In a fascinating post from Kelly Jacklin, the long time Apple software engineer details how he helped create the default text alert sound on the iPhone -- now known as the "Tri-tone" alert.

The history of the the pleasant chime we've all come to know and love stretches all the way back to 1998, nearly 10 years before the iPhone ever hit store shelves.

Back in 1998, Jeff Robbin, Bill Kincaid and Dave Heller began working on an MP3 player for the Mac called SoundJam MP. If the name sounds vaguely familiar, it's because Apple famously acquired SoundJam MP in 2000 and quickly repurposed it into the first version of iTunes.

But in 1999, before an Apple acquisition was on the horizon, Jeff Robbin asked Jacklin if he could come up with a sound to alert a user when a CD burning session was complete. Being a hobbyist musician, Jacklin was up to the task, and he got to work experimenting with various sounds.

I was looking for something "simple" that would grab the user's attention. I thought a simple sequence of notes, played with a clean-sounding instrument, would cut through the clutter of noise in a home or office. So I had two tasks: pick an instrument, and pick a sequence of notes. Simple, right? Yeah, says you; everyone's an armchair musician...

I was really into the sound of marimbas and kalimbas at the time, so I thought I'd try both of those. I also went through bank (after bank) of sounds built into the SW1000XG, auditioning instrument sounds, and found three other instrument sounds that I liked: a harp, a koto (Japanese zither), and a pizzicato string sound (that's the sound a violinist makes when plucking the string, rather than bowing it).

Jacklin recalls that he wanted a simple sound, which meant that many of the sounds he experimented with were just three of four notes long. For all you music buffs out there, Jacklin also mentions that he wanted the sound to have a happy vibe, so he particularly experimented with "notes from the major scale, focusing on I, III, IV, V, and VIII" octaves.

If you'd like the full nitty-gritty as to how Jacklin came up with a plethora of note permutations to choose from, the full article is a must read. But suffice it to say, Jacklin ultimately settled upon a winner, a sound file he called 158-marimba.aiff.

As initially intended, the sound did indeed become the default sound when a disc burning session in Soundjam MP concluded. When Apple transformed Soundjam MP into iTunes, the sound remained part of the app.

Jumping ahead a few years to the iPhone's release in 2007, Jacklin was pleasantly surprised when he discovered that the sound he created many years earlier continued to live on, this time in the form of the default text alert.

So imagine my surprise when the iPhone ships, and the default text message tone is... "158-marimba", now going by the clever (and not actually accurate, from a music theory perspective) name "Tri-Tone". Time goes by, and this sound becomes iconic, showing up in TV shows and movies, and becoming international short-hand for "you have a text message"... Wow! Who'd have thought?

Indeed, I myself have noticed, while watching TV with friends, that when the "Tri-tone" sound happens to be played in a scene, a number of people reach for their pockets to see if they have a message.

Again, Jacklin's full write-up is worth checking out. As an added and extremely interesting bonus, Jacklin's post includes an audio file comprised of sounds he experimented with that didn't quite make the cut.

[Ed. note: It has come to our attention that blockquotes are not working on the mobile version of the site (m.tuaw.com) and may distort this story, particularly for those reading on the iPad via the Facebook app. We are working on a fix and apologize for the inconvenience.]

Behind the music: the backstory of Marimba 158, the iPhone text tone originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Aug 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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nevver:

Ben & Jerry’s

Tonight: the beginning of the end.

The Times spoke with the people who oversee several top dramas about the challenges of producing television in the Twitter age.

The Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet.

Courts in the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and elsewhere have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and more are expected to follow.

Up until now The Pirate Bay has encouraged users affected by the blackout to use proxy sites. However, on its 10th anniversary they are now releasing a special “PirateBrowser” which effectively bypasses any ISP blockade.

“It’s a simple one-click browser that circumvents censorship and blockades and makes the site instantly available and accessible. No bundled ad-ware, toolbars or other crap, just a Pre-configured Firefox browser,” The Pirate Bay explains.

The browser is based on Firefox 23 bundled with a Tor client and some proxy configurations to speed up loading. It is meant purely as a tool to circumvent censorship and unlike the Tor browser it doesn’t provide any anonymity for its users.

“This browser is just to circumvent censorship, to remove limits on accessing sites governments don’t want you to know about,” The Pirate Bay notes.

PirateBrowser works like any other web browser and comes pre-loaded with several bookmarks for blocked sites, which aside from The Pirate Bay includes EZTV, KickassTorrents, Bitsnoop and H33T.

