Byron

Newegg offers the XFX Radeon RS RX 480 8GB 256-bit PCI-Express 3.0 Video Card, model no. RX-480P836BM, bundled with Doom for Windows for $219.99. Redeem this $30 mail-in rebate to cut that to $189.99. With $3.99 for shipping, that's $16 under our January mention, which was bundled with a different game, and the lowest total price we've seen. (It's also $41 below the best price we could find for these items purchased separately elsewhere.) It features a 1.3GHz core clock, 8GHz memory clock, DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.5 support, and HDMI, DVI, and DisplayPort inputs. Rebate expires March 15.

ANTOnline via eBay offers the Seiki 42" 4K LED-Backlit LCD Ultra HD Television, model no. SE42UM, bundled with the Microsoft Xbox One 500GB Console in Cirrus White, model no. 5C7-00239, and downloads of Quantum Break for Xbox One and Alan Wake for Xbox One for an for $489 with free shipping. That's $80 under the lowest total price we could find for these items purchased separately elsewhere. The TV features a 3840x2160 (2160p) native resolution, 4K upscaling, USB, and three HDMI inputs. The console functions as a Blu-ray/DVD player and features a wireless controller with 3.5mm headset jack, 500GB hard drive, and chat headset.

This is the intro to 90s sitcom Full House edited to NOT include Michelle. It was posted by Youtuber Full House Without Michelle, who asks in the description “Did Danny Tanner deal with the grief of losing his pregnant wife in a fatal car crash by creating an imaginary daughter named ‘Michelle’?” I don’t know and [...]
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The ongoing legal battle between Hotfile and the MPAA is nearing its climax.

In August the movie studios won summary judgment on the issues of DMCA defense and vicarious liability, while the file-hosting site was cleared of direct copyright infringement. The remaining issues, including the damages amount, will be decided during a trial early next month.

In preparation for the trial both parties have submitted motions to the court in recent weeks. Hotfile, for example, asked the court to prevent the MPAA from using “pejorative” terms including piracy, theft and stealing as these could misguide the jury.

District Court Judge Kathleen Williams has now ruled on these motions, with the file-hosting service scoring several important victories.

The Judge granted Hotfile’s “pejorative” terms motion, which means that the movie studios and its witnesses are not allowed to use words including “piracy,” “theft” and “stealing” during the trial.

“Defendants’ Motion in Limine to Preclude Use of Pejorative Terms is GRANTED IN PART. The parties may not use pejorative terms but may use terms of art,” the order reads.

The file-hosting service previously argued that since piracy and theft-related terms are derogatory, their use could mislead the jury and possibly influence their judgment. According to Hotfile there is no ground to substantiate the use of such terms.

“In the present case, there is no evidence that the Defendants (or Hotfile’s founders) are ‘pirates’ or ‘thieves,’ nor is there evidence that they were ‘stealing’ or engaged in ‘piracy’ or ‘theft.’ Even if the Defendants had been found to have directly infringed on the Plaintiffs’ copyrights, such derogatory terms would add nothing to the Plaintiffs’ case, but would serve to improperly inflame the jury.”

The MPAA countered that there is absolutely no reason to exclude words that are commonly used in cases related to copyright infringement. Banning the terms would make it hard for MPAA’s lawyers and the witnesses to describe the events that took place, according to the movie studios.

“Terms like ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’ are commonplace terms often used in court decisions, statutes, and everyday speech to describe the conduct in which Hotfile and its users engaged, and for which the Court has already found Defendants liable,” MPAA’s legal team wrote.

With her ruling Judge Williams clearly sides with Hotfile’s argument that the jury could be misled by piracy and theft-related descriptions. This is a clear win for the file-hosting service, but it also leads to the awkward situation that several witnesses can’t name their job titles, such as Warner’s head of Global Corporate Anti-Piracy.

Additionally, the MPAA can no longer quote Vice President Joe Biden’s famous comment: “Piracy is theft, clean and simple.”

The full list of motions Judge Williams ruled on includes more good news for Hotfile. For example, with regard to Hotfile’s countersuit over alleged DMCA abuse by the movie studio, Warner’s motions to exclude the term “perjury” and the studio’s audit of its anti-piracy system from trial were both denied.

