softsaurus.org

Rapidshare Terminates Accounts of Illegal Downloaders

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:34:34 +0000

In common with BitTorrent and other file-sharing services, Rapidshare has steadily increased its user base in recent years. The site has hundreds of millions of visitors each month and is listed among the 50 most-used sites on the Internet.

Like most file-hosting services, Rapidshare is hosting a wide range of music, movies and music files that are distributed without the consent of the rightsholders. This has dragged the company’s bosses into several lawsuits with copyright holders already, most recently they were ordered to proactively filter 148 book titles to avoid jail time and huge fines.

Although it is no secret that many people use Rapidshare to distribute copyrighted content, the site’s users have remained largely untouched until recently. Over the last few weeks, however, reports are coming in from users who’ve had their accounts terminated for downloading or uploading copyrighted files.

From the emails being sent out, it is clear that Rapidshare is taking a more aggressive stance towards ‘infringing’ users. Additional information from inside Rapidshare confirms that distributers of copyrighted material are indeed targeted more that before.

There is little doubt that this active termination policy is the result of ever-increasing pressure from copyright holders. At the same time, these actions might very well be the end of Rapidshare’s limitless expansion, as users will quickly move over to competing file-hosting services upon hearing this news.

Update: In addition to real terminations there have been reports of scam emails. However, we have additional information which proves without a doubt that Rapidhare is indeed targeting distributors of copyrighted material more aggressively by terminating their accounts. We will publish this in the coming days. We removed the quotes from the email we posted here earlier to avoid confusion.

Update: A Rapidshare spokesperson just confirmed that they are indeed terminating accounts of copyright infringers “because it violates our terms and conditions.”

Update: To clarify what happened. Last week we received confidential information that Rapidshare will take on a new direction. Among other things, it included information that Rapidshare was going to target infringers more aggressively. Then, yesterday we were sent this termination email by a reader. We assumed that this was connected to the information we received earlier and posted this article. As it turns out, we cannot verify is this email is the scam one or the legit one, but Rapidshare says that the email we posted here earlier was fake.

The email has been removed by us but there is no doubt that Rapidshare is taking a more agressive approach towards copyright infringers. More on this later.

Update: There is no doubt that the email we posted here earlier was fake. The bit about Rapidshare storing privacy sensitive information in its users for “legal reasons” is not true. We apologize to Rapidshare for posting this (we should have been more careful), but stand behind the part that Rapidshare is targeting copyright infringers more aggressively.

An article by TorrentFreak

The Ubuntu Music Store is now live

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:01:24 +0000

Even though the Ubuntu music store is realy nothing more than just 7digital with a little juice and some nice Rhythmbox integration many people (including me) have been waiting for it to open up and let us enjoy a sneek preview of the many great things to come.

I have to say I'm not dissapointed at all on behalf of the way it looks.. it looks realy tightly integrated into Rhytmbox, almost as if it had to be there in the first place. I'm still a bit let down by the overall bitrate quality of the music itself (most of the albums are 256kbp/s) but I'm sure they'll work on that once business gets booming.

The funny thing is however.. Ubuntu being open and free and all.. why is the majority of music MP3 format, a codec that Ubuntu won't even support out of the box. The music store does offer to install the MP3 codecs upon first run (if it's not already installed that is..). But I still find this to be inconsistent with the Ubuntu philosophy.

But here I am bashing away at Ubuntu for being inconsistent while we should all celabrate and embrace this nice feature, so what are you still doing reading this.. start up your Rhythmbox damn it!

New Ubuntu themes available in latest Alpha 3 update

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:17:05 +0000

The newly announced Ubuntu themes have just been made available through the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha repositories.

Simply run:
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

and you're solid! Please make sure you're not on a stable build (i.e. Karmic or Jaunty..) cause then a dist-upgrade could render your system unstable.

The new themes can then be found in your 'appearance' menu under the 'themes' dialog.
The themes are called 'radiance' (light version) and 'ambiance' (dark version).

Go check it out!
Do you like it? let us know!