The browser also lists the alternative .onion addresses for both TPB and EZTV as backups to access these sites.

The Pirate Bay is not alone in its efforts to keep the Internet open and accessible. The Obama administration has spent millions of dollars on similar projects allowing citizens of oppressed regimes to access blocked websites, albeit for different reasons.

The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that “PirateBrowser” is just the first step in their efforts to fight web censorship. They are also working on a special BitTorrent-powered browser, which lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own.

In theory, this will allow sites to exist and update even without having a public facing website. As a result, it will be virtually impossible to block or shut them down. The first version of this new software is currently being tested but there is currently no firm launch date. More on that later.

In the meantime, the development of PirateBrowser will also continue. The current release is only available for the Windows platform but Mac and Linux versions will follow in the future.

Source: Pirate Bay Releases ‘Pirate Browser’ to Thwart Censorship

During the summer of 2003 The Pirate Bay was founded by Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån.

Piratbyrån, which translates to Bureau of Piracy, was formed by political activists and hackers in the early 2000s, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral and power structures.

The group’s members were all friends of friends and in common with The Pirate Bay, there was virtually no structure.

One of the group’s unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyrån. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw it fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.

“At the time there was one big torrent site, which was called Suprnova, but they mainly had international content. We and Piratbyrån wanted more Swedish and Scandinavian content. So we started a big library, and that is The Pirate Bay,” Peter Sunde later recalled.

The site first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time.

After a few months the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Celeron 1.3GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.

The Pirate Bay server

It didn’t take long before more server power was needed to keep the site and tracker from collapsing due to a growing number of visitors.

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was coordinating a million peers and over 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also noticed that it was not only Scandinavians developing an interest in their site.

In fact, by then 80% of their users came from other parts of the world. Because of increasing worldwide popularity The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages during July 2005.

The Pirate Bay before the redesign

Due to these changes, The Pirate Bay grew even faster, and the number of peers tracked by the site grew to 2,500,000 by the end of 2005.

In the meantime, Piratbyrån had distanced itself from the site as a group, but continued to share the Kopimi lifestyle throughout the world until 2007. The Pirate Bay sailed on independently and continued to be operated by an unorganized collection of individuals.

Pirate Bay’s increase in traffic didn’t go unnoticed by the entertainment industries. Copyright holders started to send out takedown notices, which were often mocked by the site’s founders. Eventually, however, The Pirate Bay got raided following pressure from Hollywood and the USA.

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the Pirate Bay’s servers.

Um filme para toda a família com o sempre bonito "Gajas" no título, um rabinho masculino e material aconchegado bem em destaque e com, diz-nos a sinopse, um elfo metrossexual, um badocha, uma atraente guerreira (solteira, ainda por cima) e um Ronaldo que não tem jeito nenhum para as miúdas - gajas, desculpem. Yap, estou cheio de vontade de o ver. As crianças da família, essas, vão ficar por casa a ver o Rei Leão. Não vão elas começar a chamar a mãe ou a tia de gaja.

One of the main motivations for people to download and stream TV-shows from unauthorized sources is availability.

If fans can’t get a show through legal channels they often turn to pirated alternatives.

So when Time Warner Cable dropped CBS last Friday after the companies failed to reach a broadcasting agreement, there was a good chance that many of the blacked-out subscribers would turn to file-sharing networks to get their fix.

Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that this is indeed the case for the popular show “Under The Dome.”

To find out whether download rates in the affected markets increased, we monitored U.S. BitTorrent downloads of last week’s episode as well as the one that aired this Monday following the blackout.

The data from these two samples show that in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Pittsburgh, relatively more people downloaded the latest episode, an indication that customers are turning to unauthorized channels to get the show.

With hundreds of thousands of downloads Under The Dome is one of the most pirated TV-shows at the moment. Of all sampled downloaders in the U.S. 10.9% came from the blackout regions for last week’s episode, and this increased to 14.6% for Monday’s episode, a 34% increase.

In New York City, one of the largest affected markets, the relative piracy rate more than doubled from 1.3% of all U.S. downloads last week to 3% for the episode that aired after the blackout.

Worldwide, the latest Under The Dome episode was downloaded slightly more than previous episodes. This means that the relative increase in piracy rates also resulted in more downloads. More tracking is required to show a long-term effect, and whether the results are the same for other CBS shows.

While one should always be careful of drawing strong conclusions from city-based data, especially when we don’t know how many downloaders are Time Warner Cable subscribers, these initial results do suggest that the blackout resulted in a local piracy surge.

