Anti-Piracy Lawyers Face DDoS Before Pivotal Court Decision

Undeterred by the online destruction of ACS:Law, UK lawyers Gallant Macmillan will head off to the High Court on Monday to demand the identities of hundreds more people they claim have been detected sharing files online. While the ISP that holds the identities says it will resist the demand and ask for the hearing to be adjourned, the judge and jury of Operation Payback will pass down their verdict tomorrow, sentencing Gallant Macmillan to a DDoS attack — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Heavy-lifting balloons: Flying saucers

Transporting large, clunky bits of equipment has always posed a challenge. Roads and railways do not reach everywhere, and even if they did, many cumbersome and heavy constructions need to be hauled in pieces, only to be put together at the final destination. Aeroplane cargo faces even tighter restrictions on shape and size, not to mention the need for runways. Heavy-transport helicopters, such as the Mil Mi-26 or Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane, address some of these difficulties, but their payloads are limited to 20 and nine tonnes, respectively, and the huge rotors create a powerful downdraft that makes handling that payload rather tricky. So people have long been looking for other ways round the problem. Now, Skylifter, an Australian aeronautical firm, thinks it has found the perfect solution.

The company is developing a piloted dirigible capable of carrying loads of up to 150 tonnes over distances as great as 2,000km (1,240 miles) at a speed of 45 knots (83kph). This would permit the craft to transport not just hefty components, but entire buildings, to remote areas. The company envisages modules ranging from rural hospitals and disaster-relief centres to luxury airborne cruise ships — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Hello, want to kill some time?

Kick Ass is a JavaScript bookmarklet created by Erik Andersson that turns the entire web into a game of Asteroids. Just head over to the site, drag the bookmarklet into your tool bar and start destroying stuff.

Kick Ass will add a triangular spaceship to any page. Use the arrow keys to steer and the space bar to shoot. And remember, like the site says, “it’s cooler if you make your own sound effects” — via webmonkey

Twitter has allowed us to see directly into the brain of 50 Cent. And it’s not pretty

When the exciting new thing called social media first came along, it promised to do what years of reality television, forests’ worth of glossy magazines and countless fish-suppers’ worth of paparazzi shots failed quite to manage: it would allow celebrities to show us The Real Them.

If you ever wondered what really went on in the heads of the people you are used to goggling at on telly, you needed wonder no longer: now, thanks to the wonder of Twitter, we would be able to SEE DIRECTLY INTO THEIR BRAINS.

It seems to work; at least for celebrities who write their own tweets. You discover that Simon Pegg is funny and nice, Graham Linehan intelligent and politically conscious, William Gibson geeky and sociable, Amy Winehouse a bit erratic, and 50 Cent . . . well, you discover that 50 Cent is an absolutely epic plonker.

A very useful supplementary feed – @English50Cent – interprets his sayings for those less with it. For instance, when Fiddy found himself having an online scrap with some pre-teen Justin Bieber fans, he tweeted: “I’m a take my belt off and beat one of you little motherfuckers were your mama and daddy at anyway bad ass kids.” @English50Cent translated: “I am going to remove my trousers and attack some children” — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Vast Majority Of Software Patents In Lawsuits Lose

Well, this is interesting (and quite surprising). A new study by John Allison, Mark Lemley, Joshua Walker looked at highly litigated patents to see how well they did in court, and came up with some really unexpected findings.

Digging deeper into the report, it looks at and tests a variety of different concepts around patents and litigation. In theory, if a patent is used in multiple patent cases, you tend to think that it must be a pretty solid patent, and one that has been vetted plenty of times. And yet, when the researchers looked at the 106 patents that have been involved in eight or more lawsuits since 2000, they found that the patent holder wins such cases only 10.7% of the time. For patents that have only been brought to litigation once, the patent holder wins 47.3% of the time — an astounding difference — via redwolf.newsvine.com