Monday 16 January 2012

It's just a game of keepy uppy

The music, film and television industries’ recent successes in fighting illegal file sharing by promoting both legislative change and winning court decisions such as Newzbin2 and the recent Dutch Courts decision to block access to The Pirate Bay are all well and good for content owners, but in the fast moving world of the internet things don’t stay still for long and news now reaches the 1709 Blog that The Pirate Bay will start linking by default to 'magnet' rather than BiTorrent downloads in what can only be seen of as a move to avoid user and file detection. Whilst BitTorrent links will still be available (being the currently preferred option for downloaders, both legal and illegal), they will be a secondary option for the time being. The magnet system makes user and file identification even harder and it is expected that The Pirate Bay will now phase out traditional BitTorrent file-sharing (although comments on their Blog suggest this may not be that easy).

And controversial US streaming platform Grooveshark, no stranger to the 1709 Blog and currently facing legal actions from all four major record labels, has just launched a new HTML5 app making it easier for music fans to access the service on their smartphones. Grooveshark had already launched apps for both the iPhone and Android-powered devices, but Apple and Google banned them from their respective stores. The new app seems a clever way to keep fans using the service.

http://thepiratebay.org/blog and http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/13/grooveshark-html5-mobile-app/

The world record for keepy uppy (uppie) is held by Dan Magness of England, a 25 year old professional freestyler, who kept a regulation football aloft for 26 hours using just his feet, legs, shoulders and head; he completed the feat - which took place in Hong Kong, in June 2010.

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