At the same time that piracy spiked, the official ratings took a large hit. On Monday, Under The Dome reached its season low ranking with only 10.49 million viewers compared to 11.41 million the week before.

Meanwhile, Time Warner and CBS are still unable to reach an agreement. Yesterday Time Warner’s Chief Executive Glenn Britt offered to include CBS as an “a la carte” option for its subscribers but CBS dismissed the proposal as “a sham.”

As long as this standoff continues it’s expected that more and more TV fans will turn to unauthorized channels to watch their favorite shows, with the risk that some may never come back.

Source: CBS Blackout Triggers Surge in TV-Show Piracy

Following a High Court ruling last month, six UK ISPs are required to block subscriber access to the popular TV-torrent site EZTV.it.

The actions EZTV faces are not the first taken against a torrent site in the UK. The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and several other “pirate” sites have been blocked by previous court orders and remain inaccessible by conventional means.

However, over the past couple of days Sky subscribers noticed that the blocklist had been quietly expanded with a new site that’s certainly not covered by any court order – TorrentFreak.com.

Our site first became inaccessible on Wednesday night, only to be unblocked 14 hours later. However, about an hour ago it was again added to the blocklist.

The recent blocking spree is causing confusion among Sky subscribers who have no idea why TorrentFreak is longer accessible. However, we can confirm that the problem lies with Sky’s filtering software that is supposed to enforce the court-ordered torrent site blockades.

The owner of EZTV informed TorrentFreak that he used Geo DNS to point UK visitors to TorrentFreak’s IP-address. Soon after there were reports that our website had become inaccessible to Sky users.

EZTV DNS pointing to TorrentFreak’s IPs

Yesterday afternoon EZTV updated the DNS entries again, now pointing the UK public to some of Facebook’s IP-addresses. The idea was to add Facebook to the piracy blocklist, but nothing happened, perhaps because the DNS pointed to a wide range of IP-addresses.

This morning EZTV switched the DNS entries back to TorrentFreak’s IP-address and soon after our site became unavailable to Sky subscribers, as the Twitter reports below clearly confirm.

From the above it appears that Sky’s filtering system blocks any and all IP-addresses that EZTV adds to their DNS. This essentially means that EZTV, or any other blocked site, has the power to render entire websites inaccessible to Sky subscribers. Luckily we were the target and not Google.

From what we can tell, other UK Internet providers are using different systems as TorrentFreak is still accessible.

Interestingly enough, Virgin users reported an hour long blackout of Facebook yesterday evening. Whether this is related to EZTV’s DNS entries is unknown at the point, but it’s not common for Facebook to go “down” on a single UK provider.

EZTV’s owner tells TorrentFreak that he just wanted to see how the various blocking procedures work at UK ISPs. He never imagined that simply adding a few IP-addresses to EZTV’s DNS zone would take out TorrentFreak. He stresses that there was absolutely no “hacking” involved and alerted us about the plan.

It’s expected that after realizing how vulnerable to exploits their blocking system is, Sky will soon correct their mistake. While this may bring TorrentFreak back, this blunder is likely to be used by blocking opponents to show how easily things can go wrong.

In the meantime, Sky subscribers will have to use a proxy to access TorrentFreak.

Update: Sky isn’t in a hurry to fix the flaw, but EZTV said it will remove the TorrentFreak IP address from its DNS so the site should be accessible again soon.

Source: Sky’s Court Ordered Piracy Filter Blocks TorrentFreak

The downloading of movies and TV shows is a daily topic of conversation online, as is the unauthorized distribution of music, games and software.

It is this type of copyright infringement that receives the most attention, largely due to the complaints made by the big corporations that produce and distribute this content. Their influence causes those in power around the world to sit up and listen, which often leads to a tightening of legislation.

Despite all the efforts, however, this year the world’s most infamous torrent site, The Pirate Bay, celebrates its ten-year anniversary. But while it carries on business as usual, Internet users are being subjected to increasingly tough copyright regimes, such as $150,000 fines for sharing a single song in the United States through to the increasing likelihood of arrest for those sharing more than personal-use levels of content in Sweden.

Sweden’s local Pirate Party has battled these developments for years and today, marking a decade of The Pirate Bay, they’ve demonstrated that copyright infringement is not restricted to the sharing of music and movies and that anyone – even those charged with running the country – can easily break the law at the click of a button.

The party has been doing some research on the online activities of Sweden’s IT Minister, Anna-Karin Hatt, and have discovered that the 40-year-old has not been 100% successful when it comes to absolute respect for copyright law.

