Here is the info from the TorrentSpy Team: (pay attention to the bolded text)
Friends of TorrentSpy,
We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.
The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.
Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.
It was a wild ride,
The TorrentSpy Team
“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.” - Justice William O. Douglas
3D Browsing is just sooo much fun. It sure beats boring old 2D browsing…. that’s why I really love www.SpaceTime.com. Basically, it is a new browser that you can download that will make your life a whole lot easier and more fun by turning all your web pages into 3D images… You’ve got to try this! Although, of course, it won’t completely replace FireFox for me, but its a start…
For the SpaceTime team, not sure how possible this is, but, can we get SpaceTime as a plugin for FireFox? Perhaps with a button that we can use to turn on and off 3D? The reason I make this request is because I know you guys listen The last 3 requests I made actually ended up in the product which basically makes me think you guys rock!
Well, what else do you call someone who tours the country and holds events at every major city? I thought that’s what Rockstars did… Well, anywho… that’s exactly what Rick Segal is doing He’ll be in Ottawa on the 16th of April to hold a “VC Roundtable.” If you’re looking to raise money for your startup at any point, this is one of those events that would be useful to you. I’m still uncertain as to whether I’ll make it or not since I may be in NYC at that time… If I can’t make it, I’ll have to drop Rick a line to get some feedback with respect to http://chide.it - but, I hope to be there… Here is some more info:
Ottawa Edition of the VC Round Table
Something’s missing in Canada’s tech community - the chance to informally interact with VCs, learn about what it is exactly that they do and how the funding process works.
The VC Roundtable series aims to fill this gap, by hosting small (free!) get together across Canada’s major cities where RickSegal, JLA Ventures Partner and VC blogger (http://ricksegal.typepad.com) will walk through what getting involved with VCs is all about.
RickSegal will be hosting the Ottawa edition of the VC travelling roundtable on April 16th from 11am to 1pm at everyone’s favourite pub TheClockTower at 575 Bank Street. If you would like to attend sign up on the link below.
Wow! SearchMe.com is like Google, except its 3D! You search for anything you want and then you can browse through the results in the form of screenshots. It reminds me a bit of SpaceTime.com (which I think is very cool btw).
Before I actually used it, I thought that there was now way that I would use this thing on a day to day basis, but it actually is a really good way to search! The only gotcha is that their database isn’t as big as Google’s database Let’s hope they can get there fast
btw, searchme is a Sequoia backed company (so was Google).
Iotum has always had a great application on Facebook that lets you make free conference calls. Now, it has become a lot better because it allows for 100% free conference calls…
chide.it is my latest startup. It is in essence a community based on criticism. The inspiration for this came from the article that valleywag wrote about me a while back. I realized that people really enjoy criticizing others. I also thought that it would be really great if there was an efficient way to tell the difference between baseless and constructive criticisms. If there was a tool to help promote constructive criticisms, it would have the potential to help improve a lot of what is out there in the real world.
The goal of chide.it is to give people a chance to become critics on topics of interest to them. These criticisms in turn will benefit the topics being criticized (assuming we do a good job at identifying the constructive criticisms). The website is still in its very early stages and will get better week by week. If you’d like to test out the site, please go ahead (signups are open)…
btw, we’re eating our own dog food… feel free to chide chide.it here
I created this video a while back about my upcoming company (http://www.chide.it)… you can check out the alpha version here: (http://alpha.chide.it)… We’ll actually launch this on the 26th and not the 15th… but, I created this video a while back and since I won’t delete, I’m posting it…
Remember the race to register all the domain names in the world? Remember how registering www.your_name.com was a big deal (still is) and lots of people did so in order to prevent so-called “identity theft”? Well, here is a very sneaky marketing tactic that Facebook could use to help accelerate its growth…
Facebook could basically start injecting into the media a multitude of stories that show how a lot of people are getting their identities stolen on Facebook… This is not necessarily false… remember the Moroccan man who got arrested for creating a fake Facebook profile (see story from TechCrunch here)? Ok, so if there was this fear in people that “if” they did not go ahead and register their facebook profiles themselves, then other people might… this might trigger more of the people who say things like “oh… I’m not really a social networking person…” to reconsider…
Yes, this is sneaky… but, who’s to say Facebook is not already doing this? could the story of the Moroccan Man just be a plotted attempt to do exactly this?
The last 3 requests I made actually ended up in the product which basically makes me think you guys rock! 
Let’s hope they can get there fast 
