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During the past 15 years or so, online file-sharing has transformed from a relatively niche hobby into a mainstream activity. As Internet speeds and file availability have increased, most Internet users have contributed to the growth of the sharing phenomenon over the past decade.

But of course, as more and more copyrighted files such as music, movies and TV shows have been shared online over the years, rightsholders have employed varying techniques to try and bring that to a halt. Their latest tool is the blocking of entire domains by Internet service providers and thanks to the efforts of the music industry, the UK will today become the world leader.

As predicted by TorrentFreak back in May, the BPI have been building cases against more than 20 sites that they say are infringing their members’ copyrights. Today that work will come to fruition when six ISPs – BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk – begin blocking them at the ISP level.

The range is the broadest so far, hitting BitTorrent indexing sites, a torrent meta-search engine, a cyberlocker search engine, and several MP3 search engines/download sites.

Torrent sites: 1337x, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent, Monova, TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads, TorrentHound, Torrentreactor and Torrentz.

Others: Abmp3, BeeMP3, Bomb-MP3, FileCrop, FilesTube, MP3Juices, eMP3World, MP3Lemon, MP3Raid, MP3Skull, NewAlbumReleases and Rapidlibrary.

The list is almost identical to the original list sent by the BPI to record companies earlier in the year, but has a couple of interesting omissions.

Gone from the blocking proposals are music streaming service GrooveShark and music download service Dilandau. The former now holds several music licensing deals while the latter is the third most DMCA’d domain on the Internet according to Google’s Transparency Report. IsoHunt is also absent, having shut down earlier this month.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, the BPI said that over the summer they had contacted all 21 sites with a request that they “stop infringing copyright.”

“Unfortunately they declined to co-operate in any meaningful way, so BPI applied to the High Court, where the judge considered the evidence and decided that the sites should no longer be accessible in the UK. The new blocks will come into force by Wednesday, 30 October 2013,” a spokesman said.

The music industry group, which represents all the major labels, defended its action as both “fair” and “proportionate”.

“All of the sites were given a chance to stop infringing copyright before we went to Court, and the Orders were then only made once a High Court judge had fully considered our detailed evidence,” the BPI said. “We also believe that it is fair that the people who work to create music should be rewarded when it is downloaded, rather than sites overseas that are exploiting this music without permission.”

Interestingly, when conducting a review of the Top 10 Torrent Sites 2013 as published earlier this year, after today none of them will be directly accessible in the UK, either due to BPI blocking or in the case of H33T and isoHunt, being taken offline following legal action.

The BPI told us that they accept that blocking can never be 100% effective, and that is something the team at The Pirate Bay know quite a bit about. Earlier this year they released PirateBrowser, an anti-censorsip tool designed to facilitate access to any blocked site.

PirateBrowser has been downloaded more than a million times and will be in even greater demand after today. TorrentFreak is informed that a fresh update will include bookmarks for all the blocked sites so that users can gain easy access.

Source: Top BitTorrent and Music Download Sites Pushed Underground in the UK

An underwater railway tunnel is now open between the eastern and western parts of Istanbul. The tunnel is the world's first to connect two continents: travelling under the waters of the Bosphorus strait, it joins the Asian and European halves of Turkey's largest city together. It's also the world's deepest underwater railway tunnel of its type, according to Turkish officials, sitting 190 feet (58 meters) below the surface of the Bosphorus.

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UK prime minister David Cameron has threatened to get a court order against the Guardian if it continues to publish the Snowden leaks. He accused the Guardian of having a "lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view" about the dangers of leaks, and said the if the paper didn't voluntarily censor itself out of a sense of "social responsibility" he would seek court injunctions against it.

The majority of the Snowden leaks have revealed crimes -- illegal spying, lying to Congress and Parliament, violation of international law. That these crimes were committed with the knowledge and approval of the highest levels of the US and UK government doesn't make them any less criminal. And what wasn't criminal was absolutely depraved in its indifference to the public good: for example, the UK government's Edgehill programme, which, with the US government's Bullrun program, sabotaged the security of software, hardware and cryptographic standards to the tune of USD250M/year.

There is nothing more cowardly and corrupt than a lawbreaking political leader who threatens the free press when they call him to account. I never liked Cameron, but with this, he's taken the Tories beyond their reputation of being "the nasty party" and turned them into full-blown Stalinists.

Cameron told MPs: "We have a free press, it's very important the press feels it is not pre-censored from what it writes and all the rest of it.

"The approach we have taken is to try to talk to the press and explain how damaging some of these things can be and that is why the Guardian did actually destroy some of the information and disks that they have. But they've now gone on and printed further material which is damaging.

