Gearfuse

Wow. You know, I was dreaming earlier this morning that I owned a Ferrari F360, but now even that is enough to keep the shock out of me regarding this news. The Pirate Bay, a website famous for pioneering the online torrent market, has been acquired by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) for $7.7 million. What does this mean for TPB’s users?

Bad news, according to TorrentFreak. While the TPB will become a publicly traded company on a Swedish exchange, it will ditch the fact that it hosts and tracks torrents. Now, a third-party company will be used to serve up torrents, leading the way for copyrighted material to be forbidden from being uploaded. Or, worse, GGF could shut the site down for good. Ugh.

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Say what you will but some people, myself included, happen to like Coldplay. If it weren’t for us fans, why else would the band decide to give away its new live CD “Left Right Left Right Left.” You can get a CD version for free at their concerts or you can download the entire album on Coldplay’s official website. Music is great but it’s even better when it’s free.

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I’m sure you can pick this up at every other subway stop in New York, but, ah, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Tarzan? Nice. Real nice.

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See that? That’s not a smile. Four members of the popular Bit Torrent site The Pirate Bay were convicted in a court of assisting in “making copyright content available.” Found guilty, they’ll now spend up to a year in prison for their crimes and must pay $3.6 million in fines to various companies. TorrentFreak has the whole scoop but this is a landmark piracy case that will surely change how careful people are online…

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20th Century Fox is having a bad week. Like, a really bad week. Yesterday, a work print of the upcoming movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked online and consequently, made its way around the world. A work print is a copy of the movie straight from the studio, but it may be missing effects, post-production audio, etc.

And such was the case. I got a copy of the movie yesterday and a few of us all watched it. It was not only a terribly incomplete movie, with Hugh Jackman still hanging from ropes in some scenes and 3-D wireframes all over the place, the plot was just awful. I’m glad I had a newspaper to read whilst my roommates continued watching.

Either way, Fox is pissed, the FBI has been called in and rumor has it Rising Sun Pictures, an Australian visual FX company, leaked the damn print. To piracy and beyond!

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Before you get your molotov cocktails out and start heaving them in the direction of the Electronic Arts offices, stop and listen. We all know what a clusterfuck DRM caused for the game Spore. People bitched quite a bit and this time around, EA is going to listen. On the official Sims 3 blog, Rod Humble from EA just posted this tidbit about how the DRM for the game will work:

The game will have disc-based copy protection – there is a Serial Code just like The Sims 2. To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed.

We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future.

Awesome. Back to basics. Power to the player. This not only a good move by EA’s development team; it’s a PR miracle.

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So after yesterday’s asstabulous keynote from Apple, iWork ‘09 hit the web faster than you can say “Hack the Planet!” If you’d like to score a copy of the office productivity suite for yourself, simply fire up your favorite Bit Torrent client and grab the torrent off, oh let’s see, pretty much any torrent site on the ‘net and you’re good to go. Unless you plan on buying a new 17-inch Macbook Pro, this is as good as Macworld gets.

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Cracking software and generating serial numbers is nothing new. But what happens when a developer catches on and decides to play fun with you? Such is the case with USB Overdrive X. Enter a stolen or pirated serial number and this message will be displayed by the developer. An excellent point is made here: the little guy is getting hurt. This isn’t Adobe or Apple, this is an independent developer trying to feed his family.

I recently wrote about some software I actually paid out of pocket for. You should too if you’re running Bit Torrent 24/7.

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Sorry to burst your bubble, pirates, but it seems that Nintendo’s next handheld unit will block flash carts used for pirating games. It took Nintendo a long enough time to take legal action against the creators of such flash carts as the R4 or N5, now it’s making damn sure that no one is going to illegally emulate its games.

The following flash carts are confirmed not to work on the Nintendo DSi:

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Don’t act surprised. It was only a matter of time before Microsoft’s next OS hit the torrent sites, considering Microsoft was handing out copies of Windows 7 to PDC (Professional Developers Conference) attendees. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions have leaked, weighing in at 2.72GB and 3.36GB, respectively.

It looks like a lot of people are hopping on these torrents on The Pirate Bay, so if you can’t use a private tracker, might as well raise a glass of rum to toast.

But how’s Windows 7 working out? Here’s what one downloader said:
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