Heroes was the Most Pirated Show of 2009

Way to go, kids! It’s all your fault that Heroes will be canceled! Well, not really, but you’re pushing it. According to the blog TorrentFreak, which reports on the Internet black market known as file-sharing, NBC’s Heroes was the most illegally downloaded television show of 2009.

The stat shouldn’t be taken as gospel, however, as the site merely lists the number of downloads for a show’s most popular episode and not its entire season run (not to mention that it’s tough to swallow empirical data from a site with “freak” in its name). Still, TorrentFreak claims that the most-pirated episode of Heroes (the particulars of the episode were not disclosed) was “stolen” approximately 6,580,000 times. That’s over half a million more than the show’s average TV audience.

Overall, sci-fi and action dominated the list of most-pirated shows, with Lost (6,310,000 downloads), Prison Break (3,450,000), Dexter (2,780,000), and House (2,590,000) rounding out the top five. Eight of the top ten entries were broadcast shows, and two were premium-cable shows (Dexter and no. 10 True Blood), indicating that TV piracy isn’t committed primarily by those who don’t want to pay extra for HBO and Showtime, but rather by those who don’t want to pay for cable at all and are willing to watch on their dinky computer monitors.

And while online piracy is thought to be the realm of the male basement nerd, both Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives made the top ten list. Either female basement nerds are getting into the act too, or the guys out there are getting soft. That’s what happens when you dudes gender-swap and level a female night elf to 70 in World of Warcraft.

Overall, the takeaway from these numbers isn’t that there are millions of horrible people out there stealing TV (a large chunk of the downloads is thought to be from foreign markets that can’t get the shows legally), it’s this: Television viewing habits are changing. Networks shouldn’t be looking for ways to stop illegal downloading, but rather to find a way to make it work to their advantage.

The list:
Show Title, Downloads of most-popular episode
1. Heroes, 6,580,000
2. Lost, 6,310,000
3. Prison Break, 3,450,000
4. Dexter, 2,780,000
5. House, 2,590,000
6. 24, 2,440,000
7. Desperate Housewives, 2,180,000
8. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, 1,960,000
9. Grey’s Anatomy, 1,740,000
10. True Blood, 1,600,000

tv.com

Switzerland: FIFA U17 World Champions

Seferovic's second-half goal settled the match

Haris Seferovic headed home the only goal in the 63rd minute to earn Switzerland their first Fifa World Cup success at any level.

Nigeria had late chances to level score but the Swiss held their nerve to spoil the party for the Golden Eaglets and their vociferous home fans.

They proved to be worthy champions, winning every match in the tournament.

Nigeria, chasing an unprecedented fourth U-17 world crown, made a purposeful start, piling heavy pressure on the Swiss and creating a handful of scoring chances.

But Abdul Jagun, Sani Emmanuel and Aigbe Oliha had their efforts saved or punched away by Swiss goalkeeper Benjamin Siegrist.

It was a different match altogether in the second half as Switzerland abandoned their defensive tactics to take the game to their wasteful opponents.

Nasim Ben Khalifa and Pajtim Kasami took control of the midfield surprisingly muscling out strapping Nigerian midfielder Ramon Azeez.

They deservedly took the lead as Seferovic leaped above Azeez in the Nigerian penalty area to head a corner-kick over Dami Paul and into the far corner for his fifth goal of the tournament.

Stanley Okoro shot agonisingly wide late in the game to sum up Nigeria’s profligacy in front of goal.

They had the ball in the back of the net a few minutes later, but the referee ruled it out for an infringement on Siegrist.

The home fans who had created an electrifying atmosphere inside the Abuja National Stadium went home dejected and disappointed.

But in the end, Switzerland who also defeated Brazil, Germany and Italy to win the trophy, celebrated with their handful of fans in red.

Yahoo! Messenger 10 now out of beta with video chat and more

It seems like just yesterday that Yahoo! Messenger 10 entered beta, showing off new video chat and social networking features. Now it’s all grown up, out of beta, and replacing Y! Messenger 9 as the default version on Yahoo’s download page. Folks upgrading to version 10 get the benefit of several nice new features, including video calling and integration of streams from social sites.

Yahoo! has made some big improvements to its webcam feature, adding better video quality, synched audio and a full-screen mode. You can also move your video call windows around and place them side-by-side. It also supports video effects. To make video calls, both sides need to be on Yahoo! Messenger 10.

The other big addition is a social streaming view called Y! Updates, which lets you see your contacts’ updates from several social sites, including Twitter, Last.fm, and Yahoo!’s own Buzz. Of course, it also shows your friends’ Messenger status messages. However, CNET suggests you do a custom install of Yahoo! Messenger 10 rather than the default installation, so you have more control over toolbars and other additional junk that comes with Messenger.

Champion Crowned in Global Socket Showdown

Forget the upcoming Winter Olympics, CNET UK has pitted the nations of the world against one another in a heated competition that is inspiring fevered displays of national pride. And, just like the real Olympics, the sporting spectacle has been marred by outraged participants and furious non-qualifiers, as well as caustic accusations of impartiality, ethnocentrism, and corruption.

