While Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X looks to turn the Pirate Bay into a legal business, the torrent tracking site's founders have taken the wraps off of their HTML5 project site called The Video Bay, a streaming video service in the vein of YouTube and, what else, The Pirate Bay.

Even though The Video Bay has been in development for two years, it is still extremely rough. The team recently rolled out an "extreme beta" version (like a public alpha) which carries the warning: "Don't expect anything to work at all." Indeed, even the site itself doesn't load for all the traffic it's currently shouldering.

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This morning, China's Xinhua news agency announced that the country's IT ministry has decided to indefinitely delay the rollout of its "Green Dam for Escorting Children" Internet filter software, which was supposed to have been mandatory for PCs sold in that country beginning tomorrow. This after reports that the software -- whose code US-based software firm Solid Oak software claims was pilfered from its own filter products -- didn't actually work very well in real-world tests.

As Reuters reported earlier this morning, prior to China's announcement, Garfield the cartoon cat was a particular target of Green Dam's image filter, as was the face of actor Johnny Depp. However, actual pornography managed to get through just fine.

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We spent some enjoyable time earlier this week playing with TweetPsych, a site that puts linguistic analysis algorithms to work figuring out just what's with the most compulsive Twitter users out there. Currently in beta, the for-entertainment-only analysis still provided us with some amusing insight into Twitter talk -- and into the brains of three Betanews staffers.

The site, developed by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot (home of the addictive Twitter Grader), builds a "psychological profile" of a given Twitter user based on his or her last 1,000 tweets by running the text against two algorithms that look not at what topics people are talking about but at the cognitive processes they seem to be using. The RID (Regressive Imagery dictionary) algorithm sifts texts for their primary (free-form, associative, creative), secondary (logical, problem-solving), and emotional content, while the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) algorithm matches words against 82 language categories that can roughly estimate the writer's mindset. The LIWC is a widely used linguistics database; the RID is less so.

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Pandora silenced abroad, which LimeWire gains an exec

Monday, June 29, 2009 • The strikes and gutters of digital music advanced another frame on Monday, with users in France reporting that their Pandora feed is gone while LimeWire scores an executive fresh from TotalMusic.

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With a statement telling visitors, "We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die," the proprietors of The Pirate bay confirmed on Monday that they expect to be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X. It's a Swedish firm that wants, according to its ownership, "to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site."

The acquisition, which would lead to GGF operating The Pirate Bay site, is expected to close in August according to GGF. Profits from the sale, according to The Pirate Bay, will go to online projects expanding freedom of speech, information and access.

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To cut down on electronic waste and increase interoperability, ten mobile phone makers have signed a European Commission Memorandum of Understanding that commits them to using Micro USB as their standard mobile phone charger and data connection by 2010.

Many of the companies that signed the agreement, which include Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments, are members of the OMTP Forum which agreed on standardizing micro USB for charging and local data exchange last February.

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Last year, Sprint and Clearwire consolidated their WiMAX businesses in the Clear 4G wireless network, which was partly funded by investments from Google, Intel, and cable companies Time Warner, Bright House Networks, and Comcast.

Today, Comcast officially became the first Clear reseller among the investors, launching its "High Speed 2go" WiMAX subscription service in Portland, Oregon. The cable company announced that there will be further rollouts in Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia later this year as well. The plan is similar to the Sprint 4G service the carrier announced last March.

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This is the week that the Mozilla organization is expected to unveil what may very well be the most significant half-point release in its history: the 3.5 edition of the Firefox browser. While Betanews tests confirm the new version literally blows away its own predecessor in terms of speed, operating two-and-one-half times faster in page rendering and functionality on average, your own eyes will tell you it's a much faster browser.

And those same eyes will tell you that Google Chrome is already a much faster browser, by virtue of a supremely fast V8 JavaScript engine that its developers have been refining since version 1 made its debut last year. In recent Betanews tests, the Chrome 3 beta has overtaken the stable release of Apple Safari 4 as the fastest Web browser publicly available, posting a performance index score that's 83% faster than Firefox 3.5 RC3 on Windows XP SP3. So while Firefox has made extremely significant gains, it may take open source developers until version 4.0 for it to catch up with Chrome in the speed department.