On the downside, Hotfile’s request to prevent the MPAA from bringing up the criminal indictment against “Megaupload” was denied. This means that in describing the Megaupload case the movie studios can’t quote passages that reference piracy or theft.

It will be interesting to see how the MPAA tackles Hotfile now that they are restricted in the language they can use. It probably means that the term “copyright infringement” will be used more often than they had hoped.

To be continued.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

From very early in its life the Internet became a mine of amazing things, but while accessing information was relatively easy for most, becoming a publisher was a different matter.

Soon enough regular people learned the skills to put up a rudimentary webpage, but it wasn’t until the advent of mainstream file-sharing networks that anyone could become a publisher of information, simply by putting a file in a folder.

As a result countless pieces of media – from music and video, to documents, artwork and software – were distributed by individuals to every corner of the Internet-enabled globe.

Over the years many thousands of curiosities have appeared online in this manner, such as unfinished movies, unreleased songs, top-secret military documents, plus all manner of sundry ephemera subsequently given almost eternal life. Today, fans of writer J.D. Salinger will have something particularly extraordinary to talk about.

What.cd, an invitation-only BitTorrent tracker, is probably the most coveted source of music on the Internet. The site is a veritable goldmine of audio of every conceivable genre, all wrapped up in the best software interface the BitTorrent site world has to offer. But technicalities aside, what the site has is an incredible community that contributes to the enjoyment of every other member of What.cd, and not just with music either.

Yesterday one of What.cd’s users uploaded an amazing set of files – three previously unpublished stories by reclusive American writer J. D. Salinger.

As can be seen from the screenshot above, the first story offered was The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls, a coveted piece some Salinger experts describe as a “superior” work.

“Of great intrigue are the works of JD Salinger which he has determined to remain unpublished,” reads a piece on Dead Caulfields, a site dedicated to the works of the writer.

“The author’s decision to withhold these pieces is a never-ending source of speculation. Initially, Salinger anxiously submitted many of these stories to various magazines for publication, but by 1950, he increasingly begins to draw them back. The term ‘unpublished’, when referring to Salinger, is but a mild indication of the ferocity with which these works are guarded,” the site explains.

Only adding to the intensity is the fact that The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls is only available to read at the Princeton library and under supervision in a special reading room. It is one of two titles bound up in a legal agreement which forbids the release of the work until fifty years after Salinger’s death. He passed away in 2010.

Of course, that agreement now lies in tatters. The stories have escaped What.cd and are already doing the rounds on The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites. Only adding to the previously unpublished works’ availability, the entire set now available for anyone to read on image upload site, Imgur.

This leak, like hundreds before it, raises many questions, both legal and moral.

As his work, Salinger was obviously entitled to do whatever he liked with these stories and following his death those wishes seem to have been carried out by those he entrusted them to. However, one has to question why even after death someone would choose to consider a work so ‘exclusive’ as to wrap it up in security and hide it away from those who might enjoy it most.

Has Salinger been financially damaged due to the works being made widely available to anyone who cares to read them? Absolutely not. Is Princeton in a worse position now that the lid has been blown off their ‘secret’ possession? Hard to say.

There will be those who say that morally the user on What.cd shouldn’t have uploaded the stories as this was against Salinger’s wishes. But isn’t the world a richer place today now that he has? If information isn’t shared and people aren’t allowed to benefit from its availability, one really has to question the point of its existence.

Whether Salinger fans are delighted or outraged at these leaks, one thing is pretty much certain. No matter what side of the fence they sit on, fans will read these stories – possibly several times over – and worry about the morals later.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Tiny box packs four processing cores

Looking for a small PC? It doesn't get too much smaller that Zotac's Zbox Nano line of mini PCs, which you can tuck neatly out of sight behind your monitor for a home brewed all-in-one experience. These aren't typically powerhouse systems, though for the first time, you can get quad-core processing from a Zbox Nano machine. The new Zbox Nano AQ01 features an AMD A4-5000 APU clocked at 1.5GHz with Radeon HD  8330 graphics.

