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Google has removed several popular apps from its Play Store that allowed Android users to access the Pirate Bay website, even if their ISP was trying to block access.

It removed four apps from the Android store today, including The Pirate Bay Proxy, Pirate Bay Premium, The Pirate Bay Mirror and PirateApp. Google cited violations of intellectual property provisions of its store as justification for removing the apps.

The apps only seem to provide a means by which to actually reach the Pirate Bay. They effectively act as browsers but use proxies to get to the Pirate Bay, avoiding ISP-imposed blocks.

Users with the apps installed can of course continue to use them, but new users will have to find them elsewhere and install manually. The Pirate Bay Proxy, for example, can be downloaded directly from the developer's website.

The developer, Gavin, told the TorrentFreak site that he is disappointed with Google's decision, and that Google's own Chrome browser can do the same thing as his app.

The app is no different from Firefox or Chrome in that it's a tool which provides access to TPB or any other web address," he said. He is appealing the decision and hopes to get the app back into the Play Store. It had clocked up over 900,000 downloads and was used by 45,000 people every day.

North Korea has denied any involvement in a devastating hack of Sony Pictures, the theft of 11TB of data and leaking of movies and personal information of many, many people.

Allegations of the involvement from the shady and mysterious state was met with denials from a North Korean diplomat, speaking with the understanding of anonymity to the Voice of America broadcast network earlier this week. The diplomat described the allegations as just another fabrication targeting the country.

U.S. authorities are still treating North Korea as a primary suspect however, with one national security source confirming as much to the Reuters news agency on Thursday.

The evidence that is publicly known suggests a tie to North Korea but of course it is circumstantial in nature. Sony Pictures had been blasted by North Korea for the planned release of a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco called "The Interview." They play journalists recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-un during an interview.

As you would expect, the details of the movie didn't go down well in North Korea. The state even sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon describing the film as an "act of war," and claimed it was "sponsoring terrorism."

Pirate streaming services that offer unauthorized access to movies and TV shows are being increasingly targeted by law enforcement.

In the latest round of action in this international cat and mouse duality, Spanish police targeted two very popular unauthorized streaming websites, peliculaspepito.com and seriespepito.com. Two men were also arrested as part of the investigation, and police officers allege they have made more than a million euros in illicit revenue from operating the services.

On Wednesday, the country's top Internet providers were ordered to block access to the two services by a court injunction. This action followed earlier complaints from the usual suspects in the entertainment industry: Universal, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Warner Bros, via an anti-pracy group "FAP".

Both services were allegedly owned by the same company; Zeniox Media SL, which generated approximately €1,085,000 in the previous three years while operating the sites.


Sources and Recommended Reading:
POLICE SHUT DOWN SPAIN'S TOP 'PIRATE' STREAMING SITES: www.torrentfreak.com (+Picture Source)

Having raised over $1.2 billion in funding, Uber is now valued at around $41 billion as the company seeks to continue its aggressive expansion while cleaning up its image.

The growth of Uber in just 12 months is very impressive. In December 2014, Uber was operating its car service in 60 cities and 21 countries. Fast forward a year, and Uber is now active in more than 250 cities in 50 countries. The San Francisco firm is six times larger than it was just a year ago.

It has no plans to slow down either. In fact, the $1.2 billion in financing will aid its investments in the Asia Pacific region. The firm's chief executive, Travis Kalanick, is so confident in Uber's ability to grow that he predicts it will generate more than 1 million jobs in cities all over the world in 2015.

He also has championed Uber as providing relief in congested cities, as the cheaper-than-a-taxi service may prompt millions more urban inhabitants to leave cars at home (or just don't buy one) and get around using Uber instead. If so, this will also ease parking issues in cities.

Despite its aggressive expansion in 2014, Uber has not had a perfectly pleasant year. In several countries it has been blasted by taxi drivers, unions and even by governments, but Uber maintains that services like it are necessary to provide some badly needed competition to the taxi industry in Urban areas.

A Member of the UK Parliament and former IP advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron believes that Internet Service Providers and web hosting companies have to shoulder some of the responsibility for leaked Sony movies, following a massive hack.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, Mike Weatherley gave his opinion on spreading blame and responsibility for the leaking of movies including Fury, and Annie, following a devastating attack on Sony Pictures last week. Over 11TB of data was allegedly stolen. Since then, a massive ~26GB dump of data including the personal details of Sony staff, including their names, addresses, social security numbers and more, has appeared online.