OMG! Bandcamp is the new muxtape

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:54:18 +0000

We at Softsaurus love music, in a way it guides us through life... well you can make up all kinds of bullshit on music but the fact is that it should just sound right. With the current costs of drive space compression is almost rendered useless, if you run out of space just buy some more.. why listen to medioker MP3 quality if you can listen to FLAC or OGG files instead?

However many online music platforms still offer these highly compressed audio files and some even dare ask money in return. Music should be sold at CD quality, after all who would buy a 128KB/s Compact Disk, strangely enough many sites get away with it. Why do sites still compress.. bandwith you say? it's 2010 everyone has broadband nowadays.

That's just where Bandcamp comes in, Bandcamp differs itself by offering music in high quality audio instead of the pitty excuse for sound (yeah.. i'm looking at you MySpace) most band sites are offering. Bandcamp also offers a way for artists to get some revenue of their work by giving them the choice to either let their listeners pay, listen for free or simply limit the quality of the free download to a low-fi file and charge for the high-def stuff. This along with artist being able to track detailed statistics makes Bandcamp the new hot location for start-up as well as professional artists.

Go check it out!

Install firefox 3.6 stable on Linux in two steps

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:12:49 +0000

This tutorial applies only to distro's with the 'aptitude' package manger (apt-get) and focuses on Ubuntu in general.
There are several ways to install Firefox but by far the easiest way is adding the official Firefox-stable PPA to your repositories.

1) Add the PPA to your repositories:
if you're on Ubuntu Karmic or later you're fine using just this snippet and paste it into an open terminal window:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable/ppa

WARNING: only if the previous line didn't work out for you.. else skip to step 2
else just add the repository manually using these lines:

Get root access:
sudo su

This adds the source to your sources.list file



echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-stable/ubuntu karmic main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

This adds the matching PGP keys to secure the download
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x9bdb3d89ce49ec21

2) From here it's totally easy:
Update your sources...
sudo apt-get update

and finally...Install the Firefox package
sudo apt-get install firefox-3.6

There it is.. Firefox 3.6 stable build on your Linux system.

Enjoy this awesome piece of Open Source.

ISP Stands Up For Torrent Site Owner's Privacy

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:46:59 +0000

In conjunction with the local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyrån, three movie companies took legal action last year in an attempt to obtain the personal details of the owner of the SweTorrents BitTorrent tracker.

They asked the Södertörn District Court to demand that TeliaSonera give up the information because SweTorrents was infringing on their copyrights. The application was made under the IPRED legislation introduced earlier that year, which was put in place to make it easier for copyright holders to track down and identify potential copyright infringers.

In December, the Court ruled in favor of the movie companies and ordered TeliaSonera to hand over the requested information to Antipiratbyrån. Claiming that the ruling violates the privacy of one of its customers, the ISP decided to appeal the decision.

In its appeal, the ISP argues that IPRED is in direct violation of the EU’s data retention directive, under which the privacy of the SweTorrents owner would be protected. According to TeliaSonera’s lawyer, the directive applies to this case even though it hasn’t yet been implemented by the Swedish government.

“The protection of privacy contained in the directive prevents the application of the Swedish IPRED law in this case,” TeliaSonera’s lawyer Patrick Hiselius said in a comment.

TeliaSonera further notes that in its ruling the District Court speaks of “the material that is uploaded on the website,” even though there is no copyright material on SweTorrents, only torrent links. Therefore, it appears that the Court’s ruling is “based on faulty technical knowledge,” according to the ISP.

If TeliaSonera’s appeal is successful, the new IPRED law will be crushed, which would be a huge setback for the anti-piracy outfits that lobbied long and hard to get it passed.

An article by TorrentFreak

Official Ubuntu Desktop Support For Home Users

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:27:09 +0000

Daring to utter the 'M' word - Microsoft - it's worth nothing that Windows OS does come with very basic free support - however in a roundabout way you're still paying for it by having to buy the OS in the first place. Canonical are just tipping the scales the opposite way - a free OS with paid support.
"Buy telephone and email support to help you install, personalise and configure your desktop to your own needs, whether you are a beginner or a proficient Linux user." ~ Canonical Store
In theory no one need pay for support at all thanks to the indomitable helpfulness of the Ubuntu Forums but for users who are either used to being able to phone up a help-desk or prefer getting an answer pronto this service provides just what they need.

