Part of the Google I/O onslaught yesterday was an update to Google Play Books for both Android and iOS. In and of itself it's not exactly ground-breaking, but Google'll now let you read books uploaded to your Google Drive (through Google Books), which means cloud-syncing for your own, erm, acquired books. Read More >>

It's one thing if your friends, family, and neighbours find out that you've been doing some torrenting. It's a bit worse if they find out what kind of porn you like. Unluckily for smut pirates everywhere, a new "pay-up-now" letter that's doing the circuit pretty explicitly threatens to go around telling people exactly that. Read More >>

Occasionally, Google (and some of its users) don't quite see eye-to-eye. Extensions to Google Chrome which provide functions that are both legally and morally dubious fall into that category, which is why they generally get removed. But if your morals are loose and your scruples few and far between, you can still get at the forbidden fruit -- including Spotify downloads -- it just takes a bit of work. Read More >>

Long-running Bittorrent tracker Demonoid appeared to be attempting another relaunch this week, although it's almost certain the return was a scam designed to trick people into visiting a malicious site to fill their computers with malware. Read More >>

At long last, Spotify has launched the web-based interface it introduced last year. Unfortunately, it left a gaping security vulnerability that leaves the songs wide-open to download MP3s from Spotify with a simple Chrome extension. Read More >>

BitTorrent's always got something cooking, from a streaming video protocol that never overloads, to a neat little private cloud storage system. Now the company's invented a new kind of torrent that lets content creators pack their own little store right inside. Read More >>

The Prenda Law offensive against random porn downloaders has been blown apart by a US judge, who accused the claimants of lying, hitting those charged with unavoidable legal fees and generally trying to profit from the US legal system by "seeking easy money" from those hit by spurious cases. Read More >>

Today, Adobe announced the latest round of updates to its ubiquitous software suite, with its Creative Cloud subscription service taking centre-stage. Not only is the old Creative Suite moniker being dropped completely, but a whole slew of cloud-dependent features were introduced. While the updates will be a boon to a huge number of Adobe customers, it's going to annoy the hell out of one core Adobe demo: the pirates. Read More >>

The Chief Content Officer of streaming giant Netflix claims the modern trend for easily streaming legal content is impacting on the more hardcore Bittorrent scene, with pirate traffic dropping in countries when Netflix switches on its servers. According to Netflix's Ted Sarandos, this is because "...people are mostly honest." Read More >>

Every gripping pirate story has to involve at least one scene set on some godforsaken island with palm trees, and the epic Pirate Bay saga is no exception. Just days after fleeing for Iceland, everyone's favourite torrent site is now ending in .SX. A tot of rum for anyone who can tell me what country the .SX domain belongs to. Read More >>

The UK's Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act has been passed, putting controversial new copyright laws regarding what's known as "orphan works" into place for photos put online. The changes mean that if there's no clear identifying meta data in images, anyone can use and sub-license them and the owners have little recourse to complain. Read More >>

An incredibly clever bit of anti-piracy work has been implemented by the maker of Game Dev Tycoon, with the developer releasing its own cracked version to the file-sharing web sites -- complete with game-breaking piracy elements that make playing it increasingly futile. Read More >>

An updated McAfee product will kindly warn you should you attempt to download pirated material or visit dodgy web sites, politely offering alternative legal sources of files instead. We can see this catching on with literally three or four people. Read More >>

After making a run for it from Sweden to Greenland, and then finding that Greenland really didn't want a bunch of pirates plundering its waters, Iceland seems happy to have the Pirate Bay. So, time to update your bookmarks: ThePirateBay.is is TPB's new home. Read More >>

With the recent launch of Mega, Kim Dotcom has been on the upswing lately, at least when he's not getting stranded by a busted helicopter. Recently, he sat down with the Financial Times to discuss his status as a hero/villain, the future of content delivery, and the $20,000 he claims to have sunk into iTunes downloads. Read More >>