Singling out Hatt’s Instagram account as an example, the party notes that the minister has posted copyrighted Calvin and Hobbes cartoons plus the artwork for several motion pictures including The Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Quick, send the police, it’s a non-commercial infringement of copyright

“When not even the Swedish IT Minister complies with copyright law online, one can hardly expect ordinary Internet users to feel compelled to follow such an outdated law,” says party legislative spokesperson Torbjörn Wester.

To underline their point that breaking copyright law is extremely simple these days, the Pirate Party have today reported Minister Hatt to the police, just as music and movie studios do when they find people infringing their copyrights. Wester doesn’t believe anything will come of the complaint.

“Resourceful companies and prominent politicians have not much to fear [when breaking copyright] while the police are chasing down file-sharing adolescents,” Wester says.

But of course, the Pirate Party do not want Hatt or indeed anyone else prosecuted for such a ridiculously small ‘crime’. They want to decriminalize all non-commercial sharing of “culture and knowledge”, so that citizens – Hatt included – can share a music file or indeed a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon online without fear of repercussions.

“The government and Parliament have made it impossible to live a modern life and be active on the Internet without being a criminal,” Wester concludes.

Source: Pirate Party Reports IT Minister to the Police for Copyright Infringement

After a long wait The Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK was released to the public earlier this year.

The film, created by Simon Klose, follows three Pirate Bay founders during their trial in Sweden. True to the nature of the site it can be downloaded for free.

Through this model the film’s director hopes to reach the broadest audience possible. However, several film studios are obstructing this goal by sending DMCA notices to Google, asking the search giant to remove links to the documentary.

Klose was quite shocked when he found out about the unwarranted censorship and initially decided to lawyer up to sue the movie studios. That plan was later aborted when the lawyers at Chilling Effects advised the director that his efforts would be futile.

“The lawyers saw no use suing the movie studios for filing false DMCA claims and seek damages, unless I could prove subjective intent and bad faith. Instead they advised me to file a counter-notice once I had found out whether Google had actually taken down the links or not,” Klose explains.

The director decided to take up this advice and contacted Google instead, hoping to get the censored links put back up.

Klose managed to get in touch with Google’s Nordic Policy counsel David Mothander, who said he would follow up on the case. But today, two months and several reminders later, the director still has to receive a reply.

This leads Klose to belief that Google is more interested in helping Hollywood to censor the web than assisting independent creators to correct DMCA takedown abuses.

“To me it’s a depressive lesson that Google rather acts as a private proxy for dinosaur copyright enforcement than helping indie filmmakers experiment with sustainable distribution models” Klose says.

While the automated takedown request in question may not be intentional, they are certainly not an isolated incident. After our initial report back in May copyright holders have sent in several new takedown requests for TPB-AFK.

Below is one that was sent on behalf of HBO in June. The notice claims to protect “The Pacific” but also lists a link to the Pirate Bay documentary. A quick search on Google reveals that the result has indeed been removed.

HBO takedown notice

The same is true for a DMCA request that was sent in Lionsgate’s name recently. This notice lists “The Haunting in Connecticut 2 Ghosts of Georgia” as the copyrighted work but as can be seen below, the notice also affects TPB-AFK and a wide variety of other unrelated titles.

Lionsgate takedown notice

Klose is pretty upset by the unwarranted censorship which he says hurts his business model, and he urges Google to also protect those who gladly give away their work for free.

“It sucks to be arbitrarily censored by Google’s and Hollywood’s bot system. By making it harder for us to share the film they are harming our freemium distribution experiment,” Klose tells TorrentFreak.

“It’s bizarre to be punished for experimenting with distribution models by an industry doing so little for the filmmakers they claim to protect,” he adds.

While it’s unrealistic to expect Google to catch all errors made by copyright holders, Klose’s problem does bring up an important issue.

There is currently no easy way to check whether a link has been removed from Google. In addition, it is not clear how third parties can send counter-notices to reinstate content on websites that they don’t own.

First and foremost, however, copyright holders should make sure that their automated tools don’t take down legitimate content that is not theirs.

Update: Simon Klose tells TorrentFreak that after he posted his complaints in public, Google’s Nordic Policy counsel David Mothander offered to reinstate the links.

“David from Google just called me up and said his “reply to me had got stuck in his outbox”. He said it was a really lame excuse and said he was sorry. Then he offered to put the links that had been taken down back,” Klose says.

Source: Hollywood Keeps Censoring Pirate Bay Documentary, Director Outraged

Acho que nunca tivemos um título que resuma tão bem os assuntos dos quais falámos nesta emissão.

