Hasta La Gadget!

It isn’t exactly a secret that authorities and entertainment groups don’t like The Pirate Bay, but today the infamous site made it a little bit harder for them to bring it down. The Pirate Bay announced today that it has move its servers to the cloud. This works in a couple different ways: it helps the people who run The Pirate Bay save money, while it makes it more difficult for police to carry out a raid on the site.

“All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing,” a Pirate Bay blog post reads. “The site that you’re at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.” The site told TorrentFreak after the switch that its currently being hosted by two different cloud providers in two different countries, and what little actual hardware it still needs to use is being kept in different countries as well. The idea is not only to make it harder for authorities to bring The Pirate Bay down, but also to make it easier to bring the site back up should that ever happen.

Even if authorities do manage to get their hands on The Pirate Bay’s remaining hardware, they’ll only be taking its transit router and its load balancer – the servers are stored in several Virtual Machine instances, along with all of TPB’s vital data. The kicker is that these cloud hosting companies aren’t aware that they’re hosting The Pirate Bay, and if they discovered the site was using their service, they’d have a hard time digging up any dirt on users since the communication between the VMs and the load balancer is encrypted.

In short, it sounds like The Pirate Bay has taken a huge step in not only protecting its own rear end, but those of users as well. If all of this works out the way The Pirate Bay is claiming it will, then don’t expect to hear about the site going down anytime soon. Still, there’s nothing stopping authorities from trying to bring it down, or from putting in the work to try and figure out who the people behind The Pirate Bay are. Stay tuned.

There’s no shortage of fitness apps to track how much (or how little) you’ve been shaking your tail feather lately — such as MyFitnessPal, Endomondo and GAIN Fitness to name three we’ve written about lately. And if you don’t want to strap your phone to your arm and baste it in sweat, there are even a few dedicated fitness-friendly gizmos, such as Apple’s Nike + iPod in-shoe system, Nike’s Fuelband wristband or Motorola’s MotoACTIV. But none of these devices are especially intelligent — they tend to track total steps, distance, calories, and that’s about it (unless you start adding additional accessories such as heart-monitor chest straps).

Enter Amiigo: a fitness app and lightweight plastic bracelet (with detachable shoe-clip) that can identify the type of exercise you’re doing and tell you how well you’re doing it as you’re doing it, thanks to a variety of sensors analysing how your body is responding as you run, bike, swim (yes it’s waterproof), or whatever your preferred exercise poison.

Amiigo’s gesture-based software algorithms identify the different types of exercises you’re engaged in — and should improve over time as the software learns more about your movements, according to the startup. Having both a bracelet and a shoe clip helps its system distinguish between a pull-up and a bicep curl, say, although you don’t always have to wear both. To generate real-time fitness data, the hardware includes a variety of sensors that track variables such as your heart rate. The device includes motion sensors/accelerometers to track how you’re moving, plus an infrared sensor to monitor blood oxygen levels. The bracelet also incorporates a stainless steel plate to measure skin temperature.

Then the corresponding Amiigo iOS and Android apps allow you to view the data, set fitness goals and custom challenges, share workouts in real-time (which won’t be at all annoying…) and accrue fitness points for bragging rights and/or the chance to redeem them against discounts on fitness gear.

The startup reckons no one else in this space is doing gesture recognition to track activity type and response in such granular detail — at least not using just one main wearable device — which in turn allows it to provide detailed feedback via the app in order to act as a virtual personal trainer.

The startup is kicking off an Indiegogo on October 29 with the aim of raising $90,000, and hopes to be ready to ship in April 2013. First taker backers will be able to snag the device for an extremely tasty price of $89, after which it will be sold for $119 — which is still pretty neat considering it undercuts some of Amiigo’s less-capable competitor devices.

Also neat: Amiigo will be releasing an SDK for the device so app makers can explore additional uses. The startup tells me it could envisage various alternative use-cases for the hardware, such as enhanced patient care monitoring or chronic care monitoring, or — tapping up the Wii-style motion sensors inside Amiigo — even gaming scenarios.

The startup has been working on the device for around 10 months so far — with a core team of four, including “tech talent” from MIT.

If you’ve been looking for a way to ditch your car, HP Velotechnik’s new Scorpion fs 26 S-Pedelec electric trike could be a suitable replacement for your daily commuter. Despite a mouthful of a name, the motor-powered recumbent can hit a top speed of 28 miles per hour, while still folding away into an impossibly small package for easy storage. More »

“Taking one’s sweet time” just took on an entirely new meaning. Well over a year after Micron first introduced its RealSSD P320h PCI Express SSD, the aforesaid device is finally hitting the general availability stage. And with that, the flood of reviews begins. What sets this guy apart right out of the box is its native stature; much like Fusion-io (and very unlike most all other rivals from OCZ, Intel, LSI, etc.), this thing sidesteps the mishmash of SATA / SAS controllers and opts for a direct-attached PCIe approach. At around $7,000, it’s clearly aimed first at enterprise, but given Micron’s history in the consumer space, one could assume that this kind of wizardry will eventually trickle down. The fine folks over at HotHardware found their tester to be shockingly quick, easily outpacing its rivals when it came to read and write performance. Unfortunately, the Windows drivers provided weren’t exactly mature, which led to a few booting issues when swapping in varying motherboards. Of course, no one ever said the Ferrari of PCIe SSDs would purr without a bit of finagling. Hit up the links below for the full spiel.

Continue reading Micron’s RealSSD P320h PCI Express SSD gets reviewed: wildly fast, but a little unstable

Filed under: Storage

Micron’s RealSSD P320h PCI Express SSD gets reviewed: wildly fast, but a little unstable originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A lot of potential iOS device buyers usually seem to settle for the lower-capacity options if they don’t plan to stuff it with movies and music, and they believe apps are so small in size that even if they had a bunch installed, they assume they wouldn’t take up much space anyway. However, that no longer seems to be the case, since the average size of iOS apps is on the rise.

Research firm ABI Research conducted a survey on the iOS app ecosystem, and found out that the average app size was 23 MB as of last month. This is a 16% increase over the average app size back in March. And obviously, the average size of games saw the greatest increase at an average of 60 MB, up 42% from March.

AllThingsD cites a few reasons for the the size increase: One being that the Retina display allows app and game developers to use better quality graphics at higher resolutions, which will undoubtedly increase the size of the app by quite a bit. The second reason is because of the increase of the over-the-air app download limit from 20 MB to 50 MB. And the final reason is universal apps, which require the necessary resources to run on both the iPhone and iPad.

This doesn’t even take in account in-app downloads, which can soar into the gigabytes on navigation apps for offline maps, as well as music-streaming apps that offer offline streaming. So, the next time you’re looking to buy a new mobile device, take a look at how much space you’re using just for apps. You may be surprised by what you see.

[via AllThingsD]

iOS app size averages at 23 MB, 16-percent increase since March is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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