered by a 1GHz VIA WM8950 CPU and Mali-400 GPU.

The device sports a 10-point multi-touch LED-backlit display with 1024 by 600 resolution, 8 or 16GB of internal storage, and a microSD card slot which will let you boost capacity by an additional 32GB.

Continue reading →

Shortly after Apple launched its disastrous maps app, Google’s CEO Larry Page made a comment regarding how it had taken Google seven years of hard work to get to where it’s at now. Seven years sounds like a long time, but it pales into insignificance when compared to the 232 years that British mapping agency Ordnance Survey has been making and refining its maps.

It’s rather surprising that it’s taken this long for the OS to put its work on iOS, but the agency has at last come up with an official app. OS MapFinder isn’t a straight alternative to Google Maps or Apple Maps though. Rather, as Ordnance Survey puts it, the app is "aimed at walkers, ramblers, runners, cyclists and generally anyone looking to enjoy the outdoors".

Continue reading →

Users of Google’s popular desktop browser have a choice of release channels. If you hate bugs and crashes, there’s the stable version of the browser (which was just updated). If you don’t mind taking a little risk and want to get your hands on the newest features, there are the Beta and Dev channels. And finally, if you want to be on the absolute cutting edge, there’s the Canary build which runs alongside any other Chrome installs you have.

Android users don’t have this degree of choice, but from today Google is offering a new Beta channel for phones and tablets running Android 4.0 and up, and the good news is it can be installed alongside your current version of Chrome so you’ll always have a stable version of the browser on hand.

Continue reading →

If you’re one of those people who still prefers audio CDs to digital downloads (because you can’t beat a physical product with album art and sleeve notes, right?), but then rip the tracks so you can actually play them, Amazon’s new AutoRip service is for you. Purchase an AutoRip CD from the site and you’ll get the MP3 version for free.

The tracks will be automatically uploaded to Amazon Cloud Player, where you can stream or download them immediately, even before the CD arrives. And that’s not all. Any eligible CDs you’ve purchased from Amazon after 1998 will be added to your Cloud Player too, for free. If you don’t have a Cloud Player account you’ll be able to sign up for one.

Continue reading →

The problem with making apps -- whether for smartphones, tablets or the Windows Store -- is getting enough people to sit up and take notice. Sure, if it’s good enough, word of mouth might propel it upwards, but the sad truth is a lot of great apps never get the traction they need to succeed.

If you have an idea for a Windows Store app, Microsoft’s Windows Startup Challenge could be just the boost your concept needs. The winner of the app design contest will get the chance to launch their creation at DEMO Mobile in San Francisco on 17 April.

Continue reading →

A Distributed Denial of Service attack is no different from someone repeatedly tapping F5 in their web browser, at least accordingly to loose hacktivist collective Anonymous. The group (or someone claiming to be affiliated with it at least) has added a petition to the White House's We the People website, asking the US government to recognize DDoS as a legal form of protesting, and comparing it to the international "occupy" movement.

The petition also calls for the immediate release of those who have been jailed for DDoS attacks, and for their records to be cleared.

Continue reading →

There was a time when Play.com looked set to rival Amazon in the UK. The online retailer, which focussed initially on selling DVDs, made a big splash when it launched in 1998 by offering its products for the same price as Amazon but, crucially, threw in postage for free, a move which made shopping there a lot cheaper overall.

However, time hasn’t been kind to Play.com. First it was sold to Japanese company Rakuten for just £25m in September 2011, and then the government closed a Jersey tax loophole that allowed retailers to avoid paying VAT (Value Added Tax) on items under £15. With Rakuten seemingly unwilling to back up its investment, Play.com limped on, but the writing was on the wall for the once great retailer.

Continue reading →

I like a good mystery. When Samsung teased us with ‘something new’ I wanted to know what it was (I’m still not entirely sure, to be honest, given Samsung announced so many products at CES). When Microsoft says it’s sold 60 million licenses I want to know how many of those were sold to consumers (Microsoft remains tight lipped).

And now a new mystery has arrived to pique my interest, this time courtesy of Facebook. The social network has sent out invitations to the press inviting us to a media event at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters on January 15 to "see what we're building". Since press events are rarely held at Facebook's corporate HQ, it’s likely to be something big.

Continue reading →

If you carry more than one electrical device around with you -- a smartphone and a tablet, say -- at some point you’ll probably find yourself in a position where your tablet has loads of battery life, but your smartphone is about to die.

Fulton Innovation has come up with new technology which will allow users to wirelessly steal battery life from one device to power the other. No need to carry chargers, or hunt around trying to find a charging point.

Continue reading →

It’s hardly one of the sexiest announcements to come out of this year’s CES, but the news that Corning has improved its toughened screen glass will be welcomed by accident prone smartphone owners everywhere. As someone who drops their phone with distressing regularity, I can’t begin to tell you how much I already appreciate Gorilla Glass’s strength and scratch resistance.

Corning says changes to the atomic structure of its material means the new Gorilla Glass 3 with Native Damage Resistance boasts such improved durability that it can withstand deep scratches and cracks in the glass, so you’ll be able to keep using a damaged phone or tablet for longer. Scratches you pick up along the way will be much less visible too.

Continue reading →

BlueStacks has been very busy lately, inking a series of deals with major partners to bring its App Player software to a much wider audience. The App Player, if you’re not familiar, virtualizes the Android environment and lets users download and run green droid apps on desktop and laptop computers. The company last year formed partnerships with Asus, MSI, and AMD, and at the end of December rolled out a beta version of its software for Macs. Today’s CES announcement is, however, easily the firm’s biggest coup to date.

China’s Lenovo, which late last year usurped HP as the world’s largest PC manufacturer, will start bundling the BlueStacks App Player on all of its Idea-branded line of consumer PCs, including Ideapad laptops and IdeaCentre desktops. A total of around 40 million systems.

Continue reading →

Finding the app you want on Windows 8 -- by sight alone -- can at times feel like a really frustrating game of Where’s Wally. If your eyes are already flicking around the screen, it makes sense to use them as a control method, right? Well, that’s what Tobii thinks at least. The company is releasing a USB bar which attaches to the bottom of any monitor displaying Windows 8, and tracks your eye movements.

Due to be shown at CES, Tobii REX is described as the "world’s first Gaze interaction computer peripheral for the consumer market" and works in conjunction with touch, keyboard and mouse.

Continue reading →

Following on from the success of last year’s hugely popular Olympics app, BBC Sport has released a new sports app for iOS, with an Android version to follow in the coming weeks.

The new app displays the headlines from the BBC Sport website, and lets you view the latest scores and results for all of the major sports, including football (soccer), rugby, cricket, tennis, and horse racing. The Quick Links button lets you select any of your favorite sports. Choose football, for example, and you’ll be able to view live scores, results, fixtures, and more. The app will also provide live text coverage of England's cricket Test matches, rugby union's Six Nations, and the forthcoming Formula 1 season.

Continue reading →

Problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused a major Netflix service failure on Christmas Eve that affected a large portion of US and Canadian subscribers. "Terrible timing" Netflix tweeted as the scale of the problem became apparent. The outage in this case, Amazon said afterwards, was caused by human error -- a developer accidentally deleted some Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) data.

This wasn’t the first high-profile web outage, and it certainly won’t be the last either, but as Randy Clark, UC4 Chief Marketing Officer explains, solutions like DevOps, WebOps and ITPA can all help to limit the problem.

Continue reading →