SPOILERS: ”Hannibal”.

ALINHAMENTO

0:00:00	0:01:06	Introdução
0:01:06	0:08:22	ZAPPING: “Camp”, “Crossing Lines”, “The Fosters”, “The Bridge”, “Axe Cop”, “Les Revenants”
0:08:22	0:11:50	Balanço de Temporada: “Veep”
0:11:50	0:13:51	Balanço de Temporada: “Falling Skies”
0:13:51	0:19:27	Balanço de Temporada: “Rectify”
0:19:27	0:22:07	Balanço de Temporada: “Continuum”
0:22:07	0:37:01	Balanço de Temporada: “Hannibal”
0:37:01	0:39:23	Balanço de Temporada: “Defiance”
0:39:23	0:44:13	“Under The Dome”
0:44:13	0:49:44	Balanço de Temporada: “Orange Is The New Black”
0:49:44	1:02:16	Séries de Verão
1:02:16	1:21:55	Séries fora de época
1:21:55	1:24:08	Final

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As Ben mentioned in our previous post, our top priority right now is improving the stability of The Old Reader.  To start, we’re going to get The Old Reader a much needed hardware upgrade.  This week, we’ll be relocating the application to a top tier host located in the United States, tripling database capacity and adding over 10 times the network capacity.

The move is going to entail exporting all of the posts from about 6 million subscriptions, moving that data approximately 5000 miles and then importing it into the new database servers. This is a big move, and unfortunately it’s going to require about 48 hours of downtime.   

The new environment will be ready to roll on Tuesday at which point we will begin the transfer and maintenance window.  We’re shooting to begin that maintenance window at approximately 12AM GMT Wednesday.  During this time, we’ll be frequently updating Twitter, Facebook and Status page to make sure you know as soon as it is back up and running.

The composer Alan Menken, who recently received his first Emmy nomination, reflects on winning Grammys, Oscars, a Tony and a Razzie for his contributions to works like “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” and “Newsies.”

SimCity for Mac will be released on August 29th after being delayed several times in order to "ensure a great experience" for players, EA said today.

The Mac version was originally set for a February release, but was delayed to June 11th and then again delayed until August. The PC version of Sim City was released back in March.



SimCity's PC launch was more than a little rocky, largely because the game can only be played online. EA requires that the game be connected to its servers at all times to facilitate 'region play' where the cities of multiple players are connected to share utilities and citizenry.

At launch, SimCity's servers were overwhelmed with traffic and the gameplay experience was extremely poor. Today, EA seems to have ironed out most of the bugs and users are playing the game as intended.

Currently, the PC version is available via the EA's Origin store for $40, or as a digital deluxe edition with extra buildings and add-ons for $60.

Os smartphones já se tornaram no mais popular dispositivo para gravar vídeo - afinal, estão sempre "à mão". Mas a sua popularidade fez também disparar o número de vídeos gravados em formato portrait (na vertical), que muitas vezes é a forma mais cómoda de segurar no equipamento. E por muito boa ideia que isso pareça no momento da gravação... é um autêntico desastre na hora de se ver o vídeo numa televisão, ou monitor - sendo exibida apenas uma única faixa de vídeo no centro do ecrã, com margens negras monstruosas de cada lado. Este problema é tão comum que várias apps (como a do YouTube) até bloqueiam isso atrás de uma opção com um aviso de que o vídeo na vertical ficará "mal".

Daí que eu venha sugerir uma inovação radical para acabar com este problema de uma vez por todas (seria merecedora de patente, e eu estou aqui a oferecê-la de borla).

A maioria dos smartphones actuais já vem equipados com câmaras de 5MP, 8MP ou 13MP. Para que a minha proposta funcione é apenas necessário que a resolução vertical da câmara do smartphone seja superior a 1920 pixeis. Por exemplo, no caso de uma câmara de 5MP teremos uma resolução de 2592x1944 pixels - o que já serviria.


Neste caso, bastaria que a gravação de vídeo passasse a ser feita sobre uma janela de gravação que ocuparia apenas uma subsecção do sensor (poderia até movimentar-se para cima/baixo e lateralmente para fazer a estabilização digital de imagem à semelhança do que já fazem em modo horizontal).

Desta forma, o vídeo estaria sempre na orientação horizontal mesmo quando quiséssemos gravar com o smartphone na vertical. O único inconveniente seria uma maior disparidade entre o ângulo de filmagem (teria um efeito zoom ainda mais marcado do que o que já existe entre o modo de fotografia e de vídeo), mas penso que os benefícios seriam bem mais vantajosos do que este pequeno contra.

