The pressure is mounting for blanket data gathering organisations the world over, as members of European parliament (MEP) yesterday voted with overwhelming support to block the transfer of personal data to US corporations and agencies and tightened the law on digital privacy too. Under new draft laws, US companies operating …
Read More »Bitcoin value on way to record breaking – crash imminent?
Bitcoin is anything but a certain investment. Its value has climbed mountains and filled troughs more than most traded commodities over the past year, going from a near freely available curiosity for the tech savvy, to the £100 plus per-coin, digital currency it is today. Since Bitcoin's first big value …
Read More »Kim Dotcom talks up Orcon internet
Kim Dotcom has been pushing to have the internet access in New Zealand improved for a long time, but it looks like he might have finally found a company that will do it for him, as he's now being featured in the web adverts for internet service provider, Orcon. Coming …
Read More »nVidia Tesla champion heads for AMD
Against a backdrop of AMD's Chief Sales Officer managing to bring home the Q3 bacon in the shape of a $95m profit, it looks like AMD is becoming an altogether more attractive place to be. The latest defection comes from nVidia's compute team. KitGuru snoops for more resolution on the …
Read More »Facebook is busted for now
Looks like Facebook is going through some teething problems right now. While people are reporting the ability to view the site without difficulty and load times appear unaffected, nobody seems able to post status updates, upload images or comment on anything. It seems almost everyone is bumping into some variation …
Read More »Isohunt owner gives final send off
Isohunt's decade and-a-bit long career as one of the world's paramount torrent search sites has come to an end and the site's owner and founder, Gary Fung, has initiated the self-destruct sequence, shutting the site down a couple of days before his original court settlement decreed. It was just last …
Read More »Black Market Reloaded downtime was just a hiccup afterall
Yesterday it looked like online drug dealing had been dealt another blow, as one of Silk Road's replacements, Black Market Reloaded, was taken down after a third party server vendor outed the site's source code, potentially giving the site's owner, Backopy, a real security problem. However, less than 24 hours …
Read More »Legal experts brand NSA and GCHQ surveillance illegal
While the British and US government's have been keen to defend their Tempora and PRISM surveillance programs, it looks like the international community might not feel the same way. After some scrutiny by legal experts at the European Parliament this week, several individuals concluded that the actions of both governments …
Read More »Isohunt loses legal battle, forced to close
Pirates around the world, remove your stove hats for a minute of silence please. Isohunt, one of the world's longest running and most popular torrent search sites has finally succumbed to legal pressure from the media lobby and US government and has been forced to settle on a cease and …
Read More »HMV reinvents itself with apps and downloads
HMV is going all digital with its relaunch, delivering new Android and iOS apps to allow music purchases, alongside a new website heavily influenced by app culture and using HTML5 to increase functionality across Windows and Blackberry devices. The revamped site isn't quite ready yet – the official launch is …
Read More »NSA head and deputy to step down
Both the top dog and his second in command at the NSA spying agency are set to step down in the near future according to US officials, which may go some way to restoring faith in the organisation that has had its reputation destroyed in recent months due to revelations …
Read More »Huawei to open £125 million research facility in UK
Huawei, the Chinese firm in charge of restricting its countrymens' access to content – and big favourite of David Cameron – has announced it will be opening a £125 million research and development centre in the UK, despite concerns that the company may be too closely linked to the Chinese …
Read More »New site tracks piracy vs availability
Shock and horror, it turns out that the most pirated movies might be suffering from problems with availability, making the illegally downloaded version not only cheaper, but quicker, easier to access and simpler to find, according to data from a newly launched website: PiracyData.org. The site takes the list of …
Read More »New Zealand MP resigns over anonymous Dotcom donation
Kim Dotcom is a wrecking ball to the New Zealand political system's house of cards. He's not only exposed illegal practices by the county's top spy agency, the GCSB, but has embarrassed top politicians for their complicity with US PRISM programs and selective law making and has now caused a …
Read More »Australia is finally getting Kickstarter
While I'm not sure how much the rest of the world noticed – we were busy throwing money at our digitally discovered pipe dreams – Australia and New Zealand haven't been able to run their own, native campaigns on Kickstarter since the site's inception. That's all about to change though, …
