It’s that time again, time to review some of my cherry picked smaller stories of the week for those that might have missed them. This time round we’ve got an Adobe Flash update that doesn’t suck. OK, sucks a little less. Flash 10.1 beta was unleashed to the willing public with GPU video acceleration for certain Nvidia cards on Windows, but perhaps more importantly reduced CPU usage across all platforms. What does this mean? YouTube that doesn’t make your Mac or PC red-line that’s what. A step in the right direction Adobe, maybe Flash isn’t a lost cause after all. I’ve certainly seen some improvements on my netbook and Mac. (more…)

Pirate Bay has been sold to Global Gaming Factory X for $7.8m, who will take charge in August. Having also purchased ‘p2p 2.0′ software company Peerialism, many are saying that Pirate Bay is going the way of Napster V2.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Global Gaming Factory CEO Hans Pandeya.

TPB blog had this to say:

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

It’ll be interesting whether this new approach works and whether it will be business as usual for TPB.

[Via Engadget]