"Our Zbox Nano form factor is well-regarded for its compact size and energy-efficiency. With the latest AMD A4-5000 APU, we’re able to boost performance all around while reducing maximum energy consumption compared to our previous generation with the Zotac Zbox Nano AQ01 series," said Carsten Berger, senior director, Zotac International.

It's a fairly robust system considering its diminuitive footprint. In addition to the quad-core AMD chip, it also features a single DDR3 SO-DIMM slot (supports up to 8GB of RAM), 2.5-inch drive bay, HDMI and DisplayPort output, 7-in-1 media card reader, GbE LAN, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, five USB 2.0 ports (two up front and three on back), two USB 3.0 ports (both on back), mini-Optical S/PDIF and analog combo port, and a bundled VESA mount.

All you have to do is populate the RAM slot and drive bay, and you're good to go. Alternately, you can opt for the Plus model, which comes with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB (5400 RPM) HDD pre-installed. Either way, be advised that you'll need to add an operating system, which you can install via a USB thumb drive or from an external optical drive.

No word yet on price or availability.

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Thanksgiving and Hanukkah collide next week, which last happened in 1888, and won’t happen again for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. (One rabbi estimates it’ll be seventy thousand years, though my guess is that we will no longer have one or both of these holidays in the year 72000.) What this means for marketers is that they have a unique opportunity to create compelling Thanksgiving-Hanukkah products that are only good this year and won’t be reusable ever again. They have, of course, failed at this task.

One example of this is the “When Holidays Collide” paper placemat set. They’ve slapped a clip art of Hanukkah candles over a clip art of a turkey, and then put the same artwork on their “Happy Hanukkah Happy Thanksgiving Double Chocolate Cocoa.” The only saving grace is that they didn’t attempt to create their own word, which the Happy Thanukkah shirt does, regrettably.

A Gobbling Miracle Happened There is a book that combines my least two favorite things: poetry and poetry.

And a pair of rubber duckies dressed like native Americans carrying dreidels and stars of David is a unique way to commemorate two cultures that Europeans tried their best to destroy.

The Happy Thanksgivukkah ornament may be the best, though, because it’s a CHRISTMAS TREE ORNAMENT that combines two holidays that happened a month prior. What better to add to the celebration of European conquest and the Jewish Festival of Lights than the celebration of the birth of presents?

Jesus, I mean. The birth of Jesus. Sorry.

Or how I learned to stop worrying and accept Windows 8

After six months of using it (including the previews), I’ve fully mapped out the five stages of Windows 8 adoption: Denial. Confusion. Anger. Depression. Acceptance.

First comes denial. “I mean, really, the Start button isn’t really gone, is it? It can’t be. Medic! Don’t die on me you son of…! Nooo!!!”

Confusion then sets in. Whether you’re an octogenarian octocore-overclocker or a skinny-jeaned hipster sitting in a café with an Ultrabook, confusion will reign. “Wait, why does it keep going to full screen? How do I get this to dock? How do I shut down the PC? How come the app controls aren’t uniform? How do I close apps? Wait, Modern apps are different than desktop apps? Huh, what?”

The longest stage is anger, which I’m betting the vast majority of users are still in. It lasts for months and will occasionally simmer over into bouts of screaming at the screen, murderously gripping your mouse, and pounding on that innocent victim—your keyboard—until keys pop off. “Why is it so hard to reboot my computer?!” “If I had an actual Windows 8 disc, I’d smash it to bits! Wait, I’ll actually burn a Windows 8 ISO to disc and then smash it!”

Anger is the longest stage of Windows 8 adoption

Eventually, depression sets in. Hell, what else explains dismal PC sales this last quarter? Many analysts (and PC makers) blame Windows 8 for putting the plane into a nose dive.

The good news, I’m happy to report, is that eventually acceptance sets in. I spent months in the anger stage and additional time wallowing in despair and depression. On a recent new desktop box at home, though, I had the option of going with Windows 7 or Windows 8, and actually opted for Win8. I installed the Enterprise version and didn’t initially activate it because I wanted to see if I could stand it on my primary gaming and content-creation box without a touchscreen. In the end, however, I committed, and, amazingly, I’m OK with my choice.