"I don't want to have to use injunctions or D notices or the other tougher measures. I think it's much better to appeal to newspapers' sense of social responsibility. But if they don't demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act."

David Cameron makes veiled threat to media over NSA and GCHQ leaks [Nicholas Watt/The Guardian]

We've shown you how to make scrambled eggs in the microwave before, but you can also make sunny-side up eggs and poached eggs in the microwave as well, and they're just as easy. The folks at CHOW show you how to do it in this video.

It turns out that sunny side up eggs are pretty simple: all you have to do is pre-heat your plate, swish a little butter around on it (both for flavor and so the egg won't stick), and then crack an egg onto the plate. Place the yolk at the top gently so it won't explode, and heat for 45 seconds. If it's not done, keep cooking in 15 second increments. For a poached egg, get a one-cup microwavable bowl and fill it with a half-cup of water. Crack an egg into the water, cover with a plate, and microwave for 60 seconds. If it's done, scoop it out with a slotted spoon. If not, give it another 10-20 seconds until it is. It's simple, and pretty impressive—and reminds us of Mark Bittman's reminder that the microwave is actually a great cooking appliance if you know how to use it (and don't fear it).

If you have access to a kitchen, you probably won't need these tricks—after all, frying an egg sunny side up and poaching an eggs aren't super difficult, but if you live in a dorm room, you're staying in a hotel room, or you're somewhere without a kitchen to cook, these tricks may come in handy for a more complete breakfast than whatever dried up danish may be waiting for you in the lobby or in a nearby vending machine.

Cook Eggs 3 Ways in the Microwave | CHOW

You probably already know that stress is terrible for us, but thankfully there are plenty of things we can do to push back the effect of it. This video from the folks at ASAPScience explains that too much stress can actually be lethal, and sometimes the best way to combat it is a little social interaction.

Many of us understand that stress is bad for us, but it's a fact of life. While a little stress can be beneficial, too much of it can have serious negative effects on our health. As ASAPScience notes, too much stress is potentially lethal.

We've talked about what stress does to your body and what you can do about it, specifically on your own, but the video explains that one way to directly counteract the psychological and biological effects of stress is to spend time with others. Doing so releases the hormone oxytocin into your body, which directly reduces the body's stress response. Since oxytocin is released during positive social interactions—as in, with people you love or enjoy spending time with, that's the best way to counteract the effects of stress.

That's not news—we often destress with friends or family after work at home or in some social situation—but it also points to the notion that one great way to cut down on your stress response is to foster good relationships with the people you work with, or to make friends in the places you're often the most stressed. Putting all of these methods together can give you a solid buffer to keep the negative effects of stress at bay.

Can Stress Actually Kill You? | ASAPScience (YouTube)

Like so many other startups, AbbeyPost grew out of a personal pain. Founder Cynthia Schames had become fed up with the lack of stylish plus-size clothing available to her.

“I was having the hardest time finding clothes. I live in New York,” Schames says. “If I can't find stuff to wear, where is everyone else shopping?”

AbbeyPost, which launched in January, is an online marketplace for plus size clothing from designers and independent boutiques. Schames explained that while there are great boutiques around the country that carry quality designs for plus size women, they're only great for locals. The aim for AbbeyPost is to become, like Etsy, a large-scale, inclusive discovery forum that gives women more options than they might find on their own.

The target audience is the “Pinterest mom.” She's in her thirties to early fifties, Schames says: most likely a mother, and she leads a busy life, regardless of whether or not she works.

The company is almost entirely bootstrapped for now, having received one small angel investment of $25,000. They are now looking to raise a seed round of about $350,000, Schames says, in order to make additional hires and build a native mobile app.

As will happen with any marketplace that has yet to hit its stride, the product listings are still a mix of professional lookbook shots and low-fi, stretched-out images. The lingerie category, for instance, errs on the side of the latter, while curated collections float the better quality photos to the top.

While AbbeyPost is still working on building up its density of sellers, Schames has plans for the site that go beyond a simple marketplace.
Because sizing can be so inconsistent between brands, AbbeyPost is developing a feature that uses a 3D body scan of the woman to make fit recommendations based on her exact measurements. A user takes two webcam photos of herself - one from the front, one from the side - which helps the tool's algorithm generate numerous data points on her unique shape. Those images are immediately discarded, Schames noted, and they aren't used to generate an avatar.

The scan gathers over 115 data points on the body, and, when done correctly, the measurements can be accurate to within a quarter-inch.

