The Pirate Bay is planning to launch a paid VPN service for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting. The new service will be called IPREDator, named after the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that will go into effect in April. IPREDator is currently in private beta and is expected to go public next week for €5 per month.

IPREDator’s website says that it won’t store any traffic data, as its entire goal is to help people stay anonymous on the web. Without any data to hand over, copyright owners won’t be able to find individuals to target. … The question remains, however, if any significant portion of The Pirate Bay’s users will decide to fork over 5 Euro per month solely to remain anonymous. It seems more likely that the majority either won’t care, or will simply start looking for lesser-known torrent trackers to use.

At long last folks with a contract phobia or just a general penchant for lawlessness can pay exorbitant amounts of money to get an iPhone 3G contract-free. As promised, 8GB models for $599 and 16GB ones for $699 are now available from AT&T and Apple stores, with AT&T requiring buyers to be existing AT&T customers, limited at one per, while Apple stores will sell the handsets to anyone wandering in off the street — rebellious demeanor preferred.

Today, xGPS version 1.2 was released to jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches- finally bringing turn-by-turn voice navigation functionality to Apple’s GPS enabled mobile platform. Navigation is based on top notch Google Maps data and the software has some pretty slick features like Night Mode and maps downloading for offline use, giving it a paid-app caliber polish.

Netflix Inc is the latest media company to integrate with social networking website Facebook, whose huge community of young, tech-savvy users could help drive growth of the online DVD rental service’s subscriber base.

Starting on Tuesday, Netflix users can use Facebook Connect — software that links individual Facebook pages to third-party Web sites — to share their ratings of Netflix rentals with their Facebook friends, the companies said in a statement.

“Intuitively, the folks streaming (Netflix movies) on the laptop tend to be the under-25 crowd,” Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said. “You could make the leap that it is the more tech-savvy … the early adopter crowd … but Facebook is becoming more mainstream.”

Movie ratings will appear on Netflix subscribers’ Facebook pages if they opt into the program, and will link back to the correlating movie page at Netflix.com, the companies said.

The Orange County Register - News - AP
The fast-moving Conficker computer worm, a scourge of the Internet that has infected at least 3 million PCs, is set to spring to life in a new way on Wednesday - April Fools’ Day.

That’s when many of the poisoned machines will get more aggressive about “phoning home” to the worm’s creators over the Internet. When that happens, the bad guys behind the worm will be able to trigger the program to send spam, spread more infections, clog networks with traffic, or try and bring down Web sites.

Technically, this could cause havoc, from massive network outages to the creation of a cyberweapon of mass destruction that attacks government computers. But researchers who have been tracking Conficker say the date will probably come and go quietly.

More likely, these researchers say, the programming change that goes into effect April 1 is partly symbolic - an April Fools’ Day tweaking of Conficker’s pursuers, who for now have been able to prevent the worm from doing significant damage.