Options
The 'Desktop Support' services available comes in three 'tiers'

* Starter Support
* Advanced Support
* Professional Support

All are available for either 1 year or 3 years and all include: -

* Live phone support 9am - 5pm
* Email support
* Security upgrades
* Product upgrades

Ubuntu Starter Support
[1 year = £34.73]

The "basic" package provides support for choosing, unstalling and configuring application (but oddly not Messaging applications) and is most akin to Microsoft's "free" OS support.

Aimed at helping users: -
*Creating word-processed documents, spreadsheets or presentations
*Configuring office applications
*Installing common plugins, such as Flash, from Ubuntu repositories
*Troubleshooting and resolving multimedia problems
*Help with creating and editing photo albums

Etc.

Advanced Desktop Service
[1 year support = £72.63]

The advanced package is what i'd consider to be the most helpful package. The Starter Service may seem okay, but if a new user runs into some hardware issues they'll soon be regretting not getting the Advanced package.

Some key help areas covered by the Advanced Service are: -

* Help with partitioning, migrating and security
* Hardware support
* Optimising Ubuntu performance with specific hardware
* Professional Desktop Service

[1 year = £138.03]

This 'king' package provides support for features your average desktop user wouldn't really take advantage of, such as: -

* Remote Desktop setup, configuration and support
* Windows network access
* Virtualisation
* A free t-shirt

and is likely aimed at small businesses/self-employed users who need their free OS to talk to other OSes.

You'll find a full comparison @ ubuntu.com/support/services/desktopcomparison

Article by the wonderfull OMG!Ubuntu blog

Chromium now blends in perfectly with Gnome

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:15:14 +0000

Almost from the very start Chromium has offered the ability to use your GTK theme to make the browser blend in with your everyday system.
Even though the feature to match the GTK theme has been available for a while it didn't seem to work out for me.

It did try to put together a few of my themes colors and used the native window manager but it's only since the latest build that it actually does this to the point that you can't even tell this once was that bright blue sports car called Chromium.

Very nice job by the Chromium dev team, it now integrates really well and it's slowly but surely becoming my browser of choice on my low-end netbook.

Howto: run Jinzora on your Synology NAS

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:46:12 +0000

I'm pretty sure (google) I'm not the only one that had to deal with open_basedir restrictions and headers that got sent halfway round the world and back. Well turns out the solution is 'as always' easier than you'd think. I'll run you through it in a few snack sized steps.

The following steps apply to Jinzora 2.8 Obsidian on a CS407e Synology device although it should work for all Synology NAS servers.

Step 0 - Enable SSH acces on your Synology device
Since your NAS is a remote system you must find a way to control it externally, SSH is a great way to do so, however telnet is also an option we are going to focus on the SSH way of doing this.

Connect to your Synology device and proceed to next step.

Step 1 - Prepare your php.ini to run Jinzora in the first place
As most of you might already be aware of Jinzora requires some additional settings play nice with Apache. On your synology go to /usr/syno/etc/php.ini you can edit this file using the file editor of your choice.
I prefer to use 'nano' but this is not installed by default so you'd probably use VI for editing.

Now find the lines:



max_execution_time (and set to minimal required 300 or higher)

memory_limit (128 or ++)

post_max_size (32 or ++)

upload_max_filesize (32 or ++)

and this is important!
If you'd like to use the music folder that your Synology has created for you so generously it's likely to be in /volume1/music (unless it's not on your first disk of course or manually placed elsewhere).