“We quickly and accurately get sizing information that becomes a permanent and persistent profile so we know what size she is and her measurements every time,” Schames says.

The longer-term vision for AbbeyPost's body-scanning tech is to build a custom apparel brand that uses those data points to create digital patterns tailor-made for each individual woman. It's a big goal, and Schames says it wouldn't launch any time in the near future. But the team thinks they have worked out a supply chain that allows them to turn around an order in fewer than three weeks.

Creating a plus-size pattern doesn't simply mean scaling a straight size proportionally, Schames says, because a woman's curves become more exaggerated as s

he goes up in size. Small differences between women's shapes become clearer, making it harder to fit more women into one standard size. The appeal of custom clothing begins to make sense then.

“Ultimately, what we really are is a social e-commerce platform, brand, and data platform,” she says.

That last bit - data - means widgetizing AbbeyPost's fit formula out to retailers so that shoppers can determine the best size for them for any given brand. Again, that's about a year out, Schames says.

AbbeyPost is interesting for its technology. More important, though, is the stance it takes with regard to plus-size women and fashion. With AbbeyPost, Schames is also hoping to make a dent in a retail culture that treats plus size shoppers as second-class citizens.

The site has an internal social network, in which users can post photos of themselves in their new outfits. It's like an image review, Schames says, but the focus is less on the product and more on engaging the individual. Plus-size women often miss out on the social aspects of shopping, whether they're going out with their straight size peers or shopping online.

“Shopping is inherently a really social activity. If you're the fat girl in the group, you don't really have that opportunity. You stand in the corner going, ‘Where are the earrings? Because that will fit me.' That sucks,” Schames says.

While AbbeyPost is out to cultivate a body positive culture online, plus-size fashion has in recent years seen a shift toward e-commerce - and not in a good way. Old Navy yanked its plus-size options from stores in 2007 to feature them as online exclusives, while Saks removed Salon Z from its flagship store in 2011. Target, Schames says, has also been pushing more and more of their plus-size items online.

“We already know by their admission that some retailers don't want fat people in their stores. Abercrombie & Fitch. Lululemon,” she continued. “There may be an element of that. It [the decision to move plus size online] may come down to simple economics of sales per square foot, but that stretches credibility because a majority of women are plus size or above.”

A bright spot in the startup world is Rent the Runway's recent addition of plus sizes to their dress rental offerings, which required convincing straight size designers like Carmen Marc Valvo, Badgley Mischka, and Theia to create equally beautiful designs for the plus-size shopper.

Recognizing that vast, underserved market is one of the smartest things Rent the Runway has done to date, and to ignore the plus size shopper is just bad business. And, as Tim Gunn pointed out, to then serve her only unattractive options is plain insulting.

“Nobody's being honest with this consumer, and nobody's encouraging her to own where and when and how she is. And I think that's part of my job,” Schames says. “One of the things we really like to say at AbbeyPost is that at AbbeyPost, we love who you are. And we mean it.”

[Images: Henry S. Dziekan III for Fashion Law Institute, Rent the Runway]

Netflix is continuing to exhibit unprecedented growth as its lineup of original programming expands. Having already raked in more subscribers than HBO in the U.S., Netflix is looking to outpace movie channels and on-demand services even further by bringing movies to the living room the same day they hit theaters. Speaking at the 2013 Film Independent Forum, Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos said that the model the company currently uses for TV shows "should extend pretty nicely to movies."

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We have good news and bad news, BBM fans. The good news is that BlackBerry has confirmed its plans to bring new features to its cross-platform messaging app, and it has confirmed its intention to keep the service free forever. The bad news, however, is that BlackBerry has also confirmed that it will soon introduce a variety of ads to the Android and iPhone versions of its app. BlackBerry finally launched BBM for iPhone and BBM for Android last week after huge delays and a badly bungled first attempt to launch the app. Its success since then has been nothing short of shocking. BBM for iPhone was briefly No. 1 and it remains the No. 2 free app in America more than a week following its debut, but the millions of users who have downloaded the app so far are in for a surprise in the near future.

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Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen

Usernames and encrypted passwords from around 38 million active Adobe users were stolen as part of a cyberattack first detailed earlier this month, reports Krebs on Security. Though Adobe originally reported that information on 2.9 million customers had been compromised, it now tells Krebs that the number is far higher and that it has been resetting the passwords and notifying the owners for all of them. The initial 2.9 million accounts also had credit card information associated with them, but Adobe didn't detail whether that was the case for the over 35 million other accounts compromised.

