iPhone4idiots

Update 2/6/2012
As I said before, BTjunkie was IMO the best torrent site on the web. All is not lost however. There will always be more. For those that use torrents my recommendation is to try kickasstorrents here or Extratorrents here. Both are solid and safe. Of course EZTV is a great place to find TV shows and if desperate there is always The Pirate Bay.

OMFG, I’m watching the Super Bowl like the rest of America and I go to download a movie for later tonight and this is what I see,

“2005 – 2012 This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

Obviously this is MegaUpload and Pirate Bay continued fallout. Very depressing. Time for a shot as a final send off to what has been the best bit torrent site on the internet for years. Dark times my friends.

One good sign a tech company may have peaked is when it goes public. Yesterday, Facebook filed an initial public offering (IPO) for $5 billion worth of stock that will put a valuation on the company of around $85 billion. Despite its’ massive user base of 845 million users every month (over half of those are daily and almost half are mobile) this stock will be expensive. Facebook made a little over $1 billion last year on $3.7 billion in revenues. Of course the vast majority of that revenue comes from advertising and a whopping 12% comes from Zynga (the makers of Farmville and dozens of other popular games). IMO, the problem with Facebook is how far can they push things. See you are the product they are selling. Most Facebook users still don’t realize this and at a certain point it’s gonna be a major problem. Facebook’s filing mentions “privacy” 35 times. The truth, however, is the less privacy you have the more money Facebook makes. Continue Reading…

Today, Sweden’s Supreme Court announced that it would not be granting an appeal in the Pirate Bay case. What this means is that the four main people behind founding The Pirate Bay can no longer appeal their guilty verdict for copyright infringment. This was an appeal of a November 2010 ruling which reduced the sentence of a 2009 gulity verdict. Yes, the legal system in Sweden is about as fast as in the United States. Now the four men face varying prison sentences of four months to one year and a total fine of about $7 million. However, apparently in the Swedish justice system it is not uncommon to deduct 12 months from any prison sentence on cases over 5 years old. Given that this case has been going on for longer than that, I would be surprised if any of the men spent a day in jail. Not to mention that at least two of the men no longer reside in Sweden. Shortly after the ruling the Pirate Bay website, which actually isn’t part of the case anymore, was redirected from http://thepiratebay.org to http://thepiratebay.se. Apparantly, the current owners of the website fear the US will seize the domain now that the court case is over. Moving to the Swedish domain puts it outside of US jurisdiction. The Pirate Bay started nine years ago and was sued for copyright infringment over five years ago. Yet today the website remains and according to Alexa ranks as the 74th most trafficed website in the world (90th in the United States). I suspect the US government will be more successful at eliminating MegaUpload.

I’ve written in the past about how ATT has instituted a policy of data throttling for it’s top 5% of bandwidth users. I was curious as to how much speed would be cut back and the folks over at AppAdvice uploaded a video demonstrating the extreme nature of the slowdown. Using the popular Speedtest app on two identical iPhone 4S the download speeds on the throttled device are almost ten times slower. What’s even crazier is that the throttled speeds are similar to Edge! Now I haven’t tested this myself as I don’t want to suffer through these slow speeds until my next billing cycle. However, the video is quite clear as to what happens. ATT’s reduction of the data speed by such an extreme amount serves a purpose. It encourages their heavy users to cut back or switch to another carrier altogether. I’m sure ATT doesn’t mind losing the bandwidth hogs. The reduced speeds make it impossible to stream video and make apps like Maps and Safari quite slow. So where does the throttling begin. In the past ATT stated that 98% of it’s users use less than 2GB of data. However, I went over that amount last month and didn’t get throttled. In any event, if you want to avoid this keep an eye on your data usage and use wifi whenever possible. You can easily check your ATT data usage at any time by dialing *3282# (star DATA pound) on your iPhone. You’ll get a text showing how much data you’ve used, when your next billing cycle beings and how many texts you’ve sent. Not sure where this is going as I’m confident Verizon and Sprint are or will be doing something similar. In the meantime just hope you don’t get the text displayed here!