The contest (if you can call it a contest) has been dubbed ‘Plug vs. Plug‘ (C’mon, Brits. Couldn’t you come up with something a little more creative and colourful colorful, like ‘The Plug Rumble?’), and seeks to anoint the most effective and formidable plug-and-socket combo in the world. It’s not too difficult to guess which national team the hoity-toity, high-and-mighty Redcoats crowned champion, but the hilarious and scathing comment section alone is undoubtedly worth a visit. [From: CNET UK]

Google will factor page load speed into search result rankings

Google sure seems hung up on the speed of the web these days, and I have to say, I like it. After announcing the SPDY protocol they’re working on to speed up page loading time, it has come out that Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results. This isn’t some unsubstantiated rumor, either; it comes from none other than Matt Cutts, the high-profile Google employee who works on Google’s web spam team.

Cutts said that the directive to speed up searching comes right from the top, Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Search Engine Land he said they want searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine.

At first blush it seems counter to Google’s accuracy goals to favor fast pages over slow pages when a slow page might be more relevant to a user’s search, but I know that I have often not even bothered letting a slow page finish loading when I was busy searching for something specific. If Google can shield me from the slow sites, it will help me find what I’m looking for more quickly.

Waveboard: Google Wave client now available for iPhone

You may have already figured out that you can use Google Wave in Safari on the iPhone, but now there’s a better alternative. Waveboard, one of the early attempts at a desktop Wave client, now has an iPhone app. The Waveboard app will run you 99 cents, but it’s a much faster way to check your Waves than loading them up in the built-in browser.

Waveboard basically gives you the same thing you get on the mobile web version of Wave, but also adds some additional features. You can shake your device to logout and reload your Waves, and push notifications are apparently coming soon. It sounds like right now is the time to jump on Waveboard, in case future features come with a higher price.

If you have 40 seconds to kill, and you want to see Waveboard in action, check out the demo video after the jump.

[via TechCrunch]

Confused about Google Wave? Now you can read the bleeping manual.

Google Wave is an innovative new communication tool, but part of innovation is that it’s not always intuitive to use. Early adopters have been jumping into Wave with little guidance on how to take advantage of all its features. I guess you could watch the 90-minute Wave video, but that’s not exactly a quick-start guide.

Well, there’s a saying almost as old as computers themselves, and it goes: RTFM. Read the, um, flippin’ manual. Now Google Wave has a flippin’ manual that you can read, but it’s not from Google: it’s from Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani and Adam Pash. Sounds a lot better than “watch the frickin’ 90-minute video,” eh?

Gina and Adam’s guide is quickly making the rounds on the web, being promoted by the likes of Mashable. I’d like to add Download Squad’s endorsement to the list. The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a straightforward, well-organized volume that goes a long way toward demystifying a new and complex tool. It’s available to read online for free, but you’ll be able to buy it as a DRM-free PDF soon, and in print in January.

Still don’t have Wave? Go throw your name in the hat for Download Squad’s Great Google Wave Invite Giveaway.

Halloween horror: Eight players see red in Premier League day of shame

Jamie Carragher led a Halloween horror show as eight red cards were flashed in the Premier League in one day.

Carragher was sent off in the 82nd minute of Liverpool’s 3-1 defeat at Fulham, just three minutes after his team-mate Philipp Degen had also been given his marching orders by referee Lee Mason.

And the bad behaviour wasn’t confined to England’s top flight – there were four dismissed in the Scottish Premier League in a grand total of 19 up and down the country.

Early bath: Jamie Carragher is sent-off during Liverpool's defeat to Fulham

There was no sign of the card carnage to come as half-time approached yesterday. Bolton defender JLloyd Samuel cracked first and was dismissed for hauling down Didier Drogba in a 4-0 defeat by Chelsea. Seconds later Kenwyne Jones was walking after a clash with West Ham’s Herita Ilunga in Sunderland’s 2-2 draw at the Stadium of Light.

Referee Andre Marriner later levelled it up by sending off Radislav Kovac. Aston Villa manager Martin O’Neill accused official Lee Probert of doing likewise in his side’s game at Everton which finished 1-1 and 10-a-side.

Everton’s Diniyar Bilyaletdinov was sent off three minutes before being followed by Villa’s Carlos Cuellar, and O’Neill said: ‘The referee got their red card right but you don’t want to go levelling things up and that’s exactly what the referee did.’

Hull’s Geovanni was the eighth player dismissed, during the 2-0 defeat at Burnley.

Facebook Measures Happiness in Status Updates

As we all know, Facebook lets people update their friends with status updates, and with millions of users, that’s a lot of data. Look at the aggregated data over time, and you could see some interesting trends.

The Facebook Data Team recently measured happiness in the United States based on these updates with a metric they call United States Gross National Happiness.

Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!

Browse the trends over time, and there’s nothing earth-shattering really. You’ve got dips on the Mondays and peaks on holidays. Although I’m not sure what happened January 22, 2008 to make people so sad. EDIT: It was the day Heath Ledger died [Thanks, Amanda].

Big picture though, I’m sure governments, businesses, organizations, etc would be more than pleased to have something like this when they made a new policy, launched a new product, or started a new initiative.