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SMS integration is finally coming to Google Hangouts. The company announced the new feature, describing it as one of the most popular requests from users, today during an event at its Mountain View campus. An update to Hangouts to be released today will add support for texting. The same update will also introduce a one-tap location-sharing feature, and GIFs will now animate in messages. Video calls are also getting some improvements. First, video chats will now be in high definition by default, and full-screen calls will be offered on all devices that support Hangouts. To make that experience look better than ever, Google says its Hangouts software will work to fix and enhance webcam lighting on the fly.

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Windows/OS X: Amazon's Cloud Player is a great way to stream your library everywhere you go, and their desktop app—now available for OS X—makes it even easier. Now you can stream your music from Amazon, listen to local music on your computer, and download your Amazon tracks for offline playing.

Amazon's Cloud Player desktop app is a solid way to access your online library. Whenever you buy something new on Amazon MP3, it'll automatically show up, as will all your Autorip albums and anything you've stored locally. Hit the link to check it out.

Amazon Cloud Player for PC and Mac | Amazon via The Next Web

Amazon unveiled Kindle Matchbook today, a new service that offers affordable eBook versions of some of the physical books you've already purchased from Amazon. If the books qualify, you can get the Kindle versions for between $0.99 and $2.99, and future books you buy that qualify will get you the same deal.

If the service sounds familiar, it's a bit like Amazon's AutoRip service, which matches you up with digital copies of the music you've already purchased (and any physical CDs or records you buy in the future).

Matchbook is available now, and you can click here to see if any of your past book purchases qualify for cheap ebook copies. If they do, you can purchase them right there and have them sent to your Kindle (or your desktop, smartphone, or tablet with Amazon's Kindle app installed) and read them right away. Hit the link below to read more, and to check if your previous purchases qualify.

Kindle Matchbook | Amazon via Gizmodo

Amazon's Kindle MatchBook service has gone live today, allowing customers to buy a heavily discounted Kindle copy of physical books they've purchased from the online retailer. Prices range between free and $2.99, offering a quick and cheap way to expand your Amazon ebook library. And on that note, there's good news: Amazon says that 70,000 books are enrolled in MatchBook at launch, dwarfing the original 10,000 titles it announced last month. More books will be added to the program every day, according to the company, and book detail pages will now list when specific titles will support MatchBook. Amazon combs through your entire order history going all the way back to 1995, so the initial list of ebooks offered to you may be longer than...

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GO Launcher, an Android app maker out of Beijing that has been around for nearly a decade, just filed for an IPO, according to an SEC document.

They are behind a series of Android apps that have about 87 million monthly active users globally and do things like modify the homescreen and make personalization easier.

They posted $22.7 million in revenue through the first six months of this year, up 87 percent from the same period the year before. They're profitable with net income of $5.5 million in that period. (Technically, it's the holding company called “Sungy Mobile Limited” behind the GO series of apps that's doing the offering, to be clear.)

The company is about a decade old, and they've managed to ride China's shift from feature phones to smart phones. They used to run a 3G portal product that once consumed as much as one-third of the bandwidth for mobile Internet usage in China.

But they later switched to an Android-centric strategy about three years ago, just as the platform was poised to take off in mainland China. It was obvious that a WAP strategy wasn't going to be successful in the long run.

So they launched a series of products including GO Launcher Ex, which lets customize their home screen with more than 10,000 themes and GO Locker, which lets Android users open apps directly from the lock screen or add more security protection with extra pins, patterns and gestures.

They make money through selling paid apps and premium themes, extra features, advertising and purchases of literary content. The paid apps and premium themes made up more than 40 percent of the company's revenue in the first half of this year, followed by mobile reading services at 31.8 percent of revenue. Revenues from Go Launcher's mobile portal marketing services, or its old portal site, have declined to 17.8 percent of revenue from contributing about half of the company's revenue two years ago.

Remember Phonebloks and how we all had a good laugh about how unworkable and idealistic it was? It turns out Motorola has been working on a similar project for the last year, and it's called Project Ara. This is really happening.

Here's what Ara is, according to Motorola:

• The Phonebloks Upgradeable Modular Smartphone Concept Is As Awesome As It Is Unlikely
• LG Revolution Gets ClockworkMod Recovery, But It's Not Ready - Yet
• Motorola And Google Are Working On An 'X Phone' According To WSJ Rumor That Kind Of States The Obvious
• [Rumor] Is This The Galaxy S4 Zoom? It Certainly Could Be

[Holy Shit] Motorola Announces Project Ara, An Open, Modular Smartphone Hardware Platform was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Custom license plates or take the dog for a walk all on your very own iFruit

Perhaps a little late to the party, Rockstar Games has finally released the iFruit companion app for GTA V into Google Play for Android devices. GTA V was launched a little over a month ago, and the iOS version went live at the same time, so while we've had to wait a while, the important thing is that it's here. And of course, it's a total play on that other fruit phone.

