By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.31, 01:00.28 pm
This story is not nearly as interesting as I was led to believe. Some guy bought something in the online game Entropia Universe. He bought it with in-game currency—PED3.3 million, to be exact. It just so happens that that amount, PED3.3 million, can be converted at will to real life currency. At current conversion rates that equals approximately US$330,000. So if you want to say that the guy bought an in-game item for US$330,000, well, be my guest.
The item itself, the Crystal Palace Space Station, is some sort of ship or craft or something that other players can buy things from. So the buyer of the thingamajig can use it as an actual source of income.
You should know that the game isn’t merely a game, but a fully registered bank in Sweden, complete with all the protections afforded to other, “real” European Union-based banks.
Embedded is a video of Crystal Palace, which looks an awful lot like that spaceship from Phantasy Star Online.
via Slashdot
By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.03, 01:00.56 pm
Not a day goes by without coming across one or more stories related to The Pirate Bay. Today is no different, with OpenBitTorrent (a tracker that Hollywood has accused of being The Pirate Bay’s spiritual successor, serving some 550,000 “works”) being given a new lease on life by a Swedish court. The gist is, Hollywood wanted the tracker shut down, but said Swedish court denied the action.
OpenBitTorrent is merely a tracker; there’s no .torrent files to download from the Web site. That is, you create a .torrent using http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce as the tracker, then upload the .torrent file somewhere else. I don’t know, a message board or something. Oh, or ThePirateBay.
That was Hollywood’s beef. Lawyers tried to argue that OpenBitTorrent was merely a continuation of ThePirateBay, and that it should be shut down.
It should be noted that OpenBitTorrent is proactive with regards to copyrighted material using the tracker, unlike ThePirateBay. That is to say that if Hollywood wanted, it could have just gone after the offending torrents rather than try to get the entire tracker shut down.
We all know where this is going.
Hollywood made its case to a Swedish court (OpenBitTorrent is based in Sweden), but the court didn’t buy the lawyers’ arguments. Why should an entire site be shut down when there’s no proof that the whole operation is crooked? You want to go after individual files, fine, but don’t think you can go after en entire site just because it’s easier than other alternatives.
That’s it.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.11.03, 04:30.11 pm
 [Sweden] The Swedish government is following in the footsteps of the Finns (well almost), as their IT-ministry is now promising that 90 percent of all Swedish homes will have access to a 100 mbit/s broadband connection before 2020.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.12, 12:00.03 pm
Oh, dear. We’ve all been there: you’re playing your favorite game online, and then WHAM-O~! you lose your Internet connection. The usual course of action is to mutter “Gosh darn it” to your self, then go about your business. An unusual course of action is to grab a knife, then stab a random person walking in the street. Apparently that has happened, yes.
An 18-year-old kid was playing StarCraft when his Internet connection dropped out. Then, in a fit of rage, he grabbed a knife, then ran out onto the street, where a 15-year-old girl was walking home from a party. You see where this is going.
Yes, the 18-year-old stabbed the 15-year-old. You know, because he was angry that his Internet connection dropped.
Thankfully, the girl is about as good as can be expected, with none of the injuries being life-threatening.
Oh, all of this went down in Sweden. I probably should have mentioned that in the beginning.
What’s going to happen to the crazy kid? He’s been sentenced to psychiatric care, and prosecutors are looking to charge him with attempted murder.
Again, friends, when your Internet connection dies, your best course of action is just to curse up a storm, and not bring physical violence onto random, innocent people.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.08, 11:15.07 am
I think we’ve all had our fill of The Pirate Bay stories, but here’s one more in the interest of killing five minutes. The site moved its servers from Sweden to Ukraine last week, and rather than have its servers being stored in some random server farm, they’re being stored in a former NATO nuclear bunker. So we think, at least.
Yup, so TPB’s new ISP, CyberBunker, has provided the site with access to a former NATO bunker that can withstand a nuclear attack, as well as Electromagnetic Pulses. That way The Man can’t interfere with your ability to grab that latest DVD rip you have your heart set on.
What’s not known, however, is whether or not the actual servers are inside said bunker. Or maybe they’re in a different bunker, or maybe they’re just somewhere else where nobody can find them.
And interestingly enough, the crazy Dutch anti-piracy organization, BREIN, did attempt to stop the move to Ukraine, but CyberBunker, after a bit of hemming and hawing, refused to bow to the pressure.
All is right in the world.
By PC World, on 2009.09.22, 02:21.00 pm
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.16, 05:22.41 pm
Okay, it’s actually a golf cart that just looks like a car, but it’s still pretty uncool. Volvos are nice cars, but I wouldn’t call them cool — and putting the nose of one on a little cart takes it from not cool to actively ridiculous.
