On The Pirate Bay’s blog, the decision is pitched as a step forward, away from centralised trackers to newer, decentralised systems like DHT and PEX:

Now that the decentralised 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.

Which is all well and good, but DHT support isn’t in all torrent clients yet, and many cheaper routers choke on the added connection load. It remains to be seen how smoothly the transition will go — the main site is still up and searches still work, so you can go judge for yourself — but there’s little doubt that The Pirate Bay, as precariously positioned as they are as a company (read: owned by a bunch of incredible sketchballs), was under external pressure to get rid of that giant, 25 million+ torrent liability of theirs.

And because we’re all People On The Internet here: Godspeed, I guess. [TorrentFreak via Lifehacker]

The other major bit they’re missing — where to get torrents where the policies are a little, um, flexible — we’ve got you covered. If you’ve got more tips, shower the comments with ‘em. [Maximum PC]

If you were affected by this problem, here are your solutions:

• ISO file
• Detailed Instructions
• Download tool for creating a bootable Windows 7 flash drive and DVD [Thanks Stephen!]

It allows you to bulk install up to 58 popular Windows apps without having to sit there and click through those annoying pop up questions. Obviously, you want to keep the install time down — because things can go downhill while you wait. [Ninite via Lifehacker]

“Download” was the word that kept rising above the bulleted list of new features, with Foxtel Download packaged free for Foxtel subscribers. Find out more about it here. Foxtel CEO Kim Williams said there would be 400 hours of content available to download at launch and that this would increase in the coming months.

Pricing for Foxtel Next Generation subscriptions ranges from $72 to $135, with plenty of new options to consider.

These are:

30 new channel choices including themed movie channels; new sports and doco channels; 12 new channel brands; 15 High Definition Channels including four dedicated HD sports channels and six HD movie channels; eight new timeshift channels; 10 new HD channels; a new movie service with 16 dedicated movie channels; new iQ value packs including one with an iQ for free; Foxtel Download; a new Foxtel guide for iQ and updated guide for iQ2; new search features with iSuggest for iQ and iQ2 subscribers; Record Me; a new Foxtel Box Office, Movies on Demand, with up to 40 recent release movies; and new localised services for Sky News and an improved Weather Active.

Usability features that stood out were Record Me, which makes it a cinch to program a recording by responding to an icon screened during a promo, and iSuggest, which brings movie posters in an iTunes-like interface as a way of making easier choices of content, which are categorised as: Must See, Sports, Knowledge & Adventure, Drama & Lifestyle, Kids & Music, and HD.

From October 1, all Foxtel iQ2 set-top units will start receiving a software upgrade delivering new features to the onscreen Foxtel iQ Guide. From November 1, the same software upgrade will be delivered progressively to all Foxtel iQ set-top-units.

Foxtel went to some lengths to launch Next Generation, staging a high-def multimedia-palooza in Stage 2 at Fox Studios in Sydney’s Moore Park and introducing its stable of young stars that will form the “faces” of Foxtel across its new channel brands.

But after it was all over, it was Williams’ words about Foxtel Download that were the easiest to carry away: “Now, Foxtel is not only about when and what you watch, but where you watch it”.

Amen to that. Bring it on.

Foxtel Next Generation

Reader Shinobiwan wrote in with an e-mail received from “order-update@amazon.com”:

Hello,

On July 23, 2009, Jeff Bezos, our Founder and CEO, made the following apology to our customers:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com”

As you were one of the customers impacted by the removal of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” from your Kindle device in July of this year, we would like to offer you the option to have us re-deliver this book to your Kindle along with any annotations you made. You will not be charged for the book. If you do not wish to have us re-deliver the book to your Kindle, you can instead choose to receive an Amazon.com electronic gift certificate or check for $US30.

Please email Kindle customer support at kindle-response@amazon.com to indicate your preference. If you prefer to receive a check, please also provide your mailing address.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The Kindle Team

Is this little love note enough to make us forgive Amazon for practically stealing books from users? Not really, but we say take the $US30 check with grace and buy a used copy of the book for $US3. [Thanks, Shinobiwan!]

We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn’t encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands.

It’ll be interesting to see if this philosophy holds up as the band moves into more digital-only releases, as they’ve done with a couple of single tracks in the last couple months. It’s all fine and good to not care about MP3 quality when audiophiles can just buy the CD instead, but what about when it’s the only option? It’s not just super nerds who would prefer at least a -v0 bitrate instead of 160CBR.

The whole interview is worth reading (it’s a short one), as Greenwood discusses his personal listening habits and how the band listened to a bunch of 90’s hip-hop via AirTunes while they recorded In Rainbows. [New Yorker via Kottke]

Demonoid
Demonoid, besides having a solid community and good quality torrents—no porn, exceedingly few viruses—also operates the other major torrent tracker besides The Pirate Bay. (A tracker is what help makes the whole BitTorrent system work, since it makes sure every peer’s talking to each other properly.) It doesn’t have the best selection around, but what most of what you’ll find there is quality. The catch is that you need to snag an invitation from a member or when they periodically dole them out to the public.

Mininova.org
Mininova’s always one of our preferred torrent sites—tons of torrents from multiple trackers, not a lot of crap in the interface, and the search isn’t bad. Actually, it’s kind of the like The Pirate Bay, but with less crap and fewer headaches. The catch now is that they’re slowly implementing a new copyright filter to keep copyrighted torrents from being uploaded. But you should still be able to find True Blood on there, no problem.

ISOHunt
ISOHunt is a BitTorrent and P2P search engine that’s got what feels like the most sophisticated search engine of the bunch. But like the others, you just punch in what you’re looking for, and it pulls up results you can sort by seeds, date or whatever. It has one of the most massive indices of any site, so it’s a good thing the search engine is up to it. Still, with a lot of torrents, it can be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for.

BTJunkie
BTJunkie claims to be the largest torrent search engine of all, with around 5,000-25,000 new torrents added to the index daily. The quantity doesn’t seem noticeably better than the other sites listed above, however. Also, the interface is really ugly. But you know, it’s there if you need it.

EZTV
If you’ve downloaded a TV show, whatever site you snagged it from, chances are, it came from these guys. They’re the most prolific TV rippers around, and usually have solid quality rips of shows up within hours of airing. If you’re interested in TV, you might as well just go to the source—their site points to wherever their files are hosted, so you don’t have to search through a million different sites to find the right EZTV torrent.

The whole scene is admittedly a bit depressing now, after years of high profile closures—Suprnova, OiNK TorrentSpy and LokiTorrent—so these are what’s left of the big sites. And even they’re not guaranteed to survive. Demonoid went offline for several months back in 2007-2008, Mininova has a copyright filter attached to it, and really, any site is just a police raid away from possibly going down. So tread carefully, and don’t get too attached to any of them.

And of course, you should drop your own suggestions in the comments.

Now a class action lawsuit has been filed that seeks punitive damages for those affected by the deletion as well as an injunction that forbids Amazon from improperly accessing Kindles in the future. Granted, after the fallout and subsequent Bezos apology, there probably wasn’t much risk of Amazon crossing the line again. Still, I agree that Amazon had this coming.

Again, the fact that Orwell’s 1984 is at the centre of all of this controversy is one of those delicious coincidences that is impossible to ignore. [Trading Markets]