When thinking as to how the new uploader should function, Facebook had a few goals, most of them technical in nature. They wanted the new tool to no longer depend on Java, be compatible with future versions of Facebook's chrome, be easy to update and more. However, to the end user, the best part about the new uploader is that it allows you to start a photo upload and then leave the page to browse around elsewhere on Facebook (or even the web!) while the upload is underway.

To meet their goals, Facebook went with a browser plug-in that uses JavaScript APIs and a front-end created with HTML and CSS. The end result is a much improved experience. But like the Facebook blog post says, "while it looks like magic, it's really just a bunch of cool hacks." Hacks or not, regular Facebook users will greatly appreciate the upgrade.

Install the New Photo Uploader Tool

To install the new uploader, you must first visit the Prototypes page for the tool and activate it for your profile. Then, the next time you go to create a new album, you'll be prompted to install the Facebook plug-in. Once complete, you'll be presented with the new user interface which lets you browse through your computer's photo library and select the images you want to upload. This new interface is much easier to navigate - and more attractive, too - than the old Facebook uploader from days past.

Facebook says the new tool has several additional security mechanisms built in as well, one of the more interesting being a "kill switch" that can remotely deactivate the tool in the event that a security hole is discovered. While confident that the new uploader is already securely designed and architected from the start, the company has released it as a prototype first so people can report any security issues they may find.

Less technically-minded folks can simply activate the tool and use it, reporting any problems they find as well as far as user experience issues, crashes or other bugs. Depending on the results of the tests, Facebook will be able to correct any problems prior to rolling it out to all users. If you want to give the new uploader a shot yourself, you can do so by visiting its page here.

With IPREDator's VPN, you can stay anonymous on the net. Your internet traffic will be encrypted and protected - even beyond what a typical VPN offers. This way, law enforcement can't catch you when you download the latest episode of your favorite TV show...or when you get involved in other criminal activity, for that matter. And it's that last bit which is a bit troubling, we have to admit.

For years, The Pirate Bay has been one of the top hubs for sharing copyrighted files illegally, much to the chagrin of the RIAA, the MPAA, and other content owners who see the site as one of the reasons why their businesses aren't making money like they used to. That may or may not be the case - it's just as likely that the content-producing industries have failed to adapt quickly enough to the entity that is the Internet, a global force that leaves no traditional business model untouched and, yes, sometimes destroyed completely.

There are a lot of reasons why The Pirate Bay became so popular. Not only is using the site easy, it also provides digital content for download when it is not possible to locate it legally. For example, in between the time a movie leaves the theater and the time it's released on DVD, there is no other place to watch it. Enter The Pirate Bay. Or pre-Hulu, if you missed a TV show, there were few places to see it. (And since Hulu is U.S.-only, the rule still applies). Even when legal marketplaces like iTunes arose, content owners still greedily held onto their product, making The Pirate Bay once again the place to find what you could not access through the "proper" channels. Today, that's still the case as some shows are missing entirely from iTunes and for others, the current season is nowhere to be found. Plus, sometimes the pirated content is even of better quality than the legal download.

Initially established back in 2003, The Pirate Bay quickly became the go-to site for finding any file on the net, many of which are copyrighted. Still, the site's operators claim what they're doing is perfectly legal. Now on trial for copyright infringement charges in Sweden where the company's servers are based (verdict expected April 17th), a Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi has claimed that 80 percent of The Pirate Bay's downloads are for content that's legal to share online. The defense for the legality of The Pirate Bay is somewhat like that old saying, "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Just because The Pirate Bay provides the infrastructure that points to where files are hosted, are they to blame when it's used to point to illegal content? That's perhaps a moral issue to debate at another time, because today's news is about The Pirate Bay's new anonymizer, IPREDator.

Going Anonymous with IPREDator

The VPN service IPREDator is being launched tomorrow (according to the homepage) in response to the introduction of IPRED in the E.U., a directive which stands for "Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive." With IPRED, law enforcement and copyright holders can request the names of suspected copyright infringers which they can then threaten and/or sue.

The easiest way to avoid detection, of course, is to become anonymous and that's precisely what the IPREDator tool allows for...and does so quite well, too, based on what's being said about it.

Although the concept is not new - other anonymizers like the onion-router project Tor have been around for some time - a tool provided by and pushed out by The Pirate Bay will likely gain the attention of a much larger swath of internet users than those ever did. Why's that? It's simple - The Pirate Bay tracks 50% of all public torrents on the net. In other words, they're huge. They also announced back in November that they had reached 25 million peers, a number not necessarily equivalent to number of users, but that refers to another computer on the Internet sharing a file you want to download. But again, huge.

Making it Easier for Criminals to Hide, Too?