Of course, I’d still love to race one around the course. Unfortunately they’re Europe-only right now, and possibly even Sweden-only. If you want one, you’ll have to go to one of the Volvo-sponsored matches going on.
By PC World, on 2009.07.02, 08:20.10 am
By CrunchGear, on 2009.06.30, 08:44.32 am
 Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X this morning announced it has agreed to buy file-sharing service The Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish crowns (which currently converts to approx. $7.7 million). In addition, GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism, a software technology company that develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p technology.
The transaction is scheduled to be closed in August 2009.
Update: The Pirate Bay has confirmed the news (see their commentary below).
By Neowin, on 2009.06.29, 08:54.06 am
Sony Corp. of Japan and Sweden's Ericsson have a long established joint venture in the Sony Ericsson line of cell phones. According to Reuters, it was reported in Saturday's Nikkei business daily that Sony would like to bring enhanced portable gaming features to the Sony Ericsson label to compete directly with Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch product lines. More and more game developers, like Capcom, are designing games for Apple's popular iPhone device and this is seen as a direct threat to some of Sony's portable gaming products. Sony is not commenting on the story but others have speculated that we may see a PlayStation Portable-like device that can make and receive cellphone calls. Read full story...
By CrunchGear, on 2009.06.29, 07:01.13 am
 Supposedly, the The Pirate Bay guys were found guilty in their recent trial in Sweden, and, supposedly, they got sentenced to a year in prison and had to pay $4.5 million in damages.
But back in the parallel universe which happens to be the real world, they've appealed the verdict and could probably keep doing so for the next few years. So in the meantime they need to keep busy, and what better way to do this than start a new user driven video portal to take on YouTube, called, predictably, Video Bay, allowing users to post and share video clips without having to worry about copyright violations. Seems reasonable. It's not like they need to attract any more legal interest or anything.
By PC World, on 2009.06.25, 03:10.16 pm
By CrunchGear, on 2009.06.19, 07:39.58 am
Gruber found some information that the AT&T tethering plan would cost $55 a month and suggests - but cannot confirm - that this will be in addition to the unlimited data plan already in place, potentially hitting the $85 per month for data. I, like him, find this outrageous and can only pray that this number will be more like $55 total.
On the aggregate, traffic on wireless networks is fairly low. Major carriers built out quite a bit of bandwidth - they just needed the right customers, applications, and phones to use it correctly. When I was a telecom consultant back in 1999 we were already talking about 3G but no one wanted to start up the pipe for fear of - what? I don’t know. Maybe they were afraid people would use it, downloading WAP pages willy-nilly.
I can’t speak for AT&T but in my experience as a billing and “service modification” analyst, the biggest hurdle here is probably a list of millions of names they have to provision with certain services - MMS, for example - and the refusal of marketing to cannibalize on current WWAN dongle sales.
A little insult to injury?
And our Scandinavian friends are all sharing a good laugh at our expense. Unlimited data plans with tethering run about US$20/month in Finland, Norway, and Sweden.
Mmmm, tasty pain!
By CrunchGear, on 2009.06.16, 11:40.06 am
 There isn’t a spot in the country that has been harder hit by the financial meltdown than Flint, MI. Forbes recently labeled Flint as the city that has the longest road to recovery too. It’s bad in the birthplace of General Motors and the financial climate is bad there right now - really bad. I know this first hand. That’s where I live.
But the city might soon lead the nation with the country’s first biogas plant. This plant will be built with the help of Swedish Biogas International and eventually help fuel the city’s municipal vehicle fleet, which in turn should save the city millions of dollars. That is, if the plant ever gets built.
This plant was officially announced last September when the King of Sweden visited Flint and spoke at a Kettering University. He spoke of how biogas helped his country become fuel independent and can put Flint back on track. The King, Michigan’s Governor Granholm, Flint’s mayor, the US Ambassador to Sweden and others then ceremonially broke ground.
The facility will be designed to take the human waste and convert it into biogas. This biogas would then be used to heat the facility. If an addition $4-million can be raised once the first part of the plant is completed, an addition will be built to produce biomethane which will fuel city buses and other vehicles.
The city has a large budget problem right now and it’s expected to get worse when GM attempts to renegotiate taxes on its five remaining facilities within the city. This plant should take some burden off of the city.
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But construction on the $8 to $10-million plant hasn’t started. The waste treatment facility where it is suppose to go hasn’t been touched. Supposedly construction on the facility sometime in August. The plan laid out by Swedish Biogas International still includes to have the plant up and running by the end of the year making it the first of its kind in the United States. And Flint could use something positive to dwell on for a change even if it is shit gas.
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