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The last possible effort by movie studios such as 20th Century Fox and cable television producers, including CNN and Cartoon Network, to forestall cable service providers such as Cablevision from providing their customers with DVRs with full commercial-skipping control, was silently shot down this morning in the final session of this year's US Supreme Court term. As a result, last year's ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals stating that Cablevision's DVR service did not violate copyright law, stands.

That August 2008 ruling had overturned an earlier District Court ruling in March that had been a victory for the studios. Their argument was that when a cable service provider lets its customers record and play back shows at the headend -- using the provider's own storage rather than a local DVR -- that constituted a retransmission, which was contrary to the terms of service.

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The two-year old "PSP Phone" rumor has been resurrected yet again, this time because of a weekend article in respected Japanese business journal Nikkei Shimbun. The article says Sony now has plans to set up a PSP Phone development team in July which will be comprised of Sony Ericsson and SCE workers.

Rumors of a PlayStation Portable-branded Sony Ericsson device began when a 2007 patent application for a gaming phone was filed by the joint venture. The device in the patent is designed with a 90-degree pivoting screen not unlike the LG VX9400, and d-pad style buttons rather than the traditional numeric keypad. Earlier this year, a Christmas 2009 launch date for the device was rumored as well.

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You've got to feel some serious empathy for Adam Savage.

The co-star of the popular Discovery Channel television show Mythbusters found himself on the receiving end of a huge bill after a recent vacation to Montreal, Canada. He had tethered a cellular modem to his laptop, and ended up racking up $11,000 in charges before returning to the US. Upon his return, AT&T, claiming he had used over 9 gigabytes of data during his foreign surfing adventure, helpfully shut his account down. Only when he called them to complain about the outage did he learn he had been hosed.

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Microsoft's advertising over the past three years has focused on this "human element" thing (although that's also Dow Chemical's campaign at the moment), where technology is supposed to empower people to do what people can do best, rather than simply make technology better or more complex or cooler. Well, with the May 2007 purchase of ad agency aQuantive, Microsoft had the opportunity to practice what it preached, since an ad agency is full of people -- not just ordinary laborers, either, but creative folks whose factories are their brains. Just the kind of folks you'd think Microsoft would be eager to employ, right? Nope. For two years, it's been looking to unload the creative baggage from the $6 billion technology package it bought, and this morning it may be closer to dumping its load. That's coming up in What's Next, but first, let's see if the Mythbusters can blow up AT&T all the way from Canada.

MythBuster 1, AT&T 0 in bad-bill battle

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After days of uncertainty following Verified Identity Pass's abrupt shutdown last week, representatives of the defunct company are coming forward with at least some data on what will happen to the large collection of personally identifiable information (PII) it acquired from its customers.

In a letter to former members that's also posted to its Web site, Clear Customer Service attempted to address at least a few of the questions that have come up. The company (the letter was unsigned) reiterated that the data "is secured in accordance with the Transportation Security Administration's Security, Privacy, and Compliance Standards." The company revealed that Lockheed, which has been the firm's lead systems integrator, is working with parent company Verified Identity Pass, Inc. and the US Transportation Safety Administration "to ensure an orderly shutdown as the program closes."

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This episode of Recovery is brought to you by second bananas. Ed McMahon knew he was one, but I'll bet Farrah Fawcett would have been surprised how things worked out. (What, too soon?)

There's an application just launching into beta called thisMoment, and I've had a tab open for it all week in hope that I'll catch some quiet time to try it out. Harry McCracken at Technologizer got there first, and he describes it as "part social network, part media sharing site, and part Facebook application."

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A Mozilla spokesperson confirmed to Betanews early this evening that, if all pans out as planned, the organization will officially release the Firefox 3.5 Web browser to the general public as soon as Tuesday, June 30. No longer a beta, users will get the first opportunity to see a completely stable version of Firefox's new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, whose latest new features were demonstrated to us today by two of its engineers.

We're seeing demos that simply are not possible with what officially passes today as the stable Firefox browser -- version 3.0.11 isn't nearly as powerful or as swift. One demo, which testers of Firefox 3.5 RC can see for themselves here, demonstrates the browser's new support for HTML5 with not only embedded video, but JavaScript that can embed graphics or video in the embedded video, in real-time, several frames per second.

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