But seriously, Wikimedia (Wikipedia’s daddy) is giving away a pile of hardware to worthy projects because they’re upgrading all their own stuff.

More info @ Wikimedia Foundation

Story upgraded from BoingBoing.

iTunes Match, for those unaware, is part of Apple’s new iCloud storage system. Essentially, if you own and want to store music you didn’t buy on iTunes, but the iTunes store has copies of that music, then for $25/year you can have Apple provide you with access to 256kbps AAC iTunes Plus copies of that music in your iCloud. That counts even if your originals were 64kbps mono mp3 or something equally unpleasant. Now I come to think of it, couldn’t you just generate files filled with noise with the same length and ID3 tags as a song you want, and have Apple provide you with it? I digress.

Some people are saying that this legitimises piracy. Download a bunch of dodgy songs off some torrent tracker somewhere, shove ‘em into iTunes and say “hey, Apple, here’s my $25, gimme the good stuff”, and they’ll dutifully provide you with full quality, legitimate copies with metadata present and correct. So, for the record companies, the good news is that instead of them getting nothing for your pirated music, they now get a very tiny amount for it. I’m sure it’d add up over x thousands of users, they’ll be happier with that than nothing at all.

Ultimately my point is this: If you had a substantial amount of pirated music, would you pay a one-time fee to legitimise it? Is it a viable option for both users and record companies? Is $25 enough or too much? How many pirates would go for a deal like that? Would it be unfair on those who only pirated 100 songs instead of the guy who’s download near on every song in the world, just because he could? It’s good to know that what you own is legitimate and I’m sure a service like iTunes could provide the quality and the metadata, album art and such that would be expected by seasoned pirates.

Personally? I have no idea if record companies would agree with me, or how it would be doled out between those who are owed the resulting cash pot, but I think it’s a great idea. Sort of like an all you can eat post-paid subscription service, if you like. Instead of paying beforehand to download x tracks per month, you’ve already downloaded x tracks per month and now you can pay up. Sounds fair to me. I’m sure there are issues with that, I’m sure people will suggest it encourages piracy, but piracy already happens, and some money is better than no money.

What do you think? Feel free to drop your tuppence worth in the comments below.

Recall note at PogoPlug’s blog.

What the hell am I talking about? Fujitsu have just announced the F-022 flip style stupidphone for release in China on the 24th of June and it comes with what appears to be a small piece of metal on a keyring attachment onto which you spray a dash of your favourite perfume. This is called a “fragrance chip”. Yup. A fragrance chip. You can understand my confusion, surely? Anyway, it’s covered in glitter and it smells nice, I’m sure there will be a number of helpless punters clamouring for the thing come release day. Engadget has the pics.

Story called up from Engadget.

Cheers to that.

Oh, and Samsung, if you’ve got any more spares… you know. Right here.

Story flashed from AndroidCentral / Phandroid.

Such was his urge to keep in step with the Jobsian shiny-shiny, the kid flogged his right piss-factory to buy himself some premium Apple gear, netting himself 1900 quid ($3000 USD, ¥20,000 CNY) to purchase it with.

His mother, quite understandably, sensed something was amiss when he came home with an armful of expensive gadgetry. She promptly called the rozzers, who were unable to find the men who bought the kidney, but did establish that the hospital had rented out their urology dept. for a bit to a businessman. The hospital claims they knew nothing else about the operation. Because obviously, the renter was clearly going to use it to play a round of crazy golf or something.

Story unwittingly volunteered by El Reg.

This attempted punch in the nose is a result of NDAs, the Gawker game people are upset over Warner’s review exclusivity deals which prohibit those under NDA from publishing information which is already out in the public eye.

IANAL, of course, so I don’t know the full ins and outs, but I thought it was interesting that Kotaku actually bothered to react in this way, telling Warner just what they think of their rules and restrictions.

Story bounced from BoingBoing.

It appears that Rovio’s plan is to use it to get their perpetually pissed off avian money engines on the telly box (or, if you’re a porcine sympathiser, piggy bank), likely a plan related to the cartoon series they had planned earlier this year. They’re pretty much everywhere else at the moment, including phones, tablets, desktops, browsers, and, in the coming months, Roku, so what’s one more platform to the list?

Story catapulted vengefully from El Reg.

Apparently China’s Lenovo Group have a rather different view though, having just announced their intention to purchase a majority share of European computer and appliance company Medion AG.

It’ll cost Lenovo 629.4m Eurobucks (that’s $907m in Ameri-Greenbacks) but may net them up to 14% of the German PC market and 7% of the left-hand end of Europe overall. I can’t imagine a Lenovo laptop sitting in my local German supermarket personally, I expect they’ll probably retain the Medion brands so as not to cheapen the Lenovo ones.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I have some bratwurst to dunk in some sweet and sour sauce.

Story badly photocopied from Engadget.

…a version number which, according to Linus Torvalds himself, means jack copulating faeces.

So what are the big changes? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. [...] So no ABI changes, no API changes, no magical new features — just steady plodding progress.

Version 3 of the kernel is currently at version 3.0.0-rc1 and will probably find its way to your favourite distro in due course.

What’s in a name, eh? Still, the Linux (originally named Freax) kernel’s 20th birthday on the 17th of September will be a good excuse for nerds everywhere to drink themselves silly. It’s a Saturday, too. Par-tay. I might even join in.

Story painstakingly recompiled from ZDnet.