One of the founders of the Pirate Bay is kicking off a venture that aims to help websites generate cash.

Called Flattr, the micropayments system revolves around members paying a fixed monthly fee.

At the end of each month that cash will be divided among participating sites a Flattr member wants to reward.

Members might want to reward a band that made a track they liked, the author of a story they enjoyed or a site that gave useful advice.

Participating sites will sport a Flattr button in the same way that many have clickable icons that let visitors send information to friends or refer something they find interesting to sites such as Digg and Redditt.

“The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month,” said Mr Sunde.

Wikileaks is in the process of making a cache of documents and files from eleven different neo-Nazi organisations readable, and readily available, online.

The membership records and private messages are currently being formatted to make them easy for non-techies to read and will be released on the Wikileaks site shortly.

The organisation got massive publicity last year when it published a BNP membership list handed over by a disgruntled ex-member.

The raw data is already available but needs formatting so: “your grandmother can read them and google can find them… Journalists won’t write about it otherwise.”

The site is asking for volunteers with enough database skills to be able to expand fields and dumping to text.

The compressed data is about 54MB.

The internal documents include more than just membership lists. There are what seem to be private internal messages, forum posts and email addresses.

Hulu has debuted a long-requested feature–the ability to find out when new episodes of TV shows will be available to stream.

The video site, which is a joint venture of NBC, ABC, and Fox, calls the new feature Coming Soon. It went live Monday.

You’ll be able to watch popular cable television series such as HBO’s “Entourage” and AMC’s “Mad Men” on your computer by the end of the year without paying extra - as long as you’re a Comcast Corp. subscriber watching at home.

Comcast will be the first cable TV operator to unlock online access to a slate of valuable cable shows and movies, aiming to replicate what’s available on television through video on demand.

Time Warner Cable Inc. and others plan to follow as the pay-TV companies look to satisfy growing consumer appetite for online video while preserving subscription revenue.

Access will be carefully guarded: Comcast subscribers can initially watch shows and movies only on their home computers after being verified by the cable system. And for now, the online viewing will be restricted to those who also get Internet service through Comcast, not through competitors like phone companies.

Comcast, wanting to make sure the shows will remain off-limits to non-subscribers, still is working on providing access over competing home broadband systems as well as on the go - at work, on laptops and, one day, over cell phones.

In its search for fugitives, the FBI has begun using facial-recognition technology on millions of motorists, comparing driver’s license photos with pictures of convicts in a high-tech analysis of chin widths and nose sizes.

The project in North Carolina has already helped nab at least one suspect. Agents are eager to look for more criminals and possibly to expand the effort nationwide. But privacy advocates worry that the method allows authorities to track people who have done nothing wrong.

“Everybody’s participating, essentially, in a virtual lineup by getting a driver’s license,” said Christopher Calabrese, an attorney who focuses on privacy issues at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Earlier this year, investigators learned that a double-homicide suspect named Rodolfo Corrales had moved to North Carolina. The FBI took a 1991 booking photo from California and compared it with 30 million photos stored by the motor vehicle agency in Raleigh.

In seconds, the search returned dozens of drivers who resembled Corrales, and an FBI analyst reviewed a gallery of images before zeroing in on a man who called himself Jose Solis.

With the current H1N1 flu (swine flu) pandemic under way, many public health officials are concerned that critical healthcare resources could be stretched thin as people flood hospital emergency departments and physicians’ offices to determine whether they have the illness. In response, Microsoft Corp. announced a new Web site, H1N1 Response Center (http://www.h1n1responsecenter.com), which provides users with timely and relevant content and enables consumers to gauge symptoms and receive guidance using an H1N1 self-assessment service.

“If current estimates are correct, many emergency departments across the nation could be overwhelmed by two groups of patients — those who have H1N1 and those who believe they have H1N1,” said Angela Gardner, M.D., FACEP, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians. “It is going to be essential that we use every tool and service at our disposal to contain this illness, and online H1N1 self-assessment tools, such as the one offered by Microsoft, can be helpful in providing people with ways to determine whether they should seek emergency care.”

Designed to help people decide what to do if they are worried that they or someone they know might have H1N1, the site offers consumers a self-assessment licensed from medical and public health experts at Emory University. The service assists people in deciding whether their symptoms could be caused by the H1N1 flu virus and provides guidance on what they can do next.

