A dutch site by the name of PS3 Clan has just revealed the newest rumor about the PlayStation 4, and the raw power it will have under its hood. Below is a statement the site received from IMGTEC quoted.

“The PlayStation 4 shall use a high end variant of the 6 Series line. Performance, specifications and features are unknown at this time. The Series 6 shall receive an official announcement from IMGTEC sometime in 2010, with initial models targeting the smartphone and netbook sectors.”

According to this, the PS4 will use the PowerVR Series 6 graphics card by Imagination Technologies. This graphics card is suppose to be 3 to 5 times better than a competitive level nVidia/ATI graphics card. The PowerVR card is also the same size and price as a nVidia card. Hopefully, gamers won’t have to wait long to find out if this rumor is true.

Today marks the end of an era, as The Pirate Bay team announces that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is shutting down for good. Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading.

In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. It soon became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of more than 25 million peers at its height.

Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

Aside from this shutdown, there is also another major development quietly under discussion.

TorrentFreak has learned that behind the scenes the Pirate Bay operators are talking to other BitTorrent site owners to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can easily replace traditional torrent files.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Switching to trackerless and torrentless downloading on public BitTorrent sites does indeed seem to be an option. Previously, many people thought that BitTorrent would collapse if a dominant tracker like the Pirate Bay went down, but this doomsday scenario never unfolded. In fact, the recent downtime of the tracker did not slow down or stop many transfers, as DHT and PEX seamlessly took over.

Those BitTorrent users who don’t want to go trackerless just yet can of course still use OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent, or indeed one of the many other alternative trackers currently available.

Whether or not The Pirate Bay and others will move away from torrent files in the future, the closure of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is nevertheless a milestone in the history of the Internet. Starting today, the Pirate Bay has changed its tagline from “The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” to “The world’s most resilient (magnetic) BitTorrent site.”

A&E Paranormal State wallscape billboard created with the “Audio Spotlight” technology. Loudspeakers focuses ultrasonic beams which turn into audio near the target.

At the beginning of this year, you may have heard about the Sixth Sense system. This system is a camera and projector that you wear around your neck. The camera records everything that you see and can even recognize hand gestures made with the help of colored finger tips. The camera is connected to a computer system that has instant access to the internet. When the user wants to pull up information they make a simple gesture, and the information is displayed onto any surface that the user holds in front of them. This technology will definitely give the user a new way of seeing the world with information at their finger tips. The software developer, Pranav Mistry, has announced that the Sixth Sense system will be coming licensed in the next few months. From there the software will become available to the public so that individuals can design their own Sixth Sense systems. “I notice that it’s hard to for these kind of things to market in some sense. . . because I don’t want this to comply with some of kind of corporate policy,” says Mistry. “Rather than waiting for that time to come, I want people to make their own system. Why not?” To make a copy of the prototype, builders are looking at about $350 in parts. But that is a small price to pay to build your own futuristic information device.

[via OSTATIC]

A site focused on Near Field Communications has reported that Apple has built new iPhone prototypes with hardware support for sensing RFID chips.

RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) is a technology that allows a device to sense embedded chips in nearby objects without making direct contact or without using visible light like a barcode reader. Apple has already filed patents related to a mobile “ID App” capable of using an RFID sensor, a way to use RFID to sense and connect to available WiFi networks, and a touchscreen RFID tag reader.

New RFID support in future iPhones could enable a variety of “touchless” technologies, ranging from swipe payments (where users could pay for items at a checkout, vending machine, or toll booth by swiping their phone near a payment pad), to swipe sensing of information kiosks, objects, or even animals.

Very little data needs to be transmitted between the RFID chip and the device to do useful things; a payment would only need to present the user’s account number. A kiosk could simply transmit a URL to allow users to swipe their phone to open up a web page about the local area, with transit information and maps or details on items in a museum display.

The cost of RFID chips is now down to just a few cents each in quantity, making it possible to apply them to a wide variety of uses. Shipping companies and retailers already use RFIDs to track packages much like barcodes; libraries use them to track books, farmers use them to identify animals in herds, and the army, theme parks and schools attach RFIDs to people.

RDIF in mobile applications

In Japan, QR Code barcodes have long been a popular way to obtain information about an object using a cellphone with a barcode reader or camera that can read them. Mobile phones and credit cards with RFID swipe features (like Sony’s FeliCA) have also been in use for years in Asia and Europe, and are just recently entering the US.

