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Empowering users, threatening IT, making technology purchases a no-brainer? Why couldn't it have gotten here sooner? (Or why did it have to come at all, if you're among the naysayers in IT.)

The Pirate Bay is teaming up with Swedish researchers who specialize in copyright-, file-sharing and enforcement on survey designed to provide more objective data than that supplied by RIAA and MPAA to help counter rabid anti-piracy plunder-and-pillage copyright enforcement rules.

In three months, Amazon's Kindle Fire went from zero to 54 percent share of the Android tablet market. Its cost and power have changed the choice from iPad vs. everything, to iPad, Kindle Fire, or long justifications of why another choice isn't an obviously bad one

In its Terms of Service Google is probably trying to reserve the right to change the format of your files so you can get them using a PC, phone or tab. It probably doesn't want co-ownership of your copyright to the content, but that's what its new Terms require.

Eight men have been arrested on charges they ran a network called the Farmer's Market that provided an order-and-fulfillment service for the international sale of LSD, ketamine and other serious drugs, while hiding everyone's identities using the free, friendly TOR proxy network.

Dismissed by many as too shallow to qualify as communication, texting makes many feel as connected as phone calls, and can be better at getting even the sick to clean up their acts.

In an April Fool's joke that gets less phony the more you look into it, Google announced its self-driving car would soon be entering NASCAR races. Google is trying to develop, and patent, real-world versions, but GM may beat it to the punch, with semi-auto autos by 2015.

An April Fool's prank backfired on the developer of AdBlock in a positive way. Replacing ads with cute-cat pics was so popular some people want to keep the prank version. So AdBlock gets a new product, CatBlock, which will cost you $10 a month and an anti-nausea prescription.

Despite surveys showing consumers put a high value on privacy, when push comes to shove, less than a third are willing to pay even 66 cents more to disclose less personal data.

Vendors of disparate solutions are looking to leverage what they see as shortcomings in virtualization to provide customers with comprehensive views of resources and applications in complex environments.

Google may never have given more than lip service to the slogan "Don't be Evil," but it struck everyone else as pretty significant. Now that it appears to prefer effective exploitation of customers and bullying of partners, it's clear if Google ever was Good, it certainly isn't now.

HR 1981, the SOPA alternative proposed by SOPA/PIPA author Lamar Smith, tries to give more power and less culpability to copyright owners already abusing enforcement system so badly that 67 percent of takedown orders come from competitors, not from simple mistakes.