I even opted to stick with the much-hated Modern UI because I wanted to suffer as others have. While I’m a bigger fan of Windows 8 when paired with a touchscreen, the lack of a touchscreen on this gaming box hasn’t been a deal-breaker. How did I go from foaming-at-the-mouth anger and deep despair over Windows 8 to a level of acceptance? I’ve really started to appreciate all the little things Microsoft has done to the OS. The Windows Task Manager, for example, is one of the more accurate tools for determining my machine's current clock speed. I’ve put it against Intel’s own utilities and it’s been spot on. Switching back to the Windows 7 Task Manager feels like I’m in Windows XP or Vista. My new SSD needs to be Trim’d? Not a problem with Windows 8, either.

There are enough improvements to Windows 8 that at this point in my life, I’ve decided to accept it, and maybe even prefer it.

The copyright monopoly debate started with an assertion from the monopolists that “no artist can make money without having a complete monopoly on every form of distribution”.

This is obviously false, most easily observed by looking at the millions of works under Creative Commons licenses, where artists have renounced their already-awarded copyright monopoly rights.

When this is pointed out to copyright monopoly fundamentalists, who begrudgingly have to admit the existence of Creative Commons, they frequently shift stances and say it should be up to every individual creator what distribution they would allow of their book, painting, or guitar piece. They argue that the “distribution control of the author” is some kind of right that has no side effects at all.

Few things could be more deranged and out of touch with reality.

Today, noncommercial distribution of works under the copyright monopoly take place in our private communications, intermixed with our most private data that leave and arrive at our devices. You can’t tell one type of data from the other without looking at all of it, so the only way to discover copyright monopoly violations is by mass wiretapping and mass surveillance.

This means that enforcement of the copyright monopoly has become mutually exclusive with private communications as a concept, which is why the copyright monopoly must take a rather large step back into brain-undamaged territory.

This means that allowing every author to control distribution of their book – including me and my swarm leadership book Swarmwise – would give each and every one of those authors the right to wiretap and censor every individual on the planet. That’s the very real, and very insane, consequence.

Let’s take that again, because it is key to the whole copyright monopoly debate today: it was never about the money, it was about the fact that you can’t enforce the copyright monopoly without mass wiretapping, censorship, and intrusive mass surveillance. This is also why you see the copyright industry relentlessly pushing for just that – for example, when they sued Eircom for the right to install the copyright industry’s wiretapping and censorship equipment in the deepest of the Irish internet hubs. The audacity, it burns!

You cannot say that freedom of speech and the secrecy of private correspondence applies to some types of data (mail, surfing, communications) but not to other types (transmissions of works under copyright monopoly), because the only way to tell which is which is to break the secret of correspondence in the first place. You can’t tell if the contents of a letter is legal or illegal without opening it, reading it, and sorting it based on your findings. This monopoly enforcement breaks centuries of civil liberties.

This is also why the common and dismissive counter-argument from copyright monopolists along the lines of “you’re just spoiled brats who don’t want to pay” is such an enraging insult. In Sweden, there’s a saying that “the mouth speaks of what fills the mind”. Monopolists may only care about money, but I don’t care about that and I never did – the copyright monopoly conflict was always a deep civil liberties issue, where the monopoly has become incompatible with fundamental civil liberties for the entire online generation.

Therefore, the copyright monopoly needs to give way.

The copyright monopoly needs to be permanently and irrevocably scaled back in legislation. Until it is, it is everybody’s duty to undermine it in favor of the communications secret and freedom of speech that have always covered private communications.

In the words of the Freenet philosophy: “You cannot have both copyright monopoly enforcement and freedom of speech. Therefore, any technology designed to promote and protect freedom of speech must by necessity prevent copyright monopoly enforcement.”