This is where the copyright witch hunt has brought us: in order to access the content we want, we have to become anonymous and hide our identities. Because people just want to watch a TV show or see a movie, they have to play a ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with the authorities who somehow equate downloading a file with stealing a car.

That's not to say that some people don't abuse the system and have gotten into the habit of never paying for anything, but a lot of people just casually use The Pirate Bay and other similar sites. The system arose to fill a void in the marketplace, just like any other black market does. Without a legal alternative, The Pirate Bay could succeed and it did.

Yet here we are, only a day away from the launch of a tool that is surely going to be used for much more than just torrenting. An anonymizer as easy to use as The Pirate Bay itself, affordable at only €5 per month, and made available worldwide will become the scourge of law enforcement everywhere, especially once it's put to use for much more dangerous purposes than catching up on the latest episode of "Lost." And how did we get here? A failure to adapt. Instead of concentrating on providing new ways to market, distribute, and sell content, content owners have spent entirely too much time fighting the inevitable future.

So now we have yet another tool that will make things easier for the terrorists, the child predators, and the other online criminals to use to hide behind along with those oh-so-dangerous downloaders. We can't help but wonder if that's really a good thing.

It's strange, too, because in all other aspects, the Internet seems to be moving towards a place of openness and accountability. Thanks to the movement of Web 2.0, social networking has become the norm on many sites and new tools like OpenID, MySpace ID, and Facebook Connect are letting people log in and authenticate with sites as themselves - not with some anonymous handle they can hide behind. This authenticity has been a great thing for net as it becomes harder for anonymous trolls to leave hateful comments that disrupt the normal flow of online discourse. In short, the internet has the potential to become a more civil and therefore, more engaging and productive place.

That's why being anonymous, especially so anonymous that your IP isn't even traceable, sounds like we're backtracking instead of moving forward. Although we understand the reasons behind the IPREDator project (and a bit of the anarchist in us supports it), we have our concerns. Is downloading really that bad of a crime? Will this technology be used for more harm than it is for protection from the copyright cops (just like like Tor is)? Sadly, that is, in fact, possible. And we're sorry to see that it's come to this.

Originally designed as a solution for e-commerce sites, the service strangely called Adam is not complicated to use. However, the company does estimate that the time it takes from mashup creation to having it live on your web site could be approximately 20 minutes. That's a little bit longer than just linking to a PDF or even uploading it to a document-hosting service like Scridb or Issuu. Still, the extra time may be worth it because Adam lets you create a truly interactive document by allowing you to add videos, HTML, stylized text, and more to what were previously just plain files.

For those familiar with designing web pages, the process may seem familiar. To add content to a document on Adam, you select various "hotspots" in the document and then add the content you want to mashup. This is where you would paste in any text, images, music, or videos you want to appear when the user mouses over that part of the document. The service currently integrates with other content providers including YouTube, flickr, metacafe, Veoh, vimeo, and imeem.

The best way to understand what Adam can do, though, is to view some sample of it in action. You can check out a mashed up floor plan or you can see all the content providers in use on one document.

Adam doesn't provide anything that a talented web designer can't already do on their own, but like every service that comes out of the Web 2.0 movement, it's about letting everyone have access to the tools that previously only skilled professionals knew how to use. If you want to try Adam for yourself, you can sign up here.

Why Use ContextMiner?

Marketers will probably be interested in how this free tool is able to track views and links, but that's not really the purpose behind ContextMiner's creation. Instead, the tool is designed more for research than anything else. For example, one of the main reasons to use ConextMiner is its ability to document the cultural phenomena of viral videos.

Often, when a video goes viral, very few people are aware of where it came from, what the story is behind it, who created it and why. As time goes by, finding the original video creator and source is even harder as the video spreads across the internet. But now, thanks to ContextMiner, the history behind a video's creation is no longer a mystery.

Take for instance, Vote Different, the mashup of Hillary Clinton with the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad and one of the most popular videos on YouTube. We've probably all seen this video at one point or another, but did you ever want to know who created it and why?

With ContextMiner, that information can easily be discovered. Because of its ability to pull the inbound links to a video, we can see that the original creator of the video, a user by the name of "ParkRidge47," is the subject of one of the inbound links to the video. A blog post on TechPresident titled "Who is ParkRidge47?" gives us a great history of this particular video's creation. You could also sort through the links provided to find the very first person to link to the video, which is often the creator themselves.

ContextMiner is still under development. In the future, the developers hope to offer tools and policies for exporting the videos, blog pages, and metadata. That's probably not an empty promise - there's already an an option to "download Flash video from YouTube" on the campaign creation form, it's just disabled right now. When that feature becomes available, we think it would be fine to then call ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool. Since "Archive" implies making a backup copy, until then we think ContextMiner should really just be considered a research tool. Still, we have to say, it's a pretty good one.