2006: Swedish police raid The Pirate Bay website and shut it down.

“Pirate Bay was a huge source of pirated films for people around the world, and today they are no longer.”

That was a statement issued exactly five years ago Tuesday by Kori Bernards, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America.

After all, Swedish police that day had just raided the file sharing site’s offices and carted away a boatload of servers.

Welcome to the second installment of our list of top SSDs at at any given price point. This month we see the announcement of several new drives from OCZ, availability of Crucial's m4 lineup (at expected prices), and the emergence of new SF-2200 options.

While vacationing in France, you find a DVD of Ishtar. Score! (It’s never been released on DVD in the US). But when you get home, you discover that you’ve purchased a Region 2 disc, which, in your Region 1 player, is as useful as a coaster. This raises two questions: Why do you want to watch Ishtar? And why do we still have region codes?

The answers: taste and money, respectively. Though there’s no accounting for the former, those codes may soon be gone.

Regional restrictions began in 1997, as DVD technology was rolling out. They have nothing to do with the NTSC and PAL...

AMD is laying the foundation for its Socket AM3+, Bulldozer-based Zambezi processors with the 990FX chipset, functionally identical to 890FX. The big news is that motherboard vendors are licensing SLI again, and we want to compare performance to Intel.

Mothers, lock up your gamers. The PlayStation phone has arrived.

And while it’s a bit on the chubby side, we think that, for Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play, big is beautiful.

You could almost call the Xperia Play the shorter, fatter cousin to the svelte Xperia Arc, which Sony Ericsson once described as the “world’s thinnest smartphone.” At .62 inches, the Play looks positively bulky compared to its Xperia-line relatives — a veritable Jan Brady to the Arc’s Marcia.

Les rumeurs allaient bon train sur les nouveaux produits Apple qui seraient présentés la semaine prochaine lors de la WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) de la firme à la pomme. Eh bien, Alors que ce n’est pas franchement l’habitude de la maison, un communiqué de presse officiel annonçant à l’avance certains produits vient de tomber. iOS 5, OS X Lion sont donc au programme ainsi que l’énigmatique  « iCloud ».