Apple could leverage its micropayment system in iTunes, which already has a hundred million users’ accounts with credit cards in 23 countries, to set up a payment system tied into the iPhone and iPod touch. However, simply offering a way to read RFID tags would open up the device to a variety of industrial applications where swipe sensing could be used to track inventory and discover items in the area.

Adding support for an RFID reader is apparently easy and cost effective, and can be built right into the screen according to a recent Apple patent, which stated:

“The efficient incorporation of RFID circuitry within touch sensor panel circuitry is disclosed. The RFID antenna can be placed in the touch sensor panel, such that the touch sensor panel can now additionally function as an RFID transponder. No separate space-consuming RFID antenna is necessary. Loops (single or multiple) forming the loop antenna of the RFID circuit (for either reader or tag applications) can be formed from metal on the same layer as metal traces formed in the borders of a substrate. Forming loops from metal on the same layer as the metal traces are advantageous in that the loops can be formed during the same processing step as the metal traces, without requiring a separate metal layer.”

iPhone 3.0 already supports local discovery and networking setup via Bluetooth on all iPhone models, but Bluetooth devices are too expensive to embed in lots of devices that could use cheap RFID chips.

The venerable Italian brand Brionvega thinks the 60s and 70s are worth bringing back, or that at least some of the design sensibilities of the era warrant new life. The classic, groundbreaking Radiofonografio, divined in 1965 by two of the three Castiglioni brothers, Pier Giacomo and Achille, is making a new entrance as RR226. In 1965, the ‘musical component robot’ was a home electronic marvel that in one sleekly designed device included a radio, amplifiers and a record player (for both 45s and 33s).

The modernized model has also a CD and DVD players but otherwise it is as close as possible to the original. The amplifiers are moveable which makes it possible to create different configurations both for visual and listening pleasure. Showcased at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in April, RR226 may be a while coming to a store near you. But like so many of the Castiglioni brothers’ objects, still produced and/or displayed by Zanotta, Flos, Artemide and MoMA, the Radiofonografio is most likely going to stay with us for yet another long period. – Tuija Seipell

When Philippe Starck works, our world watches – and when Starck teamed up with LaCie to help design two new external hard drives, we stayed attentive. Both the mobile and desktop hard drives appear to have fluid silver magma protected by a hard aluminum outer shell – or as Starck describes it, a brain with a motorcycle helmet.

Beyond pure aesthetics, the inner ‘brain’ is touch-sensitive as well, allowing users to manipulate applications. The devices connect via a USB cable and do not require their own power supply. The desktop model comes in 1TB or 2TB capacities, while the mobile drive holds either 430GB or 500GB. – Andrew J Wiener.

Last night we broke the story that Google would be teaming with a number of well known artists to launch a promotion for its Music Onebox search, which was releasedlast week. Turns out, it’s launching a bit sooner than we thought: beginning tonight a number of well known artists will be offering exclusive songs and free downloads through Google’s Music search. To get the freebies and exclusives, simply run a Google query for the artist’s name (the album name works too in some cases).

One clarification: while these songs are being presented and promoted on Google, they’ll also be available on the site that’s actually streaming the songs — be it MySpace or Lala. In MySpace’s case the songs could also be potentially be surfaced on other search engines, though it sounds like artists will be asking their fans to search for them on Google as part of the promotion.

Included among artists giving away free MP3s as part of the promotion are:
Tim McGraw
Phoenix
Major Lazer
Mos Def
Zee Avi

And the following exclusives are being showcased on Google as well:

AFI – “Torch Song (Demo From Crash Love Sessions)”
– Search on Google for “AFI”

Arctic Monkeys – “Catapult”
– Search on Google for “Arctic Monkeys”

Bon Jovi – “We Weren’t Born To Follow [Acoustic Version] (Recorded Live From Inside The Actor’s Studio)”
Dead by Sunrise – “Let Down [Live]”
Green Day – “Know Your Enemy [Live In Tokyo]”
Kings of Leon – “Crawl (Miike Snow Remix)”
Lady Gaga – “Paparazzi (David Aude Remix)”
Linkin Park – “New Divide [Live]”
Luke Bryan – “Better Than My Heart”
Norah Jones – “Young Blood”
One Republic – “All The Right Moves (Live)”
Paramore – “Where The Lines Overlap [Acoustic Version]”
Snoop Dogg – “Upside Down (Featuring Nipsey Hussle)”
The Fray – “Be The One (Demo Version)”
Trey Songz – ” LOL [feat. Gucci Mane & Soulja Boy Tell 'Em] [Logan deGaulle Remix]”
Weezer – “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To (Live In Kansas City)”
Zac Brown Band – “Chicken Fried [Live From Bonnaroo]”

Can you live without physical media? Are you ready to buy into owning a license without any physical property to show for your purchase? We hope so ’cause that’s the future. Today Best Buy will announce confirmation of its rumored partnership with CinemaNow in a deal that will stream first-run DVDs directly to consumers. Better yet, according to an AP report, the software required to access CinemaNow’s video library “will be included on all the Web-connected devices sold in Best Buy’s more than 1,000 U.S. stores.” If taken literally then wow, just wow… that’s a lot of devices. However, since Best Buy sells Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, and there’s no way that Apple’s going to let a retailer tamper with its devices, we think the AP’s wording is a bit ambitious.