So, what's it all about? Signing in with a Rockstar Social Club account hooks you in to your GTA V experience, be that on PS3 or on Xbox 360. With it, you can do a bunch of tinkering to your in-game vehicles, buy yourself a bunch of custom license plates, and even take your dog for a walk. 

That's right, Chop, your in-game pooch is present in a kind of Tamagotchi style way. You can feed him, train him, take him for a walk, all in the name of improving his behavior while you're playing GTA V. 

So far, it seems to be working just fine on the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7, but there's a bunch of reports suggesting that not everyone is able to install this. If you're having some specific troubles, drop us a line in the comments and tell us what you're using. 

EE, the UK's most widespread 4G LTE network operator, has announced that it's switched on LTE in 14 new towns this morning — Benfleet, Caerphilly, Caldicot, Canvey Island, Carlisle, Chepstow, Cwmbran, Grays, Harlow, Hatfield, Kenilworth, Rayleigh, Southport and Worksop.

The network expansion comes one day before EE's new 4G price plans come into effect, with a new tiered approach to data speeds, higher mobile broadband allowances and EE's first PAYG LTE deals.

The carrier recently claimed to have 60 percent UK population coverage with its 4G network.

You may not think of sous-vide as the perfect cooking method for cooking eggs, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt over at Serious Eats shows us that if you can control the temperature of your water, all you need is time to end up with deliciously poached, soft boiled, or hard boiled eggs, all in the shell.

Kenji walks us through the times and temperatures required for poached eggs are different consistencies, but settles on water that's about 167 degrees F (approx 75 degrees C) for 13 minutes. The end result is an egg you can peel like a normal boiled egg (only the top, since you'll essentially dump the poached egg out from the top) but has a creamy poached consistency to it:

By cooking eggs for 13 minutes at 167°F, you eliminate the need for the seconds-accurate timing you'd need with boiling or simmering water.

The slightly higher temperature also builds in a temperature gradient—the whites get hotter than the yolks. Thus you end up with an egg with a yolk that is just barely beginning to thicken and a white that is relatively firm. With this method, the thin white will not thicken completely and will drop away easily from firm tight white.

He also explains a 45-minute method at a lower temperature, around 145 degrees F (63 degrees C) that yields a much softer egg that can then goes into simmering water for just a minute for an absolutely perfect poach. If you prefer soft boiled, he has another method that gets just the right consistency but also makes them easy to peel. The post also walks you through a number of temperatures to show you how quickly the consistency of an egg can change—that way you can pick the one that looks best to you.

The beauty of this method is that you don't have to do too much to get the texture you're looking for. Bring your water up to the right temperature, try to keep it there (within a few degrees), and then start the timer. If you're using a large enough volume of water, it'll retain its temperature long enough for you to cook your eggs to the perfect consistency. Hit the link below to dive into the science of soft-boiled eggs.

The Food Lab's Guide to Slow-Cooked, Sous-Vide-Style Eggs | Serious Eats

Responding to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), on Friday the MPAA submitted a new list of so-called “notorious markets.”

The MPAA’s report listed many of the usual suspects such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent and Torrentz, plus a selection of file-hosting sites such as Netload, ExtaBit and PutLocker.

A little while ago TorrentFreak obtained a copy of the RIAA’s submission and aside from doubling up on some of the same sites listed by the MPAA, it also delivers a surprise.

Torrent site blocking imminent

The RIAA says that in just 48 hours time a new wave of site blocking will take place in the UK covering not only the usual BitTorrent indexes, but also dedicated search engines in the torrent and file-hosting space.

On October 30, ExtraTorrent will be blocked by the UK’s leading ISPs, presumably following action by the major labels of the BPI. ExtraTorrent has suffered at least two anti-piracy setbacks in the last week, first when City of London Police convinced its registrar to take its domain and second when Google removed the site’s homepage from its search results.

The second indexing site to be blocked on Wednesday will be BitSnoop, which earlier this year was the eighth most-popular torrent site in the world. The RIAA says that since the site provided no way for rightsholders to make contact the decision was made to have ISPs block the site instead.

The third site to be rendered inaccessible this week will be Torrentz.eu. What is unusual about this development is that Torrentz is a so-called meta-search engine, in that it carries no torrents of its own but searches other torrent sites instead. Nevertheless, the site still complies with DMCA takedown notices, a fact acknowledged by the RIAA.