Read More »GCHQ might be spying on lawyer-client emails
While over in the states, the anti-NSA groups are beginning to find their feet, here in the UK the revelations of government spying are getting worse and worse. It now looks like intelligence agency GCHQ, might be spying on the privileged emails between lawyers and their clients. Alleged as part …
Read More »Smart adverts raise more questions on personal data
Personal data, personal privacy, freedom of thought and expression, these are all big topics at the moment thanks to the Edward Snowden leaks and the ever evolving landscape of the cloud and big data. Public opinion tends to split down the middle, with some suggesting they have nothing to hide, …
Read More »The world is taking the internet back from the US
Like a dog shaking away the clinging pond water it just emerged from, ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and many other organisations, have all pledged to end the United States' strong arming of the world's interenet and to push forward the globalisation of …
Read More »Activision Blizzard buys its freedom
Activision Blizzard has finally completed its buyback from parent company Vivendi, for a total of $8.2 billion, and has once again become an independent company, despite a stall in the process during the earlier days of October, where a share holder brought legal action against the publishing giant for not …
Read More »US Congressman wants to shackle NSA spying
Maybe it's time we put our scepticism aside for a second and considered that maybe not all politicians are liars and charlatans. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the US' Patriot Act, has called for the NSA's ability to survey its own citizens to be severely curtailed …
Read More »Frictional’s SCP like SOMA keeps getting weirder
Frictional games didn't have much to do with A Machine For Pigs, despite it being based in the Amnesia universe, it just published the thing. Obviously in the mean time it's been up to something and if you've been keeping up with the AR game like leaks it's been giving …
Read More »Acer release C720 Chromebook
Acer have announced the release of their third generation Chromebook featuring Haswell. The new C720 will be quicker than the older model and will have longer battery life due to improvements with the Haswell architecture. The C720 ships with an anti glare screen which should popular for those people who …
Read More »THQ suing EA and Zuffa over possible shady UFC dealings
It's down but not quite out. THQ, the publisher of many of the last decade's bigger franchises, including WWE, Dawn of War, Saint's Row and Company of Heroes, has filed a suit against both EA Games and UFC owners Zuffa, claiming that EA used internal THQ documents to undermine its …
Read More »New Portal fan-film lands
A new fan film called “Portal: Survive” and based in the Portal universe has been released, showing Chell as she attempts to escape incineration, as well as jumping back in time to the day that GLADOS became the deadly psychopath we all know and love her as. “The engineers tried …
Read More »NSA’s PRISM surveillance may extend to New Zealand too
While companies like Lavabit have fearless leaders that are willing to shutdown their long term businesses to protect their customers, governments seem less and less willing to do the right thing for their people. According to a few New Zealand journalists, the Dotcom spying case involved not only the country's …
Read More »Google working on in-car gesture controls, files patent
Google has filed a patent application for some in-car gesture based control its working on, indicating that the technology might soon make its way to our vehicles. A number of hand movements have been listed in the patent which trigger specific commands, giving the driver control over the stereo or the …
Read More »Minecraft toys coming to a store near you
Minecraft is this generation's Mario. It's the game that's going to define a genre and generation of gamers for years to come and for many, will be the first game they really invested themselves in. Not us, we're too old, but those kids, this will be the one they remember. …
Read More »The robot uprising is now wireless
The creation of super batteries, wearable armour plating and augmented strength suits are a double edged sword. While on one hand, it could potentially turn us all into Iron Man, it's also giving rise to the creation of fast, powerful and now wireless robots that will surely one day overthrow …
Read More »GTA V has already sold more than GTA IV
In the wake of the GTA V release, if you still think there was a big splash surrounding the release of its predecessor GTA IV, back in 2008 (it was the reason I bought my 360), forget it, that game's got nothing on its younger brother. GTA V ladies and …
Read More »Computer 2000 disappears – is no more
For many years, one of the most famous brands in the distribution channel was Computer 2000. With huge sales, massive organisation and just about the most extensive customer base in town, it stood astride the UK IT market like a giant. But it is no more. KitGuru pulls out the …
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