A nível técnico não me parece que fosse difícil de implementar, já que todos os sensores CMOS permitem definir subregiões de captura (habitualmente designadas como "RoI - Region of Interest"), e uma vez que o processamento de vídeo conta com aceleração por hardware, facilmente poderia implementar a função de rotação para que esta captura "vertical-horizontal" passasse a ser realmente horizontal.

É uma daquelas ideias tão básicas e que resolveria um problema tão comum que não sei como é que ainda nenhum fabricante se lembrou disto! (Mas aparecendo a partir de agora, ficará sempre a suspeita de que andaram por aqui a "inspirar-se"! :)

August last year the popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid had its servers taken down by Ukrainian hosting company Colocall.

Local authorities explained that Interpol had requested the action as part of a criminal investigation into the site’s alleged owners in Mexico.

Months earlier Mexican authorities had carried out raids in Monterrey, the capital city of the northeastern state of Nuevo León. Their prime target was a Demonoid operator, and one person connected to the BitTorrent tracker was subsequently imprisoned but later released.

While the legal troubles may have played a role in Demonoid’s continued downtime, the site was already suffering with technical problems at the end of July last year. Talking to TorrentFreak the site’s admin blamed a DDoS attack. At the time, however, the tech admin of the site was determined to get the site back online.

“You know how it goes with Demonoid. It might take a while but it will come back,” the admin told us.

But in the year that followed the Demonoid team kept their trademark silence. The last official update we received dates back to September last year when hopes for a quick resurrection were tempered. At the time, Demonoid’s tech admin told us that the site might not come back soon.

“We are down, and we’re not looking into putting the site back up at the moment,” the admin said.

And he was right.

Of course there are still many who believe the site may eventually return. The hopes of these Demonoid users was fueled in November when the tracker briefly returned, as well as by a follow-up switch to a new .HK domain. But this short-lived excitement wasn’t followed up by anything concrete.

Still, the Demonoid “spirit” is still very much alive and touching many people who miss it dearly. Over the past months we have seen the rise of imposters and a standalone tracker inspired by Demonoid. The closest to a true resurrection is the mysterious D2.vu site, which launched using a copy of the Demonoid user and torrent database.

However, none of these sites has come close to the millions of active users Demonoid had before it collapsed. These newer “alternatives” simply miss the truly unique community and collection of fresh and rare content.

Of course there is no shortage of “pirate” sites on the Internet, but many users saw Demonoid as something more than that.

While the music and movie industries would quickly label Demonoid as a piracy haven, for members it was often the go-to place for rare and unique content that was not available elsewhere on the Internet, even through legal channels. In addition, it was also a place where creators were happy to share their work.

However, we have now come to a point where we are tempted to draw a sad conclusion for the “comeback kid.”

After a year of Demonoid downtime, which is double the 2007/2008 downtime record of six months, it is very unlikely that the famous tracker will ever return to its former glory. Never say never, but even those who are optimistic by nature have to agree that Demonoid’s future is looking grimmer than ever before.

The end?

Source: Demonoid Down For One Year: The End?

We’re pleased to announce that The Old Reader will officially remain open to the public! The application now has a bigger team, significantly more resources, and a new corporate entity in the United States. We’re incredibly excited to be a part of this great web application and would like to share some details about its future as well as thank you for remaining loyal users. We’re big fans and users of The Old Reader and look forward to helping it grow and improve for years to come.

First off we want to say that it’s rare to have an application that inspires as much passion as The Old Reader has as of late. We think that’s a sign of greatness and all credit for that goes to the wonderful team that has been running the show including Dmitry and Elena. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well this past week and they are smart, honest, and passionate people. We’re happy to announce that they are still a part of the team and we hope they will be for a long time to come.  The new team will be managing the project and adding to the engineering, communications, and system administration functions.

So now for the future. The Old Reader is going to retain all of its functionality and remain open to the public. Not only that, we’re going to do everything in our power to grow the user base which will only accentuate the things that make this application special. To facilitate these improvements, we’re going to be transitioning The Old Reader to a top tier hosting facility in the United States this coming week. It’s going to require some downtime and for that we sincerely apologize, but it’s also going to mean A LOT more servers, 10x faster networks, and long-term stability. We realize that doesn’t make the downtime easy but rest assured that things are looking up.

Over the coming weeks we’ll talk more about the new team of The Old Reader. We’re looking forward to introducing ourselves and making significant improvements to this incredible application. Thanks for reading and thanks for using The Old Reader!