“[Torrentz] is currently hosted by Canadian providers. The site complies with take down notices by removing the torrents identified in those notices which provide access to infringing files. The site can take up to several days to remove infringing files following a request by right holders,” the RIAA explain.

In the rest of the USTR submission on torrent sites the RIAA lists many of the usual suspects, including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, Torrenthound.com, Fenopy.se, Monova.org, Torrentreactor.net and Sumotorrent.sx. Many of these sites are blocked around Europe already.

As usual, two resilient trackers from Bulgaria – Arenabg and Zamunda – also get a mention.

Cyberlockers and related search engines

While there are plenty of file-hosting sites to choose from that could certainly be considered rogue (refusing to take down content etc) it’s again somewhat of a surprise that this week a copyright-compliant site will become blocked at the ISP level.

FilesTube is the most popular search engine for file-hosting sites and as such has been absolutely hammered by rightsholders looking for links to be taken down. It is by far the most targeted domain in Google’s Transparency Report with 9,242,032 URLs removed, double its closest ‘competitor’.

Interestingly the RIAA admits in its report that Filestube does respond to takedown notices. However, the industry can’t keep up so the implication is that this is FileTube’s fault.

“Industry reports links to infringing materials to the site operator, but any action by the operator is ineffective as the speed of the takedowns cannot match the speed at which new links are added,” the RIAA writes.

Along with the sites listed above, FilesTube will be blocked by the UK’s top six ISPs on Wednesday.

Other hosting sites singled out for detailed criticism by the RIAA include Uploaded.net, 4Shared.com, ZippyShare.com, Rapidgator.net, TurboBit.net and a selection of lesser known sites located in the Czech Republic. Three other sites are mentioned in passing – FreakShare.com, BitShare.com and Extabit.com.

“We greatly welcome this initiative designed to expose businesses who operate notorious markets for infringing materials, and who generally either directly profit from the sale or other distribution of infringing materials, or who profit from facilitating such theft—in many cases through the sale of advertising space,” the RIAA writes.

“Quite simply, there is no place for open and notorious theft in a civilized world, regardless of how that theft is accomplished. Addressing the conduct of these notorious markets for piracy will go a long way towards promoting the rule of law, fuelling creativity and innovation, and maintaining US economic competitiveness,” the industry group concludes.

Meanwhile, every single site listed in the notorious market reports of both the RIAA and MPAA remain 100% accessible from all of the ISPs in the United States.

Source: RIAA Rogue Site Report Reveals Major Site Blocking in 48 Hours

'What's the last thing you remember?'

We've been teased on Instagram, but now it's finally here: the trailer for Bryan Singer's return to the X-Men franchise, X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Feast your eyes below, and try to not get over-excited or faint.

Days Of Future Past finds Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and the current X-team confronting a dark alternate future where mutants are an endangered species, tracked down, imprisoned or killed thanks to Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage)’s Sentinel program and an overwhelming level of distrust aimed at them from regular humans.

They boldly plan to send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time to the First Class era (or a few years after we last met those versions of the characters) to convince the younger Professor X (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and the rest to work together to stop the threat at its source.

{New X-Men: Days Of Future Past Stills}

X-Men: Days Of Future Past opens on May 22 next year, and you can find out more about it thanks to our exclusive on-set report in this month's issue of Empire, out this Thursday. And if this trailer is making you feel nostalgic about your favourite X-Men characters, be sure to click this way...

[[Poll1082]]

It's love triangle-tastic!

Aside from occasional emails sent by creator Rob Thomas via the Kickstarter website, we haven’t heard much about the Veronica Mars movie since Thomas and his cast brought footage to the San Diego Comic-Con in July. Since then, he’s obviously been busy slaving away in the editing room and has put a new featurette online, which boasts some fresh material.

Veronica Mars, of course, is born from the gone-too-soon teen PI show that ran for three short seasons on US TV between 2004 and 2007. Now the movie, set 10 years later, brings Veronica (Kristen Bell) back to her hometown of Neptune to investigate her first mystery since she left nearly a decade ago.

Despite moving on with current beau Piz (Chris Lowell) and becoming a corporate lawyer, she’s drawn back home because her former flame, Logan Echols (Jason Dohring) is accused of murder. The old love triangle between the three rears its head, and that’s the subject of the featurette wrapped around the new footage. Best answer about whether they’re Team Logan or Team Piz goes to Dohring, who says he’s “Team Logan and Piz”…

Thomas has been attending test screenings of the film, and says in the latest missive to Kickstarter backers that things have been going well: “The crowd reaction was everything I hoped for. People were laughing and gasping and cheering. As a TV writer, I rarely get to experience audience reaction. I could get used to that feeling. Our distribution partners at Warner Bros. were also very pleased by the feedback and excited about the movie. The scores made me happy to the point of unseemliness.”