The hack coincided with the leak of several Sony Pictures movies, which have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times through torrent websites and other sources of pirated content.

An FBI investigation is currently under way into the extraordinary breach, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - aka North Korea - is near the top of the list of suspects, and you can read the reasons why that is the case right here.

The German High Court has decided not to permit the extradition of a man once described as the world's "number two" hacker to the United States to face prosecution.

Turkish national Ercan Findikoğlu, 32 years old, has alleged links to global cybercrime activity that generated millions of dollars in illicit revenue. He has been linked to the 2012/2013 attacks on EnStage and ElectraCard in India, two payment processing companies, and on partner banks including the the Bank of Muscat, Oman, and the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaima (RAKBANK), UAE.

All told, over $45 million was stolen by using cloned payment cards with stolen PIN codes to withdraw cash from ATM machines all over the world, including from some 140 machines in New York. In February 2013, over 36,000 illicit ATM withdrawals were made within a ten hour time frame.

Findikoğlu is also allegedly linked to a failed heist targeting over a million credit card numbers back in 2008, around the time he was described as the world's "number two hacker."

In August, a regional court approved his extradition to the United States, but now the Bundesverfassungsgerich (Federal Constitutional Court of Germany) has overturned the lower court's decision, citing the "extreme length" of the sentence being threatened by U.S. authorities, and the inclusion of a "conspiracy" charge which is incompatible with German laws.

HTC One owners will have a nice start to their Friday, as HTC will be rolling out Android Lollipop OTA update to One (M8) and One (M7).

This brings the latest and best of Android to HTC's flagship owners, whether the flagship was bought in 2013 or 2014. There's one catch: the OTA update will be available only to Google Play Edition phone owners. Others, especially those with operator-locked phones, will receive the update later (or in worst case scenario, never).

M8 GPE Owners! We just received TA from Google!! I am very grateful for all your patience. OTA to start at noon on 12/5 (working to pull in)

— Mo (@moversi) December 5, 2014

A week after hackers took down the networks of Sony Pictures and stole 11 terabytes of data, more personal data has been released today, including the social security numbers of nearly 50,000 past and present employees.

Among those with leaked information were celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, Rebel Wilson and Judd Apatow.

Besides the socials, hackers released much more info, as well. Credit card info, social media accounts, computer passwords, home addresses, salary information and contracts are also available now for all to see. Some of the leaked personal data comes from as far back as 2000. On the corporate side, there were passwords and logins for expensive research and data services such as Bloomberg, ComScore and Lexis Nexis leaked, and even the logins for Sony's Amazon and FedEx accounts.

Sony Pictures truly failed its employees with lax security as the documents were kept without encryption, and in plain text labeled files as obvious as "YouTube login passwords.xlsx," for example.

It is unclear where the destructive malware originated, but a handful of security experts have cited how similar the attack was to 2013 attacks by North Korea against South Korea. In fact, North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un promised "merciless retaliation" if Sony did not ban showings of its new film "The Interview," a comedy in which Seth Rogen and James Franco are sent to interview Un and then kill him. North Korea, for its part, has denied any involvement.

Spotify has gotten into the holiday spirit, discounting their premium package for new customers.

Anyone new to the service can get the Premium subscription for just $0.99 for 3 months, when it then reverts back to the normal $9.99 per month.

A premium account gives you unlimited, ad-free access to the entire Spotify catalog and it also gives you the ability to stream from mobiles and other devices. You can also save songs and playlists for offline listening.

Spotify also offers a free ad-supported service and a cheaper "unlimited" service that gets rid of the ads, but doesn't give you mobile access.

Check out the deal here.

Google's excellent new operating system, Android 5.0, is currently on just 0.1 percent of handsets, meaning nearly nobody has gotten to test it outside of the tech media world.

By comparison, Android 2.2, released in early 2010, is still on 0.5 percent of handsets.

Of course, the numbers make sense given that Android 5.0 Lollipop was released to November 12th, and is still only available for a handful of devices. The Nexus 6, which we reviewed here, is still extremely hard to come by but the figure should pick up when all the carriers announce firm release dates.

Other notable devices that aren't in the Nexus line, like the LG G3 and the Moto X, also have seen limited rollouts of the operating system.

