Michael Moore's 'Sicko' leaked to BitTorrent – huzzah!

moore.jpg Please oh please don’t let this mean Michael Moore’s next film – sorry, documentary, will be concerned with the perils of poor struggling artists and filmmakers whose life-long work is exploited on Peer to Peer networks. I don’t think I can handle a documentary which interviews Metallica, the world surely isn’t ready for another grlimpse of James Hetfield’s guitar-antics.

Yep, so Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Sicko, has been leaked to the internets weeks before its cinematic debut. There’s been much controversy over the fact that he filmed parts of the documentary in Cuba without adequate…

FBI tries to fight zombie hordes, but not the good kind

shaun-of-the-dead-zombies-small.jpg

Despite the rather alarming headline from the BBC, there is not some kind of 28 Days Later epidemic going on in the North American Midwest. What the FBI is actually doing is contacting more than one million PC owners who have had their computers hijacked by cyber criminals. These hijacked home computers, known as “zombies”, are then used to spread spam, steal IDs and attack websites. Also, they eat brains, which is why people are so dumb about security, meaning it’s hard to say how much success Operation Bot Roast is going to have. [GT]

FBI tries to fight zombie hordes

Related posts
Sony plans to sue PS3 hackers
Pirate Bay hacked
John McCain’s MySpace page reverse hacked

Review: Ask3D – Ask's revamped search engine

askcom.gifI’m choosing to forget Ask’s rather bizarre ‘propaganda’ advertising of their new search “Ask 3D” search engine as I take a look at how effective it is as a tool, and whether it’s going to pose a threat to Google.

There’s more to Ask3D than the slightly shiny, icon-based eye candy that greets you when you arrive at their front page.

Both Google and Ask are keen to offer a more holistic approach to search results. A search for “Steve Jobs” in Google brings up the usual listing of results, but interspersed with news and video. It’s easy to find these items by scrolling through the results, but they’re not particularly distinct at first glance.

Ask, on the other hand, clearly separates regular web pages, listed in the middle column, from multimedia content and the latest news, displayed in sections in the right-hand column. It’s an elegant layout, marred only slightly by the “Sponsored Results” boxes which don’t integrate as well as their Google counterparts, and can sometimes take up to half of the screen before search results are displayed.

nuTsie: do you really want ads on your own shuffled iTunes library?

andy-merrett.jpgAndy Merrett writes…

Melodeo has introduced a new beta service that lets users play a random selection from their iTunes music library on their mobile phone or Internet-connected PC.

Called nuTsie (and yes, that is an anagram of iTunes), users upload their iTunes library to Melodeo’s servers, and then have the ability to play back a randomised selection of their tunes in hi-fi quality.

The nuTsie service doesn’t download any of the music from its servers to the mobile device – it streams it. It also features a ‘radio rules’ shuffle algorithm to ensure artists, record labels and music publishers are paid for every use of a song. It can even play iTunes’ “Fair Play” tracks.

Vodafone launch "Mobile Internet" service

vodafone.pngVodafone UK has announced its new “Vodafone Mobile Internet” service, whereby the Vodafone live! portal will now provide access to mobile-optimised versions of popular web services including Google, MySpace, YouTube, eBay, and Instant Messaging from Microsoft and Yahoo!

It comes together with new tariffs that include a ‘data pack’ allowing users to download up to 120MB of data for £7.50 per month, or a daily charge of £1 for 500K, with no further charge unless the day’s usage exceeds 15MB.