The Pirate Bay today posted a blog on its website and cleared the air on its closure. Well, the good news is that The Pirate Bay is not closing down. What they are doing is stopping the use of .torrent files on its website. This is a move that comes after the much publicized SOPA and ACTA laws that will highly prohibit the sharing of content that is pirated.

Read their blog posted below.

“No more torrents=no changes anyhow

Today marks the end of an era. Sort of.

TPB will no longer give out links to .torrent files. The reason is simple: They’re just a waste of space and our time.

Instead we’re giving you Magnet links. It’s simpler for us and no more hassle for you. It’s more resilient than .torrent files and it uses much less bandwidth for those who wants to mirror. Also, since the magnet links are just a hash, it’s on every single torrent detail page – so noone knows that you actually downloaded a file or not. Read more »

Microsoft today held a presser to announce how far the piracy fight has come. Truth be told, it has come a long way.

According to a study done in May of 2011, Microsoft loses up to 85 Million USD annually through piracy of their software packages in Kenya alone. According to their OEM Lead for East and Southern Africa (ESA) region, Wanja Muriithi, this is attributed to by the many installations done in offices, schools, cyber cafes and home personal computing systems across the country.

On an authoritative note, Microsoft in conjunction with the Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO) conducted a raid yesterday, 21^st December, at the premises of an industrial company and confiscated computers allegedly installed with pirated software. The biggest culprits were the Windows operating system and the Microsoft office suite which is largely pirated across the country, even in mid-size companies and SMEs.

The raid comes after the Kenya Copyright Board recently concluded their debatable successful 30-day amnesty campaign for software offenders and did much to send messages n the dangers and tough penalties should one commit an intellectual property crime.

Read more »

Microsoft recently announced that they are offering free antivirus software for local small and medium enterprises beginning sometime this year.

This comes at a time when Microsoft increasingly got feedback from customers with businesses that they needed something to combat viruses. In response, Microsoft made changes to licensing agreements to ensure that Microsoft Security Essentials is now available, free-of-charge, to those companies with no more than 10 PCs.

Kevin Connolly, Windows Product Manager for Microsoft West, East, Central Africa & the Indian Ocean Islands said that “Microsoft Security Essentials is Read more »