Update 1/27/2012
Oh crap. I’m a idiot guys. As @Leggee @jcis031071 and others pointed out iTransmission won’t sync to your iOS device from iTunes if you don’t have AppSync. Duh. My only pathetic excuse is it has been so long since I’ve had a non jailbroken device I let this simple fact slip my mind. That said, if there ever was a time jailbreak it is now. All devices can be updated to 5.0.1 in iTunes and then use Absinthe to jailbreak. Find the guide here. There really is no reason not to do it. This was done over one million times last weekend so rest assured it is safe and you can’t hurt your device. Sorry for getting any non jailbreakers hopes up.

I’m going to show you step by step how to easily download and view movies and TV shows to your iOS device. With the death of MegaUpload I highly encourage any of you to try this method. It’s really quite simple and in many ways better. Best of all, you don’t have to be jailbroken to do this. If you like this post or find it helpful, please leave me a comment on it. Without further adieu let’s begin! Continue Reading…

So what if MegaUpload never comes back? There are tons of alternatives but of course none are as good, popular or fast as MegaUpload. As I wrote yesterday, many of the other popular alternatives have either blocked United States traffic, disabled sharing of links or deleted user accounts. Thus, they are as good as dead too. Filesonic, Fileserve, FileJungle and UploadStation now forbid users from downloading anything they did not upload themselves. Upload.to is blocking all USA traffic. 4shared, VideoBB and VideoZer have been deleting user accounts and UploadBox and x7.to are just closing altogether. Nevertheless, there are still a some alternatives left. At least for the moment. BTW, look for a detailed post later this week on the best and easiest way to download to your iOS device in the post MegaUpload world. You don’t even have to be jailbroken either. Enough teasing, so what are the best storage lockers left? Continue Reading…

Wow, the United States has some juice. Several European countries have been prosecuting the founders of popular torrent website The Pirate Bay for years. Not only have they not spent a day in jail, but there website is still in operation to this day. Yet, the United States convinced New Zealand to arrest a dual citizen of Finland and Germany for extradition to face copyright infringement charges. Kim Dotcom has been in jail since his arrest on Friday and I’m beginning to think MegaUpload may never return. Even more impressive is the dramatic drop in storage locker file sharing the United States has produced in less than a week. Both FileSonic and FileServe have pulled the plug on their own business fearing the same fate as MegaUpload. Continue Reading…

Like sands through the hourglass, so goes the daily drama of MegaUpload. The only good thing about the FBI’s arrest and seizure of the MegaUpload has been the interesting reading it has provided. Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is quite the character. His birthname was Kim Schmitz, but he changed it years ago. A month ago in a big middle finger to the recording industry he put the MegaUpload Mega Song on YouTube. It’s a catchy song about how awesome MegaUpload is with over 12 million views that features tons of celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Jamie Foxx, Chris Brown, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Diddy, Floyd Mayweather, Jr and many others. Apparently Alicia Keys’ husband, Swizz Beatz, was negotiating to become CEO of MegaUpload for about a year. My guess is Mr. Dotcom thought it would be a good move to befriend some in the industry and it also surely helped him gather some of the singers featured in the Mega Song Video. Why Swizz Beatz would agree to become CEO was either lack of knowledge or greed. Either way it is interesting that he hasn’t been arrested or even questioned by the FBI so far. While this is intriguing the arrest of Kim Dotcom was right out of a Hollywood movie. Continue Reading…

Great news the untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 has been released. This is the first jailbreak of any kind for iPhone 4S so servers are sure to slammed for the next 48 hours. The jailbreak is easy as I’ve already updated my iPad 2 to 5.0.1, re-jailbroke it and so far am experiencing no bugs (as expected). So watch the video cause this jailbreak called Absinthe works differently than redsn0w or greenpois0n. After watching click continue reading for a few extra tips. Continue Reading…

MegaUpload has been shut down by federal prosecutors in Virginia. The site’s founder Kim Dotcom and three others were arrested by the police in New Zealand on request of US authorities. MegaVideo, the streaming site belonging to the same company and 16 other domains connected to the Mega company were seized as well. An indictment unsealed today by the department of justice claims MegaUpload has caused the entertainment industries more than $500 million in lost revenue. Not sure what this means going forward. Mr. Dotcom just weeks ago claimed to be operating within the law and has a tons of money and lawyers to fight. Given the Pirate Bay website still runs today I think MegaUpload will come back online in the future. In the meantime other storage locker websites like RapidShare, FileServe, WUpload and others will benefit.