Uma reportagem sobre os alemães que passam fins-de--semana na Herdade da Comporta está a causar polémica.

Sometimes it pays to have killer ad space. Here’s what commuters are seeing on the CBS Cube in the heart of NYC’s Times Square. A not-too subtle reminder that CBS and Time Warner Cable failed to reach a deal by today’s 5 PM ET deadline in their retransmission deal negotiations.

NEW YORK, August 2, 2013 – COMEDY CENTRAL announced today that Seth Rogen has been named Roast Master for the “COMEDY CENTRAL Roast of James Franco.” The event (#FrancoRoast) will tape at Culver Studios on August 18 and premiere on Labor Day, Monday, September 2 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT. Since first teaming up in 1999 on the cult-favorite television series “Freaks and Geeks,” Franco and Rogen have collaborated on some of today’s most outrageous and quotable movies including “This Is The End,” “Pineapple Express” and the forthcoming “The Interview.” The “COMEDY CENTRAL Roast Of James Franco” will be executive produced by Joel Gallen from Tenth Planet Productions, who also served as Executive Producer and Director of the COMEDY CENTRAL Roasts Of Rosanne Barr, Charlie Sheen, and Donald Trump, as well as the Emmy®-nominated “COMEDY CENTRAL Roast Of William Shatner.” Jonas Larsen is the Executive in Charge for the network.

Related: James Franco Says He’s Comedy Central’s Next Roasted Celebrity

Related: Ellen DeGeneres To Host Oscars

Ellen DeGeneres landed an Emmy nomination for hosting the 79th Academy Awards in 2007. Here’s her opening monologue from that ceremony, which drew 39.92 million viewers. Check it out:

We've seen Lorne Michaels pull off miracles to save the show in the past. No miracles will be needed this season. "SNL" is in good shape -- great shape, even. This might be the best core group of young talent the show has had, all at once in, well, 18 years.

Read more: Fred Armisen, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Tv, Snl, Jason Sudeikis, Satuday Night Live, TV News

NBC‘s Parks & Recreation may have been renewed for 22 episodes, but two of its co-stars, Rob Lowe and Rashida Jones, are only staying for the first 13. Lowe and Jones are set to exit the off-beat comedy halfway through Parks & Recreation‘s upcoming sixth season. I hear NBC is looking to keep Lowe in the fold, finalizing a development deal with an actor for a potential new series. Meanwhile, Jones has been ramping up her producing career, setting her production company with Will McCormack at Warner Bros. TV and tapping Wonderland Sound and Vision’s Jeff Grosvenor to run it. Jones was the first actor to join Amy Poehler on Parks & Rec (then still perceived to be an Office spinoff). Lowe, who next stars in National Geographic’s Killing Kennedy, joined as a guest star at the end of Season 2. Their characters share a storyline on the show — they’re having a baby. The duo’s departure was first reported by Buzzfeed. Season 6 of Parks & Recreation launches on September 26 with the daunting task of its hour-long premiere facing the hour-long season opener of CBS’ The Big Bang Theory.

Rui Rio declarou guerra aberta a Luís Filipe Menezes e não está a ser bonito.

O debate da moção de confiança foi marcado por um novo protesto, desta vez recorrendo a narizes de palhaço.

A military judge today announced that Pfc. Bradley Manning is not guilty of aiding the enemy in the largest leak of classified and diplomatic information in American history. But you wouldn’t have known it if you were watching one of the Big 4 TV networks. Unlike when the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling came down on June 26 and the birth of the royal baby earlier this month, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox all stayed with their regularly scheduled programming today. Over in cable newsland, Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC all reported live on the verdict, with FNC first at 10:05 AM PT. MSNBC was next at 10:08 and CNN right behind at 10:09 AM. All of the cable news networks stayed on the immediate story for several minutes before updating later as more information on the verdict came in. The timing of the verdict was no surprise, as it had previously been announced by a spokesperson for the military district of Washington DC. Manning today was found guilty of other charges including espionage and theft which carry hefty sentences. The sentencing process starts Wednesday.

Formerly based in Iraq, the U.S. Army soldier was accused of delivering vast amounts of data to WikiLeaks, though the organization has never officially confirmed Manning was the source of the information. Manning was arrested in May 2010 not long after WikiLeaks posted a video from 2007 showing an American helicopter firing on a group in Baghdad. The soldier plead guilty to 10 of the 22 charge leveled against him by the government, which held jail time of up to 20 years, in February of this year. The trial on the other charges, which including the aiding the enemy claim, started in early June. 