Android 4.4 KitKat remains king, with 33.9 percent share, followed by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean at 21.3 percent and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean at 20.4 percent.

Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have unceremoniously ended their partnership in the Nook digital venture of the bookstore.

Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $300 million for a stake in Nook, and today the deal is over, with Microsoft taking a significant loss and no real gains from the partnership.

Microsoft has sold "all of its $300 million convertible Series A preferred limited liability company interest in exchange for an aggregate purchase price equal to (i) $62,425,006.63 in cash and (ii) 2,737,290 shares of common stock."

With B&N shares currently at around $21, Microsoft will get to leave with $119 million in equity, down quite significantly from their original investment.

Of course, the company's stock could go much higher to offset the loss, but things are not looking good for Nook. YoY quarterly revenues decreased 41.3% from 2013 to just $64 million. Device sales fell 63.7% YoY.

A Los Angeles man has become the first person convicted under California's 'revenge porn' law for posting topless images of an ex-girlfriend to Facebook.

Noe Iniguez tried to hide behind a fake identity when he posted topless pictures of an ex-girlfriend to her employer's Facebook page, and also described her as a "drunk" and a "slut" while he urged the employer to let her go.

He had been the subject of a restraining order issued in November 2011 following their break up. They had been together for four years, and Iniguez had been sending her harassing text messages in the wake of their relationship.

Under the 'revenge porn' law in California, it is illegal to upload unauthorized nude or sexual images of a person with the sole purpose of causing them distress. It was enacted in October 2013.

Noe Iniguez will now go down in history as the first person convicted under the law. The 36 year old was sentenced to a year in prison and three months of probation. Additionally, he must keep away from his ex-girlfriend and attend counselling.

Hawking warns again that Artificial Intelligence could one day destroy humanity, while acknowledging that the early primitive forms of A.I. we currently utilize have been very helpful.

He reiterated his fear of the potential of A.I. to bring about the end of human civilization as we know it in an interview with the BBC. "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," he warned, as a machine spoke for him.

That kind of A.I. - the primitive technology we use today to overcome obstacles - has been very useful to humanity, Hawking will submit, but he fears for the long term as A.I. becomes increasingly more powerful. Could humans lose their grip on intelligent machines one day?

The pessimistic commentators in this debate cite the potential for artificial intelligence to quickly surpass that of a human being, and could eventually lead to intelligence re-making itself in order to become more and more powerful, or that it may experience a form of "technological evolution" at a pace vastly more rapid than the biological evolution that developed human intelligence.

Such super-smart intelligences may find human affairs totally unimportant, and may even see humanity as a hindrance.

Arnold Schwarzenegger returns for the fifth Terminator movie, coming to movie theaters in July, 2015.

The movie also stars Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor, Jason Clarke as John Connor and Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese. The film is initially set in 2029 with John Connor retaining his position as leader of the resistance, forced to send Kyle Reese back to foil a SkyNet plot against him, and to save his mother's life.

As you'd expect, when Reese travels through time, things aren't quite what he expected to find.

Check out the trailer.

According to attorneys representing consumers in a class action antitrust suit against Apple, the Cupertino giant was deleting songs from iPods that were bought from iTunes' rivals.

Consumers would purchase music from sources other than iTunes - Amazon for example - and then store it on an iPod. Later, when attempting to sync the iPod with iTunes, an error would reportedly occur instructing the user that factory settings must be restored.

If the user went ahead and restored the settings, songs purchased from rival sources would be lost, according to attorney Patrick Coughlin, who made the claim to jurors in the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California.

Furthermore, Coughlin asserted that Apple directed the system not to inform users of the problem, which occurred frequently between 2007 and 2009.

Attempting to explain the actions to the court, Apple security director Augustin Farrugia cited fears of hacking, and said it was a legitimate security measure. He said Apple didn't provide a more detailed explanation because they didn't want to confuse users.

Apple paranoid about iTunes / iPod hacking?

Farrugia even name-dropped "DVD Jon", referring to Jon Lech Johansen who was responsible for the DeCSS decryption tool that made it possible to rip the contents of retail DVDs back in the late '90s. Later, in 2004, Johansen got under Apple's skin with a tool called PlayFair, intended to be a solution for the "FairPlay" digital rights management Apple initially used to protect iTunes songs from piracy.