Source: The Copyright Monopoly Can Only Be Enforced With Mass Wiretapping, And Must Therefore Be Torpedoed

Etsy artist CarvedCrayons is selling (SURPRISE!) carved crayons. The shop’s got characters from Adventure Time, Futurama, Star Wars, plus all the Game of Thrones house sigils. Each is going for $20+ a pop crayon. Whoa, these are a little more pricey than I’m used to — it must be because they’re Crayolas. I’d say I’m [...]
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Over the past year the focus of anti-piracy enforcement has shifted from mandatory legislation to voluntary agreements between copyright groups and other stakeholders.

The Center for Copyright Information (CCI) is one of the pioneers in this field. Earlier this year the coalition of copyright holders and ISPs launched the six-strikes Copyright Alert System, but the non-profit company has additional plans to tackle the piracy problem.

CCI’s Executive Director Jill Lesser addresses the House Judiciary Subcommittee today, explaining what efforts the group has taken so far and what it hopes to achieve in the near future.

Lesser states that it’s too early to evaluate the effectiveness of the alert system. However, through customer research the CCI has learned some valuable insights that will help to frame their educational messages.

“To support the companies’ work, the CCI engaged in consumer research that helped us understand what consumers do and do not know about P2P technology and their level of understanding about the copyright laws.”

One of the troubling findings of the research is that most consumers don’t understand or appreciate copyright.

“We found that most consumers do not understand or appreciate concepts that many of us in the policy and legal communities take for granted – like the meaning of copyright,” Lesser notes.

These and other insights are used to better communicate their anti-piracy messaging, and CCI hopes that this will eventually lead to less copyright infringements.

“This research is helping us to better understand the drivers of consumer behavior around piracy and, we hope, will help us to improve the CCI’s effectiveness in communicating our messages and ultimately reduce the level of online piracy and increase content consumption through legal means.”

Aside from the alerts, which are targeted at the person who pays the Internet bill, the CCI is also reaching out to a much younger group of U.S. citizens. Together with iKeepSafe they have developed a new curriculum that will teach the value of copyright to California kids, starting at kindergarten.

“We have developed a new copyright curriculum that is being piloted during this academic year in California,” Lesser informs the House Judiciary Subcommittee.

“The kindergarten through sixth grade curriculum, entitled ‘Be A Creator’™, is the result of CCI’s partnership with the California School Libraries Association and iKeepSafe, a leading digital literacy organization.”

I Play Fair (large)

The pamphlet pictured above is one of the course materials that’s currently listed on CCI’s website. The “Be A Creator” ™ program was also mentioned during the launch of the Copyright Alert System, but at the time it wasn’t known that kindergartens would also be targeted.

TorrentFreak talked to Public Knowledge president and co-founder Gigi Sohn, who is a member of CCI’s advisory board. She assured us that there are several safeguards in place to assure that the end product will be objective. The advisory board was brought in for advice at various stages in the process, and the California School Libraries Association is a known fair use proponent.

“Rest assured if this curriculum is perceived as being anything but fair, it won’t proceed beyond the pilot stage,” Sohn says.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), however, is skeptical about the educational program, and fears that it will be biased towards copyright holders.

“Based on what we’ve seen so far, that curriculum will do little to help kids understand the copyright balance. Instead, it is going to teach kids that creative works are ‘stuff’ that can be owned and that you must always check before using that ‘stuff’,” the EFF commented.

While we haven’t seen the full course materials, the EFF has a valid point. The CCI consists of copyright holders and Internet Providers who will most likely highlight other copyright aspects than free speech scholars. While there are other parties that will add balance, it can still create distrust.

Earlier this week the Internet Society warned that the CCI’s educational copyright alerts might be biased to a certain extent. The organization encouraged CCI and other groups to use neutral third parties for their educational efforts.

Whether the CCI plans to do something with this critique remains to be seen.

Source: MPAA and RIAA Teach Copyright at Kindergartens

If the revelations of Edward Snowden have taught us anything, it’s that our activities online can hardly be considered private.

When we write private emails or fire off instant messages, someone somewhere has the ability to access their contents and, if necessary, act on what they’ve seen.

We’re told that this is a necessary evil, that our countries’ security depends on us giving up some of our freedoms, indeed some of our rights – including the right to privacy – in order to keep us all safe from the ill intentions of the world’s bogeymen.

