For '41 billion page views'.
The file-locker industry, already in a state of chaos after MegaUpload’s January shutdown, faces more bloodshed, says one Hollywood executive who named five more services on the studio's hit list. 

MediaFire, PutLocker, Deposite files, Wupload and Fileserve are all “rogue” websites, collectively responsible for 41 billion page views a year, according to Alfred Perry, Paramount Pictures’ vice president for worldwide content protection...

Could replace the Space Shuttle this decade.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is planning to build a spaceship that could replace NASA's Space Shuttle program this decade.

Allen, 58, is hoping his new company, Stratolaunch Systems, will launch unmanned rockets from a flying carrier plane to ferry government and commercial payloads into space and back...

Unveils attractive thermostat.
Tony Fadell, known as the godfather of the iPod, has made a new gadget with the help of a small army of engineers and designers from alma mater Apple and other tech giants including Google and Microsoft.

But instead of the next hot digital media device, Fadell on Tuesday unveiled a new thermostat for home temperature control...

Viable alternative for Germans.
Information freedom fighters, the German Pirate Party, have for the first time won a spot in Berlin’s state parliament. 

The Pirate Party took 9 percent of the state vote according to polling, more than the 5 percent it needed to gain a seat...

Some US bank breathes a sigh of relief.
Former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg has allegedly destroyed thousands of controversial documents the organisation hoped to release. 

WikiLeaks shot a volley of Tweets over the weekend highlighting what Domscheit-Berg had “claimed” to have destroyed, which included five gigabytes of data once held on the Bank of America...

But is it worth it?
Acid leaching just one square kilometre of certain tracts of the Pacific Ocean’s seabed could address shortages of rare earth materials affecting technology companies, according to Japanese researchers.

Rare-earth materials were used in a host of new technologies, in particular to make powerful magnetic components of hard-drives, speakers, LED lights and hybrid cards...

Danish maritime court action planned in coming days.
WikiLeaks and data centre provider DataCell plan to sue Visa and MasterCard for blocking payments to both organisations last December, according to Julian Assange. 

The “financial blockade” was in “serious violation” of European Union competition rules, and violated Danish merchant laws, WikiLeaks said in a statement on Saturday...

Attempts revenge by chicken.
A 23-year-old former fast food worker at Red Rooster has escaped conviction after an apparent 'revenge' attack where he remotely accessing a work computer to order $67,000 of chicken.

The man had resigned earlier in the day after a heated argument allegedly over safety issues, according to a report by the Queensland Times...

How would you use Pawsey's 87.2 TFlops?
Early adopters of Murdoch University’s $5 million Linux cluster have spent the past five months studying radioastronomy, nuclear fusion and weather patterns on the 87.2 TFlop machine.

The projects were chosen by operator iVEC late last year, ahead of the supercomputer’s official launch this month...

Three-year project targets tsunamis, nuclear fusion.
Fujitsu and the Australian National University (ANU) have partnered to develop software for modelling tsunamis and fusion reactors on petascale machines.

The three-year project aimed to produce mathematical techniques for parallel processing on next-generation high performance computers (HPCs)...

The difference between leaking and whistleblowing.
Espionage charges against a former National Security Agency employee have been watered down to the relatively minor offence of unauthorised access of a government computer. 

Thomas Drake, the 55 year old former NSA senior executive, pleaded guilty last week to the “misdemeanor offence of intentionally exceeding the authorised access of a computer,” the US Department of Justice said in a statement...

Develops waste-to-energy technology for deployed environment.
Defence scientists are developing a prototype waste-to-energy (WTE) system that could generate electricity for troops in areas without power infrastructure.

Jointly developed by the Defence Science and Technology Organisation and energy consultancy HRL Technology, the system could generate 200 kW of power from two tonnes of waste...

Former Privacy Commissioner on privacy, censorship and economic gain.
‘Big Data’ is emerging as one of the Big Issues of the knowledge economy.

These immense datasets have immense potential to provide us with economic gain, offer individuals free, customised services, drive innovation and much, much more...

WLAN inventor questions lack of 'Australian Cisco'.
Radioastronomer John O’Sullivan could not have foreseen today’s wirelessly networked world when he sought to detect the theoretical Hawking Radiation more than 30 years ago.

He nonetheless credits those failed experiments for an Australian wireless LAN invention that plays a role in more than a billion devices worldwide...

Prototype shows promise.
South Korean researchers have revealed a project they hope could allow mobile phones to be charged by talking into them.

Britain's Telegraph reported that a team led by Sungkyunkwan University's Sang-Woo Kim aimed to convert sound into electrical power...