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The U.S. official who has accused Kim DotCom of operating an online criminal empire has plenty of piracy-fighting experience.

Neil MacBride, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, is the former general counsel and antipiracy enforcer for the Business Software Alliance, a trade group representing software producers such as Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Intuit.

MacBride has accused DotCom and six others of operating MegaUpload, a cyberlocker service that has allegedly generated more than $170 million in criminal proceeds. The government asserts that MegaUpload enabled and encouraged users to upload pirated movies and other media to one … Read more

A lawyer representing MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom denied his client has engaged in piracy and told a New Zealand judge the U.S. completely misunderstands the nature of his business.

DotCom, along with three other men accused of helping him run MegaUpload, appeared in court to plead for bail after he was arrested Thursday at his mansion near Auckland. The group is charged with money laundering, racketeering, and online piracy.

In an indictment issued in Virginia, the U.S. contends that MegaUpload was a massive criminal enterprise designed to enable and encourage millions of people to store and distribute unauthorized … Read more

Leave it to Sony's marketing arm in Japan to rustle up yet another cryptic advertising campaign.

A video quietly emerged last week on Sony's YouTube channel labeled Dot Switch. It's a first-person view of someone holding what appears to be an Xperia Arco smartphone and wielding it as a remote control. The Arco is the Japanese version of the Xperia Arc, and perhaps it's relevant to note that the Arco also has an infrared (IR) port.

What's got everyone buzzing about the viral ad is that the person holding the device in the vid is controlling a random assortment of products, such as a gramophone, a TV, and confetti machines. What a strange combination!

The end of the video is marked by yet another tap on the smartphone's screen toward a robot arm that reveals a small shiny black box. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--This could become the year for panoramic video.

New York-based startup Kogeto, which makes the Dot camera lens, is on a roll. I met up with founder and CEO Jeff Glasse this morning at CES' Eureka Park exhibition, where Kogeto is showing off the device, and he told me that his 1-year-old company just raised more than $1 million in venture funding, which is no easy feat for a hardware marker.

More importantly, the Dot's distribution is about to get a huge boost. He said the lens will be on sale in all U.S. Apple stores on … Read more

Scientists designing the next generation of solar cells are trying to do away with waste heat.

Two research groups this week reported advances in a technique to capture a portion of the sunlight's energy that's normally lost as heat. The advances are aiming toward a breakthrough in how much light can be converted to electricity on a solar cell.

In a paper published in Science, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reported developing tiny crystals a few nanometers in size, called quantum dots, that are able to capture high-energy photons that today's solar cells don'… Read more

I had an incident recently where oatmeal bubbled over the top of the bowl and coated my microwave with a gloppy mess. If only I had a microwave with a built-in projector, I would have seen it coming much more clearly.

Designers Hwang Jungjoon and Lee Jaeryong are already on top of this issue with a concept that melds a microwave and a projector. It's called the "Proinjector," which sounds more like a fancy turkey prep accessory than a kitchen appliance.

The idea is that the projector captures what's happening inside and projects it against the kitchen wall. You don't have to squint through the thick front window of your microwave to see if the chicken cacciatore is about to explode.… Read more

Microsoft said today that a Czech Republic-based provider of free domains has agreed to pull the plug on botnet activities using his subdomains, as part of a settlement of a lawsuit the software giant filed in September to shut down the Kelihos botnet.

The suit, filed in federal court in Virginia, named Dominique Alexander Piatti and his domain company, Dotfree Group SRO, as defendants, alleging that they were involved in hosting the Kelihos botnet. Infected computers in that operation, also known as "Waledac 2.0" after a previous botnet that Microsoft shut down last year, were used to … Read more

Pulling my dot-matrix Mighty Wallet out of my pocket, I might look like I'm living life with dollar bills stuck into an old piece of '80s printer paper. I like that. I just hope no one throws it out.

Searching for a backup wallet to replace one from a vacation I just took, I wandered down to Urban Outfitters and found this enticingly ridiculous, and ugly, dot-matrix wallet. It's a design only a geek could love. The green-and-white paper complete with tractor holes looks picture-perfect, only this wallet's not made of standard paper. Mighty Wallets are made of Tyvek, that same tear- and water-resistant material that's used in mailing envelopes and water-park wristbands. They've been around since 2005, but this is the first time I'd ever seen one.… Read more

Consumers should have an easier time comparing the fuel economy of cars and light trucks once new consumer labels unveiled today go into effect.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson unveiled the new set of labels this morning at a live press conference hosted on the Web.

Prior to this, car labels hadn't been updated for 30 years.

Each new label differs slightly depending on the car's drive train or fuel source. (Click for a PDF of all labels.) Labels in the set include those for gas, flex-fuel gas-ethanol blends, … Read more