But despite the assurances of our leaders, most of us simply don’t want to be spied on.

You almost certainly can’t tell, but this article was placed on TorrentFreak’s servers using an encrypted connection. There’s nothing illegal about this article or the way it was written and its author isn’t wanted for crimes anywhere and isn’t trying to cover any up. Encryption has simply become part of life and turning on a VPN here is now as natural as firing up a browser.

But with the perhaps needlessly over-cautious cast aside for a moment, there are those who really do need to stay encrypted for genuinely important reasons. For dissidents around the globe privacy can be a matter of life and death and for whistle-blowers the need to remain in the shadows is paramount, as the unfortunate cases of Manning and Snowden illustrate.

Sadly, and despite all the good carried out via encrypted communications such as Tor, there’s a bitter pill to swallow. There are criminals – serious criminals committing horrible crimes – that use these very same systems in order to hide their identities. What’s to be done about these individuals when their online activities are cloaked? Swedish police think they have the answer.

“We must have a law that allows us to get access to the encrypted services. We need to get a key to access the serious crime,” says Per-Åke Wecksell from the Cybercrime Section of the National Criminal Investigation Department.

Wecksell says gaining back-door access to encryption services is necessary to clamp down on the growing problem of child abuse. Those who engage in such activities are now acutely aware they’re targets for the police so they’re increasingly taking special steps to ensure they remain untraceable.

But of course, once police have the authority to decrypt encryption (and it’s currently extremely unclear how that could be achieved from a technical standpoint), the security of non-abusers using these systems take a massive hit too, through no fault of their own.

“In the world outside the Internet, the police do not go to any lengths to try to chase criminals, for the simple reason that it would hurt other people. It’s the same online,” says Anna Troberg, chairman of the Pirate Party.

“For example, I have talked with a lot with human rights organizations that are totally dependent on having encrypted information to do their work with activists in other countries, that opportunity would surely be threatened if the police have the ability to decrypt things.”

Of course, it could be argued that restraints could be put on the police so that any new law states clearly that decryption could only take place in cases of suspected child abuse. However, during the crafting of any new legislation there would be calls by interested parties to throw other crimes into the mix – terrorism and issues of national security for instance.

A likely catch-all term of decryption for only “serious crimes” would then be wide open for manipulation by interested parties, meaning that while today abusers and terrorists would be hunted down, tomorrow’s targets would include whistleblowers traitors such as Edward Snowden and alleged copyright infringers master criminals such as Kim Dotcom.

Russia is currently grappling with the same issue, although they appear to be going down a different route. According to local news reports, the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) has initiated a process which will see the introduction of laws that will not allow the decryption of Tor and other anonymous networks, but will ban them completely from the Russian controlled Internet.

The process was uncovered when a request to have Tor blocked on the grounds it is used by child abusers was sent to the FSB by the Bounty Hunters civil movement. But even the movement have their doubts about blocking. Their chief, Sergey Zhuk, told Russian media that he would prefer it if Tor operators were forced to work with the authorities instead.

So it appears we are left with three current approaches.

1 – The status quo where everyone keeps their privacy, serious criminals included.
2 – Trusting the police with the keys in the hope they only go after the really bad guys.
3 – Blocking anonymity tools altogether.

The battle now, to maintain a free and open Internet and the privacy rights of millions, is to find a way to weed out the bad guys without ruining it for everyone else. It might be the most complicated Internet task ever carried out, but someone is going to have to find a fourth option.

Source: Should Authorities Decrypt VPNs and Tor – or Ban Them Altogether?

I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike, I want to ride my bicycle I want to — oh yeah, that’s the spot! *CRASHES INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC* This is the Happy Ride. It’s a bicycle seat that vibrates. Why? More like why not? Jk, the question is definitely why, because getting [...]
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1 Gif Dance Party – Gifdanceparty.com 2 10 of the Strangest Theme Bars and Restaurants on Earth – io9 3 Our Favorite Cosplays from SDCC 2013 – Fashionably Geek 4 20 Things We Wanted To Steal from Comic Con – Cool Material 5 Dirty Library – Tumblr 6 9 Extreme Foods – Oddee 7 27 [...]
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For the past four years Rick Falvinge, the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, has been working on Swarmwise, his second book.