The Fifth Estate, a feature about WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, is set to premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The DreamWorks and Participant’s Bill Condon-helmed film stars Star Trek Into Darkness’ Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange along with former Downton Abbey actor Dan Stevens. 

UPD: We have received a number of proposals that we are discussing right now. Chances are high that public The Old Reader will live after all

Since we launched first public version almost a year ago up until March 2013 we have been working on The Old Reader in “normal” mode. In March things became “nightmare”, but we kept working hard and got things done. First, we were out of evenings, then out of weekends and holidays, and then The Old Reader was the only thing left besides our jobs. Last week difficulty level was changed to “hell” in every possible aspect we could imagine, we have been sleep deprived for 10 days and this impacts us way too much. We have to look back.

The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all. The “life” variable was out of equation: you can limit hours, make up rules on time management, but this isn’t going to work if you’re running a project for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me tell you why: it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that. We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday. Talk about “laid back” attitude now. And I won’t even start describing enormous sentimental attachment to The Old Reader that we have.

We would really like to switch the difficulty level back to “normal”. Not to be dreaded of a vacation. Do something else besides The Old Reader. Stop neglecting ourselves. Think of other projects. Get less distant from families and loved ones. The last part it’s the worst: when you are with your family, you can’t fall out of dialogues, nodding, smiling and responding something irrelevant while thinking of refactoring the backend, checking Graphite dashboard, glancing onto a Skype chat and replying on Twitter. You really need to be there, you need to be completely involved. We want to have this experience again.

That’s why The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

The private site?

Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013. And of course, we will migrate all our awesome supporters and people who donated to keep the project running (if you sent us bitcoins, please get in touch to get identified). Later this week your account will get a distinct indication whether it will be migrated to the private site or not. If you see that message and believe that it’s wrong, or if all your friends are getting migrated and you are left behind — please, drop us a line.

Give me my data!

You will have two weeks to export your OPML file regardless of our decision. OPML export link is located at the bottom of the Settings page — use the top-right menu to get there. All posts that you saved for later by using Pocket integration will obviously remain in your Pocket account.

But you could…

For those who would like to start the usual “VC, funding, mentor” or “charge for the damn thing” mantras — please, spare it. We’re not in the Valley where it might be super-easy, and, after all, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We just love making a good RSS reader.

We really want The Old Reader to be a big and successful project, with usable free accounts. But this is not possible to achieve with what we have, so unless someone resourceful takes over the project and brings it to the next level, it is not gonna happen. We had over 2 000 new registrations after the blackout last week. This is amazing and sad at the same time.

If anyone is interested in acquiring The Old Reader and making it better, we are very open and accepting proposals at hello@theoldreader.com. We would be waiting for them for two weeks, supporting and maintaining The Old Reader as usual. Please don’t write us if you don’t have resources to maintain a site used by tens of thousands of people every day, or if you don’t know how you would improve The Old Reader. And please spare our time if you just want to buy the domain name and park a bunch of silly ads there — it’s not going to happen.

We value our community very much, and we will either pass the project to somebody who we know is going to take a good care of it, or we will switch it to private mode.

What next?

From one point of view, it’s not a big deal: “RSS is obsolete”, nobody died, we don’t owe anybody anything, you name it. Also, there are a lot of good readers around to choose from, a large part of them is smaller than The Old Reader and had not experienced growing pains of 80 000 daily active users in no time. But for us, it’s heartbreaking.

I will finally get back to work on my small studio — Bespoke Pixel — which has been run by my awesome partner all this time. Dmitry will keep being bright young software developer, making scalable and beautiful projects. Our team will stay together, and will keep working on making the private version of The Old Reader awesome.

We feel great responsibility for the project. We’d rather provide a smooth and awesome experience for 10 000 users than a crappy one for 420 000.

Sorry, each and everyone if we failed you. You are an incredible, supportive and helpful community. The best we could possibly hope for.

All the love,
Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov

It’s wedding time for Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin (Cobie Smulders), so it’s hardly surprising that the groom’s father

Three duets that Michael Jackson recorded with Queen singer Freddie Mercury 30 years ago will finally see an official release later this year According to The Times of London the demos were recorded in 1983 at Jackson's home studio but a larger project never came to fruition due to the singers' conflicting schedules  "They were great...

Passos Coelho afirmou que Portugal precisa de uma “ união nacional “ , tendo sido criticado pela bloquista Catarina Martins, que perguntou “ Se Passos Coelho é inculto, não sabendo o significado de União Nacional ou se o partido único do Estado Novo é a sua única referência política “.