The Pirate Bay raided, shut down by Swedish police – and it may never return

The Pirate Bay has been raided by Swedish police and shut down — possibly forever, according to its co-founder Peter Sunde. According to some initial reports coming out of the Sweden, Stockholm police seized computers and equipment belonging to The Pirate Bay, and have detained “at least one man connected to the site.” At this point, it’s unknown if the current operators of The Pirate Bay (TPB) plan to reopen the site — there were reportedly redundant Pirate Bay servers located in other countries, to mitigate against raids like this, but now we’ll see if that redundancy actually exists.

   As far as we can tell, today’s raid on TPB is a pretty standard case of copyright              law violation.TorrentFreak has a statement from Sweden’s chief intellectual property police officer, Paul Pintér, saying “There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law.” The previous raid on TPB, way back in 2006, was the same deal. Back then, the movie industry — the MPAA — was involved in the raid; it’s fairly safe to assume that commercial interests are behind today’s raid and shutdown, too.

Really, it was only a matter of time until The Pirate Bay was raided again; it’s one of the biggest websites in the world, with tens of millions of users — almost all of which are there to, in most jurisdictions, download stuff illegally. The shift away from hosting torrent files, in favor of magnet links, probably bought the site a little more time — but clearly, given today’s raid, the magnet links weren’t a complete panacea.

This morning, Pirate Bay’s co-founder Peter Sunde had some interesting remarks to make about the shutdown:

“News just reached me that The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I’m one of them. Why, you might ask? Well. For multiple reasons. But most of all, I’ve not been a fan of what TPB has become.”

Sunde goes on to talk about how TPB has “become an institution” that people took for granted. He hates the spam of “distasteful” ads that now blanket the site, and the site’s ugly design — but perhaps most tellingly, he is upset by how the site goes “against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB.”

Basically, The Pirate Bay was meant to be a breath of fresh air. It was meant to be some kind of vehicle for the ideology of the founders and its first users. Sunde even says that the original plan was to close TPB down on its tenth birthday — job done, it would be time to get out of the way and let other smaller, faster, fresher sites take over. Instead, The Pirate Bay has become this lumbering beast — an institution that millions of people idolize, an institution that is essentially a glorified Viagra ad.

Some new Pirate Bay mirrors are already starting to pop up, but they are probably not “official” — rather, they’re most likely just a cloned version of the original site, with many (but probably not all) magnet links still in tact. That isn’t to say that any Pirate Bay clones aren’t useful, but it probably isn’t fair to call them The Pirate Bay; they’re most likely just set up by people who saw an opportunity to raise some fat advertising revenues.

Sunde, for his part, hopes that The Pirate Bay is gone for good — and is hopeful for the future of file sharing. “From the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There’s already other services for that.”

The future of extreme e-sports: The gamepad that draws blood every time your character gets hit

n a rather chilling case of dystopian sci-fi made real, some Canadians have created a modified Xbox gamepad that draws blood from your arm every time your in-game character takes damage. According to the gamepad’s creators, the idea is to hold “blood donation gaming events” — to bolster blood bank reserves (which are always in short supply), and also to make gamers “think about more important issues while still doing what they love.” While this is ostensibly a rather noble effort, it’s hard not to see this as the first step towards extreme gaming and e-sports where losers actually die in real life.

The system, which is rather scarily called Blood Sport, is fairly simple in its design. Basically, the creators found an old blood collection machine, and then connected its pump to an Xbox 360 gamepad via an Arduino microcontroller. Every time the gamepad rumbles/vibrates, the Arduino tells the machine to draw some blood. The creators say their system should work with any console/gamepad that has the rumble feature, but they’ve only modified a single Xbox controller so far. Apparently the Arduino keeps track of how much blood has been drawn, so that no one dies.

Blood Sport – connecting the blood collection machine to the gamepad’s rumble/vibration mechanism

The next step, obviously, as it isn’t much fun to lose blood to an NPC, is to modify another gamepad and acquire another blood collection machine so that you can play against other people. Thus, Blood Sport turned to Kickstarter for funding. At the time of publishing, however, the project had been suspended — with no word from Kickstarter or the project owners as to why. Presumably it’s because Kickstarter simply found the idea a little bit squeamish — though I’m sure the site has crowdfunded lots of other weird projects over the years.

Here’s the promotional video for Blood Sport. It’s not particularly graphic, but if you’re not a fan of blood you may want to skip it.