“Swarmwise is a summary of what I learned on building a cost-efficient community that is capable of delivering to world-changing levels,” Rick told TorrentFreak.

“We put people in the European Parliament on less than one percent of the competition’s budget, and we beat them. There is a lot of new stuff here on leadership, swarming, and community-building that I haven’t seen anywhere else.”

Rick says that the techniques he describes in his book work equally well whether they are applied in social, business or political environments.

“The only consistent factor is that the person wanting to change the world needs to be short on cash and time,” he notes.

Swarmwise is due for a release soon but this morning (perhaps somewhat fittingly considering Rick’s unswerving support for file-sharing) the book leaked on The Pirate Bay. Well, that seems to have been the intention at least.

The torrent, uploaded by an anonymous account, carried with it a somewhat taunting message.

“From the author that you love to hate, or hate to love. That delivers lulz and facepalms in equal doses,” the release begins. “Just remember, dear Ricky, where ‘your’ ideas come from. They are as unique as any musicians music, or any writers concepts.”

However, despite the leak and the mocking tone, the leaker’s plan fell off the rails. Rick himself had quickly jumped on the torrent and he didn’t like what he was confronted with.

“Oh come ON, what kind of release is this? It’s not even properly packed,” he wrote. “Come on, you don’t need a multi-part ZIP inside a RAR archive when you’re already inside a torrent folder.”

Rick informs TorrentFreak that he had anticipated the possibility of a leak and only had a problem when it was badly presented.

“I was concerned that the people who went for the torrent may get disappointed in the quality of it, and that may reflect badly on the leadership book I’ve been working on for four years,” he explained.

Trying to put things right, Rick took matters into his own hands.

“If you really want this book in pre-release quality, don’t use this torrent, it appears to be broken,” he wrote, adding a link to a PDF on his own site instead for good measure.

“So, much better to make sure that the people who search for Swarmwise and find the torrent actually can get the pre-release version advertised,” Rick told us. “It’s still not proper, with draft image quality and stuff, but at least it’s the advertised pre-release.”

Of course, considering Rick’s anti-copyright stance he’s hardly likely to complain about the leak, but now he’s on the receiving end, how does that feel?

“A leak is an interest in your work. As such, it is a golden business opportunity to connect with your potential customers and/or people you want to get to know, for a myriad of reasons,” Rick explains.

“Of bloody course you want to make yourself known and say hi if there’s a torrent of your book somewhere? How else are you going to build a community? Which, by the way, is what the book is about: building a community and delivering. A bit of meta-levels there.”

Fans of Rick’s work will be able to buy a paper version of the book on Amazon next week but if they can wait and don’t want Rick’s ‘workprint’ style version, a finished electronic version will be out soon, free of charge (and free to share) of course.

“Actually, it’s more than free to share; the copyright monopoly page (which is usually filled with grim FBI warnings etc) says outright that people are _encouraged_ to share it with friends if they like it. I think that’s only proper,” Rick says.

Finally, we asked Rick if there was one single lesson that he’d like a reader to take from his book, what would that be?

“Whether you think you can or cannot change the world, you’re most likely correct,” he concludes.

Source: Rick Falkvinge Schools Pirate After Botched Leak of Swarmwise Book

This is the Powered Jacket MK3, a $123,000 exoskeleton suit that makes you taller and stronger. The thing weighs 55 pounds and will make the wearer huuuuge. Like 7 feet tall huge. Not like 20 feet tall huge, just so we’re clear. Hey, wait — do you hear that? It’s the future! Jk jk it’s me clunking down the street in this thing. It sounds like a garbage truck falling apart!

There are finally some useful details about Neverwinter’s “first” content pack. As we knew it’s called Fury Of The Feywild, but other than that they were tight-lipped. Now we know that it’s adding a new area, races, weapons and items, more enemies, and so on. And it’s out on the 22nd August, and will be freeeeee.

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