Web

Have you ever wanted your own personal assistant ready to respond to your every beckoned call? I'm not talking about Siri or Google Now, which will both tell you the football scores or what the weather's going to be like next weekend; I mean a real assistant, more like a secretary - one that will fetch you a pizza or book you flights to suit your needs at the drop of a hat. A newly-introduced service has taken the idea of a butler / chauffeur / servant and rolled it into a magical new text-based system, and provided your request is on the right side of legal, any product or service is just a text away.

When an Apple or a Samsung comes through with such innovations as fingerprint sensors or NFC, we tend to take much notice. But the advancement of the Web and the wider digital community depends more upon those changes that aren't necessarily as obvious nor welcomed with the same amount of fanfare. But in news that should be gratefully received by each and every user of digital products (read: everyone), it appears that HTTP/2, a natural progression from traditional Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) in terms of speed and efficiency, is well on its way, having just been finalized by the appropriate body.

Online file sharing site RapidShare is going away come March 31st 2015, a note on the service's website has announced. Users wanting to get their data out of the service need to do just that before April 1st.

The Pirate Bay has long been among the most-used and well-known public torrent trackers around, and is revered by torrenters far and wide for its defiance in the face of umpteen warnings, court hearings and cease-and-desist letters. In fact, TPB has continually made mockery of such correspondence from a range of high profile entertainment companies, as well as the numerous bodies that represent them, by publicly displaying the back-and-forth emails filled with plenty of choice language. But having been recently shut down - not for the first time, I might add - TPB has been teasing a new landing page on its site alluding to a big announcement for February 1st, and as suspected, it looks as though the first of next month will play host to its latest rebirth.

The Pirate Bay is down right now, but a new launch date for its return may have been revealed by the site itself, and it can happen way sooner than you think. More details can be found right here.