Find the line:



open_basedir

by default it might look something like this:



open_basedir = /usr/syno/synoman:/etc:/var/run:/tmp:/var/spool/php:/volume1/@tmp/php:/var/services/web:/var/services/photo:/var/services/blog:/var/services/homes:/var/packages/MailStation/target/roundcubemail

If you want to add your music folder to this list and thereby rid yourself of the open_basedir restriction messages do so by adding the path to your music folder as shown below:



open_basedir = /usr/syno/synoman:/etc:/var/run:/tmp:/var/spool/php:/volume1/@tmp/php:/var/services/web:/var/services/photo:/var/services/blog:/var/services/homes:/var/packages/MailStation/target/roundcubemail:/volume1/music

If you've managed to get this right save the file and reboot your NAS.

Step 3 - Almost ready to install
At this point you have rebooted your Synology and you're about ready to install Jinzora. Once you've downloaded your copy of Jinzora 2.8 from the Official Jinzora webpage it's time for the key alteration to make this work on your NAS.

Extract the archive and enter the root directory of the Jinzora package. Here you will find a file called "index.php" open this file using any editor of your choice and find the following lines:



else if (file_exists(dirname(__FILE__)."/../../mainfile.php")) {



AND



else if (file_exists(dirname(__FILE__)."/../../class2.php")) {

These pieces of code are used for blog integration but trust me... you just want Jinzora to be Jinzora cause it rocks!

This is important!
Once located, replace the two lines with these two lines:



} else if (file_exists(dirname(__FILE__)."mainfile.php")) {



AND



} else if (file_exists(dirname(__FILE__)."class2.php")) {

Looks pretty similar right? Well the difference is that these paths are now no longer trying to achieve sub_root access, taking care of the last of the remaining error messages!

Step 4 - Running through the install
All you have to do now is pretty much install Jinzora according to the documentation on the Jinzora support pages. But I'll run you guys through it in just a sec..

Copy the whole Jinzora folder to your 'web' directory and follow this link in your browser of choice (choice is kind of the keyword in this tut is it?).



http://YOUR NAS IP/jinzora2 (unless renamed of course).

Jinzora will tell you that you meet the minimum requirements (thanks to step one) continue with the installation for it kind of leads itself from here. You might just want to install phpMyAdmin as well in case Jinzora fails to create a database (it happens sometimes). To do so simply download a package from the phpMyAdmin website and place this in your 'web' directory and approach it via your browser like this:



http://YOUR NAS IP/phpmyadmin

You'll figure out what to do I guess, if not.. leave complaints in the comments section below!

I hope you enjoy having Jinzora on your Synology just as I do!
It's been more than a month to figure out how to get this done but for you guys it should be a piece of cake now!

Strange Wiki page Powned Youtube.com

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:21:37 +0000

This afternoon was one of the rare days in which I would like to have found comfort in watching dull Youtube video's but as it turned out Youtube.com wasn't redirecting me to the Youtube homepage instead it showed a Wiki from the Wikimedia foundation.

Today hasn't been that swell of a day at Google for their Calendar and Gmail services also had to deal with some downtime. Although Google being.. well Google, it was all over in a hitch. Luckily for you guys I captured the whole Wiki glitch in a nice screenshot as shown above.

You know I'm just being an ass writing this, Google is providing such amazing services for free and in the case of Youtube at a loss, and they seldom get downtime. Even though half the world is pulling Google's servers they're always up to speed and glitches never last long. Neither did this one, Youtube is back as we all know it and 'love' it.

Pirate Bay admin takes legal action against Brein and Tim Kuik

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:17:22 +0000

In an attempt to take The Pirate Bay offline, BREIN took three of the tracker's 'founders' to court. BREIN won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to block Dutch users within 10 days or face thousands of euros each day in penalties.

After the verdict was made public, the three defendants immediately announced they would appeal. Lawyer Ernst-Jan Louwers represented the Pirate Bay defendants in the appeal today, and he revealed that BREIN brought in documents that are apparently faked in an attempt to mislead the court.

BREIN submitted a report on Reservella to the court. Reservella is the company that planned to sell The Pirate Bay to Global Gaming Factory, and according to the report that was apparently written by UK company Experian, one of the Pirate Bay founders is the company's CEO.

However, the defendants lawyer presented several facts that showed that the report is not what it claims to be.

"The report is an attempt to mislead the Court," Louwers said, adding that the Court should reject it since it's "fake, deceptive and completely unreliable."

