Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Pirate Bay sails again, work begins on the digital genome and how cows could become the real power behind the Google throne.
• The controversial file-sharing directory The Pirate Bay is back online, this time hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party, a political movement born out of music file-sharing.
It was happy to launch the pirates back onto the high seas of the web. :
"We got tired of Hollywood's cat and mouse game with the Pirate Bay so we decided to offer the site bandwidth. It is time to take the bull by the horns and stand up for what we believe is a legitimate activity."
In a slightly less articulate :
"TEH PIRATE BAY IZ AN UNSINKABLE SHIP. IT WILL SAIL TEH INTERWEBS 4 AS LONG AS WE WANTS IT 2. REMEMBR DAT, K THX."
• The tech press has been enjoying the lost iPhone prototype story, largely because pretty much every tech journalist can sympathise with the poor Apple engineer who left the precious gadget behind on a bar stool after an over-indulgent after-works drink.
Now it emerges that Steve Jobs personally intervened to try and retrieve the missing phone, e-mailing Gizmodo, the tech blog to which the phone was sold, asking for his phone back.
on what was said by Apple to persuade the police to investigate.
"By publishing details about the phone and its features, sales of current Apple products are hurt wherein people that would otherwise have purchased a currently existing Apple product would wait for the next item to be released thereby hurting overall sales and negatively affecting Apple's earnings."
• We have all had days when the duvet seems a whole lot more enticing than the office so imagine how great it would be to have a robot you could send to work in your place.
Robocommuting is the brainchild of Mountain View start-up Anybots. As a starting point for its project, it has unveiled a robot that allows teleconferencing from a range of locations.
Founder and chief executive
"We wanted to create a technology that allows remote workers to collaborate more fully - and feel part of the team,"
• Did Bill Gates invent the iPad? Apple is no stranger to patent rows but footage uncovered by might have a case himself. Back in 2007 Bill Gates sat next to Steve Jobs and offered these musings:
"I think you'll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you'll do dramatically more reading off of that... yeah, I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor... You'll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. And then you'll have the device that fits in your pocket."
He must be kicking himself...
• V3 is reporting that work has begun on creating a so-called digital genome, a record of old data formats to make sure that future generations can read everything that is stored digitally.
This important project, funded to the tune of 15m euros, will see data stored in a suitably secure mountain vault in Switzerland, dubbed the Swiss Fort Knox.
The British Library's why it was needed:
"Einstein's notebooks you can take down off the shelf and read today. Roll forward 50 years and most of Stephen Hawking's notes are likely to be stored digitally and we might not be able to access them all."
• We have had Froogle and now it could be time for Moogle as HP engineers point to a future of cow poo computing.
In a paper published today, the engineers demonstrate how manure could be turned into fuel which could power the vast data centers needed by companies such as Google.
:
"Information technology and manure have a symbiotic relationship"
Farmers may not agree when they find out that it will cost them $5m to purchase the equipment needed for such a system.
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