Cranking out news for the geeks, music buffs and gossip junkies, my way. -Greg

There was not a single doubt in my mind, that when The Pirate Bay announced it would be selling out and going legit, that a clone, if not several, would take its place in minutes. Even better Btarena.net has already stepped up and begun rebuilding The Pirate Bay. They took one of the greatest torrents around, an entire db copy of The Pirate Bay, and put it together. Now, they still have a few bugs, like the search engine, to work out, but I’m happy to say, “I’m HAPPY”. When torrentspy.com went to the dumps back in the day in took a little while before anything came close to it’s size and “quality?” should I say, was touched. Then came The Pirate Bay, which is obviously the best so far. Now it seems they became large enough to sell themselves and make a buck, good for them. Funny thing is once its bought and becomes “legit” its going to crash and burn. HAHA, do you really think that its going to continue getting hit as much as it does now when you have to pay? Yeah, right, I’m sure I won’t be alone when I say good bye to the Bay after telling me I have to pay and head on over to the quickest replacement. Currently in the lead would be, Btarena.net. Thanks guys! -Greg

By Kevin Parrish, published on August 20, 2009 at 7:31 PM
Source: Tom’s Guide US

A Pirate Bay clone website launched using the torrented Pirate Bay database.

Recently we reported that a special torrent was available that contained a copy of the entire Pirate Bay database, including most of the torrents that were available on the site. According to Mashable, the inevitable finally happened, as someone has launched a fully functional clone of The Pirate Bay right here using the downloaded database.

While the site reveals that the search function doesn’t work for the moment, it claims to index 873,671 torrents. Previous Pirate Bay visitors will also notice that the overall appearance isn’t a spitting image of the original classic, and many of the functions are still missing. But torrent seekers can still browse and download as if nothing ever happened. New torrents will be tracked via tracker.btarena.org.

But as Mashable points out, while one torrent-tracking website can be knocked out of business, another will come along and take its place. Perhaps government officials and copyright advocates will see that piracy of this nature will not end unless the entire Internet is knocked offline.

It’s no secret I’m a HUGE Kenny Chesney fan, his tropical-country style is nothing short of awesome. I’m sometimes jealous of his videos, just wishing I could live that Caribbean life. I like his idea of trying to give the fans a taste of that through is new clothing line. Still, looks like as would be expected they are going to be a bit higher priced. $35 for a t-shirt is not what I would expect to be paying for a t-shirt in the Caribbean carefree life style. Never the less I’m pretty sure I’ll be getting a few pieces from this new line. -Greg

For Kenny Chesney (and his fans), “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems” isn’t just a song, it’s a way of life. And now the country star is launching a clothing line, Blue Chair Bay, that captures his laidback style. The pieces — for men and women — are designed to look and feel like “that favorite T-shirt that you’ve washed a lot that is kind of sun bleached… your favorite khakis, and your shirt that you’ve had forever,” he tells PEOPLE. (Naturally, there are worn-in baseball caps, too.) Chesney was so involved in the design process that he even name-checks friends on some of the items. “I’ve got a shirt that says “Bob’s Charter” and Bob is a buddy of mine that’s been living in the islands for a long time.” Sure, not everyone can live in the Caribbean like Chesney, but he hopes his new mid-priced line (ranging from $35 for a T-shirt to $72 for khakis) — which is currently being sold at Fast Buck Freddies in Key West, Ocean Eddie’s Resort Wear in Gulf Shores, Ala., and Levy’s in Nashville — prompts people to use their imagination. “Blue Chair Bay is kind of like the place we’d all like to go if we had no obligations or nowhere to be,” he says, “and that’s kind of what I want this clothing line to represent. These are the clothes I would pack to go to this place.”

Now I remember the first time I heard about a use for the “whitespaces” when the annoucement of end analog TV as we know it came about. The use was geared more towards using it for wireless internet service providers. This was followed by who should get it, who should decide who gets to use it, what regulations should be put in place, so on and so on. So, leave it to Microsoft to decide to take matters in their own hands and create another similar use. I would have to say though getting miles of range out of my wireless router, easily creating a strong and solid Wi-Fi hotspot for my home, entire neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods?  Sounds great to me, and with the support of DOCSIS 3.0, which brings the possibilty of  over 150 Mbit/s to my home, a good firewall with IP throttling, I could become a small townships ISP  <insert big evil grin here>

You can browse for miles and miles and miles.

While most of us are still tinkering with our home networks, perhaps slowly upgrading our machines and equipment to 802.11n draft hardware, researchers at Microsoft and HarvardUniversity are exploring a new type of Wi-Fi thinking.

Instead of operating at the same (or near) frequency range of existing Wi-Fi signals, Microsoft has been testing the transmission of signals over “whitespaces,” which is part of the radio spectrum that was formerly used by analog television stations.

Microsoft has published a paper that explains networking over UHF white spaces and how it differs from conventional Wi-Fi in spatial variation, temporal variation, and fragmentation of the UHF spectrum.

Dubbed “WhiteFi,” the researchers explain that the method “incorporates a new adaptive spectrum assignment algorithm to handle spectrum variation and fragmentation, and proposes a low overhead protocol to handle temporal variation.

Using a technique called SIFT, which the researchers say “reduces the time to detect transmissions in variable channel width systems by analyzing raw signals in the time domain.”

Basically, should this technology prove viable, we could be measuring Wi-Fi signal range in miles rather than in feet. You can read the paper here (PDF) or more technical summary of it at Dailywireless.

Source : Tom’s Hardware US