The lawyer went on to argue that the anti-piracy outfit is merely trying to save face, and that BREIN will do all it can to succeed in their crusade against the three defendants. He then goes through a list of several points that show why the evidence is fabricated.

First of all, the Experian report on Reservella seems to have copied the Whois data of the Pirate Bay domain. It lists defendant Fredrik Neij as the CEO and the formation date for the company is identical to the date when the domain was registered.

This makes no sense, as Reservella was founded less than a year ago according to official information from the Seychelles Government, and Neij is not linked to the company as the report claims.

If that isn't enough already, the company ID number as reported in the document is incorrect, and the claims that Fredrik Neij is a citizen of the Seychelles are even more absurd.

Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is outraged by BREIN's attempt to cheat their way into a victory, and will press charges against BREIN and its director Tim Kuik.

"I consider what they have done as criminal. Much more severe than any 'aiding with potential copyright infringement' could ever be," he writes, adding "Maybe then we can finally have the real criminals shut down and put in jail!"

In his writeup Peter himself sums up various other points showing that the document is apparently false.

All in all there seems to be clear evidence that the report is highly inaccurate. Even if all the errors can be attributed to the research company, BREIN should have known better since they have been tracking The Pirate Bay's every move for years.

By TorrentFreak

Chromium Linux now has flash support out of the box

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:02:19 +0000

The Flash issues (emphases on 64bit) on Linux are often quite simple to bypass, especially since Adobe released the native 64bit browser plugins for Linux. But when it comes to linking these extensions to any given browser there's often more to it than you'd expect.

This was also the case with the Chromium browser, although it's still in constant development and hasn't even left the Alpha stages the browser gained a pretty big following on Linux as well as on Windows. But even though there were tons of tutorials guiding you through the process of enabling Flash in you vanilla Chromium build these instructions managed to fail once or twice but that's all history now. A fresh upgrade yesterday enabled Flash support out of the box, no configurations required! yay!

This kind of makes me wonder why exactly this browser is still in Alpha stages, it's probably more stable and usable than most browsers on the market right now, so developers... get this thing rolled into beta already. What's the sport about releasing a beta that's bug free.. we want to squash these suckers!

I enjoy using Chromium and I know this browser will certainly grow a massive user base on the Linux platform, great job guys!

New wallpaper features in Karmic alpha 6

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:20:30 +0000

They newly added wallpaper support also allows for wallpaper packages to be installed. You can now install a set of wallpapers that you'd like to be shuffled.

For the first time Ubuntu will ship multiple wallpapers with it's release in late October. These wallpapers were selected as a result to the Ubuntu wallpaper contest. As for now the wallpapers won't shake the earth and burn your eyes out with beauty but my guess/hope is that these are just stand-ins for the final collection.

Ubuntu's software store shows up in Karmic Alpha

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:37:23 +0000

The goal of the new Software Store is to bring structure to the way applications are installed on the system. They want to merge all the different package manager into a single 'click and go' system that even the n00best amongst us can operate.

With the upcomming release 'Karmic' in sight the developers have really been hollin ass to get all the milestones in and this Store was one of those milestones. Although deprecation of the current package managers 'apt-get, gdebi, dpkg' won't start until the next release I can already see many users choosing this way of installing apps over the default 'add/remove' system.

We'll just have to see how this turns out, but my first experience where pretty darn good I have to say. Lets just hope Ubuntu keeps enough of it's inner nerd features to keep the die dard Linux purists satisfied as well.

Holy crap! Skype Linux goes 64bit!

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:39:34 +0000

There has been an official Skype client for Linux for some years now but despite the efforts of putting out a client for Linux the community still wasn't quite pleased to find out that Skype had no intention of supporting the 64bit architectures. Besides being 32bit only the Linux client was also very underdeveloped compared to the Windows and Mac versions. In the beginning even lacking video support, but now it appears Skype has warmed up to the Linux community because it's new beta release 2.1 supports both 64bit and high quality video.

