Joakim Andersson

According to their blog post, they were left “no other option than to take [their] platform offline” after a court ruling from August. “The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.”

Slashdot News Story | Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents

It’ll be interesting to see what effect the change to Magnet links has on future court rulings. With Magnet links there is no torrent file, it’s not even a link to anything. It’s just a hash value that the torrent client uses to find the torrent in its peer-to-peer network.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions.

First, it’s all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Official Google Blog: Releasing the Chromium OS open source project

So the browser will be the OS.

Today when more and more of the work we do on the computer is done through the web browser and we store more and more of our data in the cloud the step to a completely web based operating system is not that big.

This might be good. We’ll see in a year.

via Mark Pilgrim

“go die somewhere
torrents don’t give viruses unless you’re a retard.”

What is the magnet link on the torrent download? – Yahoo! Answers

I didn’t know about the viruses that check your mental abilities. Must be really advanced stuff!

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked.

One major problem with this treaty is this point:

That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

Not to mention this one that is quite interesting as well:

That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

Read the full story over at boingboing, Secret copyright treaty leaks. It’s bad. Very bad.