Tech Olive

Yet another big win for the opposing forces of P2P/Bittorrent file sharing. The owner of IsoHunt, Gary Fung, looks like he’ll be facing some huge charges after he lost a lawsuit brought by movie studios. The strange thing is, Fung never rebutted the arguments against him. He simply said that IsoHunt was just another search engine, but that was quickly thrown out when the judge found that IsoHunt specifically catered to copyright material and that Fung himself mentioned that he sees nothing wrong with copyright infringement. Fung has the chance to appeal the ruling, but it hasn’t been said whether he will or not.

First there was The Pirate Bay, now IsoHunt. Could this mean that file sharing is taking a turn for the worse? Or will it keep going strong?

via [Ars Technica]

A pack of developers have sought our “expert” journalism skills for their newest game, Elementum. It’s very much in the vein of Peggle and other such casual, brightly-colored 2D combination-based Tetris-born games. As such, the game is equally as entertaining as it is confusing and unique.

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Over the past few weeks, the Modern Warfare 2 community on Xbox Live has been plagued with glitches causing major flaws in matchmaking, making the game nearly unstandable. An update was released today by the Infinity Ward team in an effort to repair this substantial glitch, as well the balancing of the greatly overpowered Akimbo 1887′s.  Across the interwebnets, gamers are already rejoicing, myself included. Let us know how it’s treating you.

Although it’s still in an early testing stage, Valve’s Team Fortress 2 development team has announced the inclusion of AI bots in TF2‘s newest update. Currently, the bots only support the KOTH gametypes/maps, but Valve promises to have them working globally soon. They’re also planning a menu-spawning system in a future update, but for now you can add and assign bots using the in-game console. Follow the break for instructions.

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Back in May, Microsoft lost a $200 million court case to a software firm known as i4i Ltd involving a supposed patent infringement. i4i says that Microsoft knowingly infringed one of their patents on both Vista and Word by “manipulating a document’s content and architecture separately.” This has to do with Word’s handling of .xml, .docx, and .docm files and how it infringed upon i4i’s patented XML handling algorithms. Obviously Microsoft fought back by saying, “the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid.” Microsoft then asked for an appeal. The court demanded that Word be taken off of the market and be forbidden to sell, but that was put on hold until the results of the appeal were final.

Well, the results are in and Microsoft still lost. So now they are forbidden to sell Office and Word 2007 starting January 11th, but they are working quickly to release versions of Office and Word 2007 that don’t have the patent-infringing features. They also said that the Office 2010 beta is safe from all this as well. Unsurprisingly, they’re considering another appeal. Existing Office users should be fine as this ruling only affects future sales.

via [WSJ]

Thanks to an early release of a French PC magazine’s cover, it looks like they know something we don’t. According to them, the issue contains information about GTA: The Lost and the Damned (GTA IV‘s first DLC pack). Could it be that the DLC is really coming to PC? Last month, a little light was shown on the possibility, but this seems like solid proof. This issue of the magazine is scheduled to hit news stands on December 28th, so we should have more news shortly after that.

This is quite a spectacle. This marvelous looking Christmas tree displayed in Shanghai is made from 1,000 Heineken beer bottles. Let’s hope it doesn’t collapse anytime soon.

via [Recyclart]

The boys over at Gizmodo did a massive 3G speed test of 12 markets in the US. The various tests checked raw speed using speedtest.net, as well as downloading large images and webpages. The conclusion states that AT&T came out victorious. So even though we give crap about AT&T, at least they have fast 3G service (when available). Check out the complete overview by hitting up the link below.

via [Gizmodo]

After being twice denied an MA 15+ rating and thus not being allowed for sale in Australia, Alien vs. Predator was the newest game to receive a banning from Australia’s Office of Film and Literature Classification. However, the rating was overturned by Australia’s Classification Review Board (they really need to get their ducks in a row). This marks a large step forward in Australia’s rating system. Perhaps this is the beginning of future changes to the rating system and its allowances?

via [ShackNews]

LG has taken an early lead in the CES 2010 race by announcing their 42-inch 1080p panel that’s just 2.6mm (.1 inch) thin. It’s only a prototype so far, but it’s LED backlit and weighs just under 8.8 pounds! No more details have been surfaced, but we’ll definitely hear more about it at CES in a few weeks. Read the full press release after the break.

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