However it's two years ago that Skype first added support for video to Skype 2.0 beta for Linux and now that the Linux version of the popular VoIP client. has hit 2.1 beta, Skype has amped up the audio and video quality a bit. Skype for Linux now uses the same SILK audio codec as the Windows and Mac clients, and packs support for high quality video.

Skype 2.1 beta for Linux also supports sending SMS messages, organizing contacts within contact groups, and a few chat enhancements. The update also brings support for Pulse Audio.

Also a new panel icon has been added that shows the number of missed events. Skype 2.1 is still beta software, so it might be rough around the edges. But if you're willing to put up with the occasional crash or dropped call, it's probably worth upgrading for the improved audio and video quality.

Thanks a lot Skype developers!

Skype 2.1 for Linux is available for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE.

UPDATE 10-16-09:
It appears I was too soon claiming the 64bit capabilities of this software. I recently discovered the truth on this topic. Skype, though offering a 64bit download does nothing more than emulate 32bit on a 64bit machine by installing the lib32 packages. This is an easy way of running 64bit apps on Linux but is nothing close to native 64bit. I apologise for the hasty article.

Looks like Jolicloud stole Ubuntu's thunder

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:16:18 +0000

Although being based on the latest stable Ubuntu Netbook Remix release the guys at Jolicloud came up with a perfectly functional instler which wraps up pretty much all the features Ubuntu described in their announcement a few days ago.

It's a simple interface that shows users a list of applications they can than browse through. Each application is shown by it's logo and has a big "install" button positioned directly under it. Also the installations can be qued and updated all from within this same slick interface, pretty awesome indeed.

Ubuntu as awesome as it is however said we'd have to wait for their similar system to come out somewhere in between the 9.10 and 11.04 release. Note that in case of the latter this means waiting for another year and a half. So all and all I think Jolicloud has done a great job at presenting such a functional installer already, maybe the guys at Canonical can have a little chat with the Joli crew.

However there is more to Jolicloud than just a neat software browser/installer.
Jolicloud comes literally installed on top of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, so it has a rock solid base and has welded several popular cloud services directly to it's host. Jolicloud offers amongst others a Facebook(duuhh) and Twitter(duuhh) service.

If I'd have to make a comparison I'd say it's pretty similar to what Intel has done with its Moblin project.
I suggest that you check it out.

The Pirate Bay is back

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:32:24 +0000

The Pirate Bay and all of it's trackers are back online as we speak, good news for all the fans of the site, however these events have given us a small preview of what would happen if The Pirate Bay was to go down permanently or worse, turn into a legal filesharing community.

It seems the practice measures up to the theory, other torrent sites experienced a massive increase in visitors these past hours. You can't stop filesharing by simply shutting down one (although huge) community. There's always the next best thing. This is actually kind of sad, cause the guys at The Pirate Bay have fought this legal battle for it's community for so long and so fierce while the community would just simply shift over if something were to happen to TPB. Of course you can't blame them for doing so, that's business.

I'm glad to have the site back up, cause for me The Pirate Bay is so much more than just another filesharing community. They fight for our freedom, I don't care what people say, they're heroes to me!

Pirate Bay and BREIN Clash at Hacker Conference

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:24:06 +0000

Two months ago BREIN decided to take the Pirate Bay founders to court, hoping to get the BitTorrent tracker shut down in The Netherlands. BREIN won the civil case two weeks ago, and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were ordered to block Dutch visitors within 10 days or face thousands of euros each day in penalties.

For now the verdict has been put on hold by BREIN, allowing the three defendants to appeal. Nevertheless, because of the legal issues between the two parties, an encounter between the head of BREIN, Tim Kuik and Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm that took place at Hacking at Random (HAR) this Friday was a rather interesting one.

Tim Kuik participated in a panel discussion on copyright laws and the future of media distribution at HAR, and halfway through he was standing face to face with Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Svartholm, who had been following the discussion in the audience, took the opportunity to confront Kuik with some of the allegations he made.

Svartholm started by asking if BREIN actually has any evidence that The Pirate Bay is making ‘a lot’ of money from distributing copyrighted works, as they claim. “Can you please tell me where that profit is, because i’d like some of it,” he asked, which resulted in applause and cheers from the audience.