Veronica Mars doesn’t have a solid release date just yet, but expect it some time in 2014.

Smoke! Steel! Stath!

The Vin Diesel promotional bandwagon rolls ever onwards! As Fast & Furious 7 continues shooting, the ever-present, Facebook-loving star is back providing pics from the set. Today, he’s shown working with Jason Statham on the script and having a tender moment as Dom with Michelle Rodriguez’ Letty. 

{Oct 28 Vin Diesel FF7 Pics}

We firmly predict a pic-off between Diesel and fellow snap-happy promotion whirlwind Dwayne Johnson now that The Rock has rolled into Atlanta to start work as Luke Hobbs, but Diesel is well ahead on the FF7 stakes, having been shooting for weeks with director James Wan.

In Fast & Furious 7, we find Dom, Letty, Brian (Paul Walker) and the rest of the gang charged with a new, legal mission: they have to track down Statham’s villain, while Mr. Shaw is pulling off some criminal nastiness and seeking revenge for his brother Owen’s death in Furious 6.

With Lucas Black back from Tokyo Drift and new recruits Kurt Russell, Tony Jaa, Ronda Rousey and Djimon Hounsou swelling the cast, Fast & Furious 7 is out on July 25 next year.

Apple's earnings are always the most highly anticipated results of the season among technology companies, and this year's September quarter is no different. The tail end of Apple's fiscal fourth quarter caught the launch of the new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c handsets and while they were only available for a total of eleven days in fiscal Q4, Wall Street is still expecting Apple's results to get a nice boost from initial sales of the company's new iPhones. Apple announced that it sold a record-smashing 9 million new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c handsets through the devices' first weekend of availability alone, and analysts have been raising their fourth-quarter estimates ever since. Heading into Apple's report on Monday evening, consensus estimates were looking for Apple to post earnings of $7.93 per share on $36.8 billion in revenue, right near the top of Apple's Q4 revenue guidance of between $34 billion and $37 billion. The numbers are now in and Apple crushed estimates, having managed a fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $8.26 per share on $37.5 billion in sales.

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Great performance is a good thing, but less time on the power cord is a better thing

64-bit processing is nothing to sneeze at, but it's also nothing new. The first 3Com PDAs used 64-bit processors. Every Intel Atom processor is 64-bit. I think Casio built an old watch with a 64-bit processor in it as well. It means nothing by itself, and the reason Apple's new Samsung-built A7 performs so well is because it was designed to deliver a particular experience to particular software. There's more to it than the number of bits.

While we're not going to dismiss the benefits of moving hardware and operating systems to 64-bit support, there's something much more important said to be part of Samsung's new Exynos design — a 14nm process.

To put it in simple terms, this refers to the way the processor wafers are built, and it's a measurement of space between components. When you move down to 14nm (nanometers) you do a couple very important things. You decrease the cost, and up the power efficiency. Advanced discussion of FinFET, MOFSET and MuGFET advancements are best left to the forums if you're into that.

When you have a minute hour to spare, ask Phil how he loves his Haswell (22nm) laptop. The 22nm process gives it awesome battery life compared to previous versions. Intel loves to crow about the Haswell, with good reason. They also offer a great example of the benefit of a 14nm process, with tests of their upcoming Broadwell chips being 30 percent more power efficient under the same load. 

TSMC has released a roadmap showing they are on-board, but Samsung can meet the demand. If these rumors turn out to be true, and Samsung delivers a 64-bit, HMP-ready 14nm Exynos processor, we may get the performance to power ratio we've been waiting for in our mobile devices. 

From National Geographic: "After quitting a comfortable day job, photographer Shane Black spent two months on the road shooting time-lapses of some of America's most beautiful spots. His 'Adventure Is Calling' video is the mesmerizing result, made from about 10,000 of the photos he took."

I wish my eyes were sensitive enough to see the night sky like this.

By allowing its users to turn any web page into an API with just a few clicks, Import.io exists to make it easy for developers to pull data from the web.

At Disrupt Europe this morning, the company launched a new service that they call the "Data Factory" that should make it even easier.

To explain Data Factory, it might be easier to contrast it against how import.io's service currently works:

To turn a web page into a developer-friendly API (in this case, that meaning something which developers can use to programmatically pull selected chunks of data from a page), import.io provides what is essentially a bespoke, sandboxed browser.