IBM has launched LotusLive iNotes, an on-demand e-mail, calendaring and contact management system meant to compete with the likes of Gmail and Microsoft Exchange, the company said Friday.

Pricing starts at US$3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year.

IBM is aiming the software at large enterprises that want to migrate an on-premise e-mail system to SaaS (software as a service), particularly for users who aren’t tied to a desk, such as retail workers. It is also hoping to win business from smaller companies interested in on-demand software but with concerns about security and service outages, such as those suffered by Gmail in recent months.

LotusLive iNotes is based on technology IBM purchased from the Hong Kong company Outblaze.

Software developers will be able to start charging for applications downloads to Palm Inc’s high-profile Pre smartphone with the company’s launch of an e-commerce beta program set to start in mid-September.

Developers will still have the choice of giving apps away for free, but Palm said on Tuesday that software providers who want to charge for Pre apps will get 70 percent of revenue from the sale. The remaining 30 percent would go to Palm in an arrangement that mirrors Apple Inc’s app store.

Although you can win or lose real money, BringIt.com is not considered online gambling, and it’s legal in 39 states.

The site, which lets players challenge other gamers for money, says it is different from online poker and other games of chance because video games are considered a game of skill.

BringIt is set to emerge from its “beta” test version in the next few days. It’s free to sign up, provided you are at least 18. The site makes money by taking a 10 percent cut from people’s wagers and a $4 fee from winners when they withdraw their loot.

Founder and CEO Woody Levin, 30, said most of the players on BringIt play for small amounts of money, $5 or $10. It’s not really for “hardcore, crazy gamers,” he said, but rather, people who “want to put their money where their mouth is, a little bit.”

To ensure that first-time players don’t go pawning engagement rings, BringIt limits players’ entry fees to $25 for the first 10 games they play. The limit increases in steps until it reaches $500.

BringIt supports the PlayStation 2, the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the Wii. Players challenge each other on the site, but play on their consoles. BringIt holds players’ entry fees until the game is finished. After the game is done, it verifies the results and credits the winner, minus the service fee.

Barnes & Noble Inc. on Monday stepped up its fight in the small but highly competitive market for electronic books with the launch of a new e-bookstore offering titles to be read on a variety of devices.

Barnes & Noble will sell books that shoppers can read on the iPhone, iTouch, BlackBerry and most personal computers, whereas competitors have sold devices designed solely for reading electronic books, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle or Sony Corp.’s Sony Reader.

New York-based Barnes & Noble said it also will be the exclusive provider of books for a reader from Mountain View, Calif.-based Plastic Logic, which expects to release it in 2010. And the company expects to make more devices compatible in the coming months.

Comcast Corp. said Monday it will be streaming HBO and Cinemax shows, movies and other content online to 5,000 subscriber households in a national trial set to start in coming weeks. It is the first time the two premium movie channels will be offering their programs over the Internet to computers. Downloads to mobile devices may come in the future.

HBO and Cinemax will join TNT, TBS and Starz in Comcast’s online video trial. If the technical test is successful, Comcast will roll out access coast-to-coast to its subscribers at no additional cost.

The trial is part of a joint effort with Time Warner Inc. to offer cable programming on the Internet as viewership increasingly moves outside of the living room. But programmers and pay-TV operators will provide access only behind a walled garden of subscribers.

Unveiled last month, the venture dubbed “TV Everywhere” by Time Warner and “On Demand Online” by Comcast began with TNT and TBS.

The surviving parts of the world’s oldest Christian bible will be reunited online on Monday, generating excitement among biblical scholars still striving to unlock its mysteries.

The Codex Sinaiticus was hand written by four scribes in Greek on animal hide, known as vellum, in the mid-fourth century around the time of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great who embraced Christianity.

Not all of it has withstood the ravages of time, but the pages that have include the whole of the New Testament and the earliest surviving copy of the Gospels written at different times after Christ’s death by four of the Apostles: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The bible’s remaining 800 pages and fragments — it was originally some 1400 pages long — also contain half of a copy of the Old Testament. The other half has been lost.

“The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world’s greatest written treasures,” said Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library.

“This 1600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the bible was transmitted from generation to generation,” he said.