The Pirate Bay is perhaps the most censored website on the Internet. Recently, a UK high court ordered several ISPs to block the website. Unfortunately, for the recording industry, the news about the forthcoming block was reported on the BBC resulting in a huge traffic spike of 12 million curious visitors in a single day. Similar incidents have occurred around other European countries and elsewhere as well. At present, the Pirate Bay remains blocked – partially - in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, India, Ireland, Malaysia, Netherland, China, and the UK.

Grooveshark has just launched a new real-time search tool called Beluga that provides insight into the listening habits of 20 million Grooveshark users, offering us some interesting information and trend about artists and their fanbase.

The other day I was talking about downloading videos from YouTube playlists. Today, Google posted a new update that improves the way webmasters and bloggers embed YouTube playlists on blog posts and websites.

Windows provides a lot of accessibility options that help people with special needs. The accessibility options in Windows can be accessed from the Control Panel. You can also open accessibility options by searching for “accessibility” from the Start Menu search in Windows 7.

Is your data on cloud backup services secure? None of the popularly used cloud services offer native file encryption facilities. Whatever you upload to these services can be opened and viewed by anyone. If tomorrow that cloud service gets sued for copyright infringement or whatever, they can potentially hand over your data to anyone who comes asking for it.

A ransomware is a type of malware that locks the computer it infects and demands that the owner pay fines for allegedly violating several laws. The notices displayed are purported to be issued by companies or law enforcement agencies which falsely claim that the user's system had been used for illegal activities, or contains illegal content such as pornography and unlawfully obtained software such as pirated edition of Windows. The idea is to scare the user into cough up the money.

Often when I search for videos on YouTube, to save time I lookout for playlist. Some kind souls go through great trouble to collect all videos related to my topic of interest and organize them into neat playlists. If the videos turn out to be great, I decide to download them to my computer so that I could watch them later. Now there are a bazillion different ways to download YouTube videos, but if you want to download entire playlists, there aren’t many. I scoured the web and discovered two free tools that lets you batch download videos from playlists. You may already be familiar with them. If you aren’t, why not go over them?

A hand-picked selection of articles published between May 13 and May 26 of previous years.

1 Year Ago

• Marble: Google Earth-Like Virtual Globe Software
• Mp3 Folder Structure Maker Moves Music Files Into Folders By Artist, Album Name

CintaNotes is a portable notes keeping application that provides a convenient way to store snippets of information collected from websites, documents and various other sources. It also acts as a personal notes manager. You can organize your notes by adding tags, search and sort through them easily by date of creation, title, size etc. Previously CintaNotes was available as a commercial product. Last month the developers released a new version and with it moved to the so called “freemium” model, also known as shareware, where basic functionality is offered for free and premium features can be had for a price.

Windows 7 lets you customize the behaviour of the icons that appear on your system tray, also called the notification area. You can configure the icons to remain hidden unless there is notification to display. This reduces the visual clutter on the system tray. The trouble is, Explorer keeps a cache of the icons and over time this cache can grow to hundreds of items. If you right click on the Taskbar and choose “Customize Notification Icon” you can see many obsolete items on the list. Some of these programs you might not even have on your computer anymore.