You load the browser, open the URL for the page you're interested in turning into an API, then start selecting the specific elements of the page (like, say, each result on a search page) that you want to be able to extract. After you've picked a few elements, import.io starts to figure out which data you're aiming for. Hit save, give it a name, and bam - you've got your API. This data can also be exported as HTML, CSV, or XLS.

With their new Data Factory, import.io is mostly gettin' rid of the need for that standalone browser, and doing away with much of the clicking. While they will continue to offer the standalone browser option, they're also launching a Chrome extension that adds an import.io button to your browser. The import.io data factory button works in two ways:

• If you click the button while on a URL that they already recognize, import.io immediately provides an API for that page and its data.
• If you click it on a page it doesn't recognize, it snaps a screenshot of the page. You visually highlight the elements of interest, and send it off to import.io. Someone on their end (at one of their "factories" in London or India), will quickly prep the API and send it your way. From that point on, that page now has a ready-to-go API for future users to be served immediately.

Curiously, everything that import.io offers is currently completely free. In time, they plan to offer premium services on top of the APIs (like, say, API usage analytics), and are considering introducing volume limits on free accounts eventually.

Import.io says they have around 8,000 users to date, with those users having created around 15,000 APIs. With Data Factory, they'll be able to immediately return APIs (with no user-driven training or further clicking required) for ~1,000 different sites - by the end of 2013, they aim to bump that number up to 10,000.

If hearing "import.io" and "Disrupt" in the same sentence seems familiar, you're not crazy. This isn't import•io's first time at the conference, but it is their first time on the main stage. We first spotted them showing off their wares in our Startup Alley back at Disrupt SF in September - but at this week's Disrupt Europe in Berlin, the company has fought their way all the way into the Battlefield competition.

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Judges Q&A

It sounds like you guys are onto something. Who are your ideal customers?

Our customers range from an owner/operator of a yoga studio, all the way up to a national bank. It's a broad market, and we think it's an addressable market.

So you're scraping as a service. You can't write back into the servers. It's a read-only API, right?

Anything you can do in a browser, you can program using the service. You can record actions and play them back, allowing you to POST anything like you could do in a browser.

Why hasn't this been done before? If it has, why wasn't it successful?

There have been tools that exist that allow you to turn a single page into a static file. They've been largely technical. The difference is that we're very simple, and it's been designed from the ground up to work with many websites at once.

Some organizations, unlike most of us, don't believe that data should be free. How do you avoid being taken to court?

We act as a pipe. We don't store the data. If someone is misappropriating the data, [that data's] TOS apply to the end user of the API.

If you suddenly saw a new app pop up on your phone this weekend marked "Trigger," don't be alarmed - the much-loved NFC Task Launcher has just been rebranded. The rechristened app has been given a new look and a small functional update, but it retains all of the NFC goodness that's earned it a 4.5 star rating in the Play Store.

Trigger has been given a slight visual update, which makes it a little more effective when used on tablets.

• [Review] AutomateIt Allows Your Phone To Take Care Of Itself
• Automagic Is Tasker With Easy-To-Use Flowcharts, But Is That Enough? [Hands-On]
• [New App] Dessin Is Like Tasker With Visual 'Mind-Maps' Of Actions And Rules
• Crafty Apps Launches Tasker App Factory (Beta), Allowing Users To Export (And Distribute) Tasks As Standalone Apps

NFC Task Launcher Is Now Trigger: Update Adds New UI And Multiple Triggers Per Task was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Imported U.S. model with UK adapter

We're expecting a couple more Nexus devices to land before the week's out, but if you're in the market for a 2013 Nexus 7 — still one of the best small tablets out there — here's a deal worth taking a look at. UK merchant Pixel Electronics on Play.com is selling the 32GB Wifi-only Nexus 7 for a mere £179.99 — £59 less than the Google Play Store price.

The devices being sold are U.S. models with UK adapters, which explains the unusually low price. The American model will work just fine in the UK, of course, so all you're missing out on is an official UK wall charger. The reduced price is part of a sale lasting for the next eight days.

Source: Play.com

After a series of leaks, LG has announced official details of its curved-screen smartphone, the G Flex. The phone, which uses flexible OLED screen technology to allow for a dramatic curve on the horizontal axis, is between 7.9 and 8.7mm thick at various points, weighs 177g, and has a 6-inch 720p display. Inside there's a 2.26GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel camera, and a 3,500 mAh battery.

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Rolling Stone: Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.