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...

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.

A cloud. Photo Karen Ka Ying Wong / Flickr

Apple has confirmed maybe the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley: it’s been working on a cloud service, and will announce it at the June 6 Worldwide Developers Conference.

So now we know annual developer’s conference will unveil “iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering,” but we don’t know yet what it is, or what exactly will reside at the domain name it may have bought for $4.5 million in April.

Where most slider phones have a keyboard, Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play sports Playstation controls. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com.

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.

La bataille de brevets entre Samsung et Apple a pris un nouveau tournant. Suite au droit concédé à Apple par la justice américaine, la semaine dernière, de pouvoir accéder aux produits annoncés par Samsung, pour vérifier s’ils ne violent pas ses brevets, la firme coréenne a répliqué, révèle le sitethisismynext.com. Elle a indiqué vouloir jouir du même droit et désire par conséquent voir les prochains produits d’Apple, à savoir l’iPhone 5 ou 4S et l’iPad 3 avant leur commercialisation, bien qu’Apple n’ait comme à son habitude fait aucune annonce à ce propos.

Asus risque de faciliter la tâche aux personnes qui n'arrivent pas à se décider entre un smartphone et une tablette. Selon des fuites en ligne, le fabricant taïwanais est sur le point de présenter le Padfone au salon informatique Computex 2011, qui se déroule du 31 mai au 4 juin. Le site PocketNow a en effet révélé des images d'un nouveau concept de tablette. Après le Motorola Atrix, qui permet de transformer un smartphone en netbook lorsqu'il est connecté à un dock, le Padfone se présente comme une tablette numérique dans laquelle vient se loger un smartphone. Ce dernier devrait tourner sous...