The idea here is simple: pay once for a DVD then eventually be able to play it on any device be it a television, Blu-ray player, PC, smartphone or some other connected device. The new Best Buy-branded service will launch “early next year” according to Chris Homeister (yes, that’s his real surname), as Best Buy gets “into this business in a big way.” Remember, Best Buy already announced a streaming Netflix deal and partnerships with TiVo and Napster that will be launching early next year as well. And we’ve already seen Sonic Solutions, CinemaNow’s owner since last year, bunging its 1080p-capable CinemaNow service into every connected-device imaginable — even 3D content for 3D Vision-ready displays. The whole concept sounds very much like Disney’s Keychest which already sounded very much like the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (or DECE) consortium. Hopefully Best Buy will clear up the details later today when this gets really official. The future is now — too bad US broadband is so yesterday.

Update: It’s official. The agreement will allow customers to “buy or rent” from CinemaNow’s library of content on “connected consumer electronics” sold through Best Buy retail stores or BestBuy.com. New titles will “often” (note the qualification) be made available day and date of the DVD release. The service will also leverage digital copies to bridge the physical and digital stream worlds. See the full press release for all the detail.

The death of television and the advent of online-only programming has been upon us every week going back at least as far as the first Hulu stream, and perhaps much further depending on which rumor-monger blogs you subscribe to. But a rumor hit the Web today that, if true, has the potential to tip the scales toward a Web-delivered TV future faster than many might imagine: According to the AllThingsD, Apple is pitching a $30 subscription package to networks that would deliver TV over the Web to customers via iTunes, and it wants to get it up and running by early next year.

In Apple’s vision, networks would climb aboard the iTunes delivery system, offering their programming via Apple’s multimedia service, which Apple would deliver to iTunes users for $30 per month. Certainly some kind of revenue sharing deal would be involved, and networks could still monetize via advertising within their shows. Further appealing to customers and networks alike, Apple isn’t tying the service to a piece of hardware like its unimpressive Apple TV box, which would require customers to make an additional investment. Rather, by streaming the service through iTunes, Apple offers the networks a built-in base of 100 million accounts that already use the software, while turning any computer or handheld device sporting iTunes into a potential means of consumption.

The real question for Apple is this: will any of the networks actually get on board? Peter Kafka over at AllThingsD thinks if anyone jumps first, it will be Disney, since CEO Bob Iger has been open to jumping in bed with Apple in the past. That first big client will likely be the hardest one, so if Disney pulls the trigger, other media giants might be forced to follow suit.

But there are other complications. Cable companies have everything to lose by allowing such an arrangement, and will likely fight tooth and nail to remain the dominant medium for programming delivery. Cable networks have profitable relationships with those cable providers that they will be loath to jeopardize, and networks themselves will be troubled by the idea that offering programming via iTunes on a subscription basis–even if the shows don’t hit the service until after they’ve aired on traditional television–will cannibalize their own ratings, driving down ad rates.

But unlike failed attempts to bring television to consumers via the Web, Apple is no startup, and its ability to deliver customers may win out. The movement is already underway, with other large companies paving the way for Apple: Netflix bundles a streaming movie service with its mail subscription DVD service, Blockbuster, Amazon and iTunes already rent movies over the Web and Google is stepping into the fray by offering films through YouTube. Then there’s television’s own success story in Hulu, a joint-venture between three leading networks (NBC, ABC and Fox) to stream their content, with limited but mandatory advertising, over the Web.

Then there’s the delivery side of things; Apple has a lock on what are arguably two of the best mobile media delivery devices in the iPhone and iPod Touch, and should the much-ballyhooed Tablet come roaring onto the scene next year as rumored, Apple might have the best portable device for watching video media tied directly to iTunes. If the networks are willing to give Apple a chance, it might just be able to meet the converging demands of increased portability and on-demand choice right in the middle. Apple completely shook up the music business when it introduced iTunes; the potential is there for it to do the same to television.