So, for now, Blood Sport has been put on ice — but, fortunately (unfortunately?) such novel and convoluted ideas don’t just vanish. Now, for better or worse, the world is thinkingabout combining video games and blood collection. At the very least, such a system could be employed by real clinics to improve the allure of blood collection — speaking for myself, I would be much more inclined to donate blood if it involved fragging some Halo noobs.

Obviously, though, I think we should be much more interested in the potential for extreme and dangerous uses of the technology. There is a very, very fine line between charitable gaming and an e-sports tournament to the death. Imagine if the Arduino bugs out, and keeps drawing blood past the safety threshold. Or imagine an extreme e-sports league, where there is no safety threshold — where dying in Counter-Strike or Dota 2 actually hits you in real life, diminishing your abilities and increasing the likelihood that you’ll lose more and more blood until… well, you get the idea. Amusingly enough, maybe this would encourage gamers to physically exercise more, or to take a leaf out of other competitive sports and start using steroids and blood doping. (Or who knows, maybe e-sports professionals are already doing that?)

The future of e-sports?

I’m starting to get ahead of myself — but I think we can all agree that such a scenario, as worrying as it sounds, doesn’t seem too far beyond the realms of reality. Whether it’s VR, brain implants, bionic retinas, brain-computer interfaces (or even brain-to-brain telepathy), we are clearly moving towards a world where the once-clear divide between humans and their tools is blurred. Today it’s the merging of fun and games and drawing blood — tomorrow, it’s a generation of humans that have had an augmented reality device attached to their head since shortly after birth.

New superomniphobic texture made of nanoscopic nails repels all known liquids

If you have ever lived in a frequently rainy area of the world where the main mode of transportation isdriving, you’re likely very familiar with products like Rain-X. Rub some of it on your windshield, let it settle, and you can practically drive through a downpour without having to turn your windshield wipers on (though we wouldn’t recommend it). Rain-X is a superhydrophobic coating that repels water, giving you a clear view of the road ahead even when wipers can’t. Though superhydrophobic coatings can repel other liquids, its main focus is water, and as your white dress shirt is probably aware, water isn’t the only liquid that can spill. Engineers at UCLA have created a liquid repellent so much more effective than superhydrophobic coating that it’s classified assuperomniphobic — and it’s based on surface texture, rather than a set-and-forget coating.

On a cool, dewy morning, you’ll tend to notice beads of water sitting atop or rolling down leaves. Certain foliage is hairy on a microscopic level, which means the surface doesn’t have enough points of contact with water to soak it in, leaving the droplet intact thanks to its own surface tension. This is also why water beads up on a non-stick cooking pan. If you cook often, though, you’ll know that oil doesn’t bead up; it has a lower surface tension than water, and thus is more difficult to repel. Surfaces have been created that can deal with lower surface tension liquids, such as oil, but being able to repel liquids with an even lower surface tension, like fluorinated solvent — used for electrical cooling, for instance — has remained elusive.

Methanol beading on the new, textured superomniphobic surface

By covering a surface with thousands of microscopic flathead nails, UCLA researchers CJ Kim and Tingyi Liu have created a surface texture that can repel all known liquids. Each nail is thinner than the width of a human hair and placed just 100 micrometers apart, and each head measures in at just 20 micrometers in diameter. Every nail has a vertical overhang coming off its head, looking similar to a tablecloth hanging over the edge of a round table. The overhang buoys liquids by creating a cushion composed of about 95% air, preserving the liquid’s surface tension. The nails are fashioned out of our old friend silica — silicon dioxide; the same stuff that lays at the base of almost every computer chip ever made. [Research paper: DOI: 10.1126/science.1254787]

The UCLA-engineered texture repelled all liquids thrown at it, including oils, solvents, and even a solvent that has the lowest known surface tension for a liquid, perfluorohexane. Even better, the nailed texture can be applied to a variety of surfaces, including metal,glass, and polymers. Due to the surface being made of nanostructured nails instead of, for example, a coating, it’s tough and wouldn’t degrade from harsh temperatures, biofluid, or ultraviolet light.

The researchers have filed a patent for the creation, but need time to explore and perfect it. So for now, you shouldn’t expect to purchase a raincoat covered in the texture anytime soon. The texture exists, though, and can be applied to a variety of surfaces. It seems all the researchers need to perfect the material is time.