“You tell me, you’re here, somebody paid for your trip,” Kuik quickly replied in an attempt to turn things around, implying that Svartholm must have used Pirate Bay revenue to make his way over to The Netherlands.

Svartholm, who currently works as a software programmer in Asia where he earns his living, then replied, “I paid for this trip by developing computer software for my customers,” which was again followed by applause from the audience.

Kuik found his argument crushed so reverted back to the earlier question about profits. “Everybody knows, including yourself, that you’re selling advertising space on your website, and people pay you for that,” he said.

Kuik went on to say that a Swedish investigative journalist found that The Pirate Bay made hundreds of thousands of kroner every year. To some this may sound like an impressive figure, but 300,000 kroner ($40,000) may not even be enough to cover the hardware and bandwidth costs, so it doesn’t prove that there’s any profit.

From Kuik’s responses it seems that BREIN has no evidence at all that The Pirate Bay is as profitable as they claim it is, so Svartholm went on to ask Kuik about the defamation lawsuit that the former Pirate Bay founders started against him and his organization.

The head of BREIN is being sued by TPB in Sweden for defamation, after Kuik claimed that the Pirate Bay founders were responsible for an alleged DDoS attack on BREIN’s website. In Sweden, Kuik is now facing up to two years in prison, and Svartholm wanted to know if he plans to show up.

In his reply, Kuik denied that he ever attributed the DDoS attacks to the people behind the Pirate Bay, but he said that it was a coincidence that their website was hit right after the case against TPB was announced to the press. Svartholm of course questioned Kuik’s denial, but he never saw his original question answered.

In the end, Kuik never answered any of the questions posed by Svartholm, but the face to face standoff between two people at the extreme ends of the copyright debate was an interesting one nonetheless. After the panel discussion, Tim Kuik and Gottfrid Svartholm set their differences aside for a brief moment, as they posed for the cameras.

The video of the HAR panel discussion is available in OGG and on Vimeo (Gottfrid at 30:20).

Coverage and story by TorrentFreak.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:16:33 +0000

Ubuntu has endured tons of complaints about their brownish looks and is notorious for being an 'ugly' distro. While this is debatable (I for one love the colors, although I am colorblind..) but the strengths of the distro have always outweighed the weaknesses. It's real power lies in the system itself, the hardware support is amongst the greatest in the Linux world and it's hardly unstable yet still wonders about on the brinks of bleeding edge software.

Ever since the Jaunty Jackalope (or 9.04) release, there has been official netbook support in the form of a spin off called 'Ubuntu Netbook Remix' or UNR for short. Not only the looks but even the kernel itself has been optimized for the popular Intel Atom based devices. As for the look I didn't like it very much but the latest UNR Alpha release show a whole new interface which looks beautiful. I can see how this could come in handy with the upcoming tablet netbooks as well, see the screenshots above to see why.

The interface is very clean and clutterless. All icons are scalable which looks just amazing on any given screen. Okay I can figure on a 26" these icons would probably look like a hybrid Martha Steward vs Barbara Streisand but heck, they would look awesomely crispy.

Karmic is focused on Cloud computing using the Eucalyptus project so this should also provide additional features for low-end Netbooks although I haven't seen much of the Eucalyptus implementations yet.

More screenshots coming soon!

Get your Alpha copy now!

PLEASE NOTE: Although being a quite stable Alpha this software is still under heavy development so do not install it on production machines.

Chromium Linux build now supports themes

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:45:27 +0000

The fact that Chrome can be themed does not sound that fresh of news to you all, but Chromium, the Open Source project behind it never had this ability on it's Linux and Mac builds.. until now. Yes! It's there, theme support for Chromium! And it works really well too!

This means Chromium will no longer look like Windows XP invading your Linux Distro and eating it's insides. You can now simply pick a theme from the Chromium Themes page or even better, let Chromium pick the colors from your GTK theme by clicking the Use GTK theme button.

Go try it out, fetch your own version from the PPA at launchpad, or use this tutorial.