That’s probably why so many are fascinated with the publicly available data coming out of Twitter.

[via TechCrunch]

Boy Kills Brother Over Computer Volume Level

Volume thrills but it also kills!

Siblings fight all the time, sure. And nowadays, the disputes tend to center around the family gadgets — anything from control of the TV remote to whose turn it is on the Wii. Most of the time, it doesn’t escalate beyond a few gentle pushes or shoves, or perhaps some shed tears. A recent argument between brothers over a computer, though, ended in shocking tragedy.

William Gorzynski, 15, has been charged with stabbing and killing his 14-year-old brother Matthew after the two got in an argument over the volume of a computer Monday. By all accounts, the two enjoyed a normal, playfully contentious sibling relationship, and the family and its lawyers are portraying the tragedy as an anomalous event that they “can’t even comprehend.”

The incident, which occurred not long after another teen stabbing in the same city, has already prompted a response in the community. Coral Springs, Florida mayor Scott Brook plans to hold a town hall meeting in order to discuss youth violence. [From: South Florida Sun-Sentinel]

The great Google Wave invite giveaway!

If you haven’t heard of Google Wave yet — a) wake up! and b) watch this tech demo. It’s long, but if you’re a nerd, or someone who uses the Internet a lot, you’ll find it more exciting than the latest Harry Potter film. And at only 80 minutes, it’s not a potentially-bladder-exploding endurance event, unlike the bespectacled wizard wannabe.

And with that said, the goodies: Download Squad are giving away Google Wave invites. We’re going to start giving away invites whenever we have them to give away and today, to get the ball rolling, we’ve got 20 up for grabs! If things heat up, we’ll scrounge under the couch cushions until we find more!

Wave is just starting to pick up steam, with more gadgets and gizmos and robots appearing every day. With reports of Google Wave server federation (the ability for anyone to run a Wave server) coming soon, and the sandbox walls being torn down, now’s your chance to get in on the action.

STELCO increases electricity prices in Malé region

Haveeru 2009-10-29

The State Electric Company (STELCO) on Wednesday announced that they will increase their electricity fee in Malé, Hulhumalé, Villingilli and Thilafushi beginning on 1 November 2009.

The new tariffs, which are separated into five categories, were announced at a news conference held at TVM. Under the new tariffs, households will be charged Rf2.25 for 0-100 units, Rf2.50 for 101-300 units, Rf 2.95 for 301-500 units, Rf3.55 for 501-600 units and Rf3.85 for all units above 601. A different tariff was announced for businesses, government offices and other places.

STELCO said that they had considered the expenses of the company when formulating the new tariffs. The new tariff for small and medium businesses was formulated in a way that they wouldn’t have to raise prices of their products, STELCO officials said, adding that the Energy Authority was also consulted.

In addition to the increase in electricity fees, STELCO will also introduce a fuel surcharge, effective 1 November 2009. However, the STELCO officials said that the surcharge would only be levied if the price of a litre of diesel in Malé market went higher than Rf8. Rf0.03 per unit of electricity will be charged as a fuel surcharge for every Rf0.10 increased from a diesel litre.

Similar Images feature emerges from Google Labs

Google Labs has been putting together some great new search technology lately. They just introduced Social Search, and now the Similar Images feature has graduated from Labs and become a permanent part of Google Image Search. When you search for an image, you’ll see “find similar images” links below most of the results: clicking it gives you a pretty accurate collection of images of the same subject.

I tested out similar images on some easy stuff (umbrellas) and some tougher stuff (celebrities), and found that it worked really well. Similar Images is good at matching backgrounds, and even manages to find similarly-posed photos if you’re searching for an animal or a person. It obviously doesn’t do as well when the subject is obscure or abstract, or there aren’t a lot of photos of it in the database. In cases like that, it’ll be more likely to match your image’s color scheme than to find a picture of the same person or thing.

Similar Images isn’t made to find identical images hosted on different sites. If you’re trying to determine where an image came from, try putting it into TinEye instead.

Scientist: Maldives sea level is not rising

The Maldivian cabinet held a meeting underwater to highlight the need for action on climate change

The president of the Maldives captured the media’s attention last week when he held a cabinet meeting underwater claiming that his island-nation faces disaster from rising sea-levels attributed to man-made global warming.  But Nils-Axel Mörner, a sea-level expert from Sweden, wrote to the president explaining that he has nothing to worry about in the following letter:

Solid Alliance’s ‘Crazy Earphones’ Are Just That

A new line of earbuds from Solid Alliance has drawn attention for its, shall we say, less than palatable designs, and as a public service to our readers, we would like to agree with all the haters. Beauty may reside in the eye of the beholder, but so does ugly.

The increasingly derided and aptly named Crazy Earphones line consists of four truly dumbfounding designs: sushi roll, banana, cat paw, and Frankenstein bolt. (And they’re only $22, or ¥2,000, a pair!) The kitty paw and Frankenstein ‘buds may appeal to a certain consumer, but sushi? Ripened bananas? We have a sneaking suspicion that whatever niche market Solid Alliance was attempting to target is nonexistent. Or, at best, still too small to cover production costs.