Say what you want about a massive retail chain releasing an own-brand Tablet, but when that Tablet sells over half a million units in one year, clearly you must be doing something right. But while the Hudl tablet may have been very successful for massive retailer Tesco – enough so that a sequel is planned for later this year, in fact – it hasn’t all been plain sailing.

An unusual glitch that causes the screen to go completely unresponsive in certain situations has caused the store to have to replace a significant number of tablets under warranty. Over the last few weeks, Tesco have been hard at work to discover a cause for this issue; and eventually narrowed it down to a faulty piece of code responsible for managing the screen’s sensors. As a result, it’s rolling out an Android update to fix the issue for any tablets still affected.

Tesco say that some updates have passed Google certification and are already hitting affected Hudls, but it could take up to three weeks for the fix to reach everyone. So if you’re using a Hudl and finding it to stop working every now and then, hold fast – you’ll soon be back to working order without the hassle of a return.

When Popcorn Time first hit Windows PCs, Hollywood was a picture of fear and anger. Here was a service designed to find torrents of all kinds of movies past and present; and make pirated copies of movies available for FREE – and worse, they were open-sourcing the project! Hollywood eventually took down the original code and jailed the person responsible – but not before other people grabbed the code and forked it, creating similar software and projects of their own. And now, Popcorn Time is going mobile.

That’s because on the project’s most popular forks, Time4Popcorn, have released an Android app online. Sporting the same look, feel and selection of films as the desktop version, Time4Popcorn’s app is only recommended for those with generous data plans; as it also streams the films from torrents rather than offering them directly. Some elements of the Android interface are still quite low-res compared to the Desktop version and there are UI elements that don’t work yet, plus some films have a noticeable delay before they start playing due to the availability or speed of the torrent process.

Naturally, with movie piracy being a criminal offence, Google were not at all pleased to see the Android app released. While Time4Popcorn apparently submitted the app to the official Google Play store, don’t expect to find it there yourself, as Google removed it on the grounds of “theft of intellectual property”. As a result, it can only be downloaded from Time4Popcorn’s website.

If this hasn’t put you off using the new App, however, there might be an even BIGGER reason to urge consumers to avoid it. The Time4Popcorn app’s functionality is mainly served by a centralised server, which makes it vulnerable both to takedown attempts by legal bodies or angry hackers; as well as opening the potential for malware to be distributed through it. Indeed, some users allege that the app contains malware already – although this does not seem to be the case, as the developers of the app makes its source code public and no dangerous code has been found within. Whatever the case may be, the point is that by utilising this single central server approach – which is also used by the Desktop version – Time4Popcorn offers no safety net and no guarantees as to the availability, safety and security of the service, should anything happen to that server in the future. You use it at your own risk.

Just like on Windows, however, the open-source nature of Popcorn Time means it may only be a matter of time before a second Android version is released; and there’s even been interest in building it for Chromecast. Perhaps this is the sad fact of piracy – it continues to evolve and grow even as it gives the finger to the very organisations by which it harms, yet whom without which it would cease to exist.

After many many months of negotiation it seems a deal between British Internet service providers and entertainment industry bodies to combat piracy in the UK has finally been agreed to. Don’t panic just yet though, it’s no where near as restrictive and intrusive as it could have been.

This discussion between the two groups has been raging since 2010 when the controversial Digital Economy Act was introduced, which included such measures such as the possibility of cutting off ‘repeat offenders’ from the Internet. However the ISPs protested the new measures, saying that it was forcing them to take on responsibility for policing their users and others raised questions about how only certain users could be cut off when IPs can be shared among people. Proposals have been worked on since then, with what seems to be considerable compromise mostly on the side of the entertainment industry bodies.

According to a document leaked to the BBC the new measures will begin in 2015, and will consist of letters or e-mails by the four involved ISPs (BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media) being sent to the addresses of users who are detected engaging in behaviour that infringes copyright. The system will run for 3 years with periodic reviews on performance and the numbers of people detected. More ISPs will also opt into the system after it has begun.

This is considerably less than the content owners had originally wanted. They had wanted letters sent to contain details of possible punitive measures and to have access to a database of known illegal downloaders, opening the possibility of further legal action against individuals. However, there is the possibility that if these new ‘soft’ measures are not seen to be working, they could push again for the ‘tough’ path of tackling piracy, this time armed with the data gathered during the 3 years this system runs.

There is no doubt that piracy is a big problem to those who make media, but equally that the thought of heavy-handed measures could end up doing a lot of damage. This system seems to be a compromise that leans more towards ISPs and users than the content owners, and we can only wait and see how effective it turns out to be.

Editor’s Note: I’m used to the occasional strange story. This is a games and technology focused site after all; but this might just take the cake.

Its a problem almost everyone has had, even if they don’t care to admit it. You know you have to go, but you just can’t. And the solution is usually some type of nasty laxative that either tastes horrible or has unpleasant side effects. But soon, instead of this less than dignified option, you will be able to turn to a tiny, swallowable engine that will get your colon back on the right track. Yes, you read that right.

The little capsule from researches at the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center is set to start vibrating six to eight hours after consumption, and will apparently err…double the weekly bowel movements of participants. The vibrations from the motor inside the capsule cause the intestine to contract and send your deliveries on their way. All without stomach pains and the unexpected…issues that laxatives can cause.

Of course, we don’t know when we might be able to ditch the Ex-Lax in favor of tiny edible motors, but I for one welcome our tiny new mechanical colon cleansing overlords!

While you may never see mix tapes or bands releasing their latest albums on cassette any more, the humble Cassette Tape still has a relatively quiet life serving as backup devices for industries with huge amounts of data to keep safe, but no immediate need to get to it later. This is because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data – and now, Sony have invented a whole new method of storing data to tape which just made it even better.

Due to be discussed at today’s International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, Sony’s new method uses a vacuum-forming technique called sputter deposition to create a layer of magnetic crystals by shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate. This lets the crystals pack together closer than any previous method to record to tape, reducing wasted space and increasing capacity within a smaller area.

Combine this with the small size of the crystals – just 7.7 nanometres on average – and the results are astonishing: the new tape can hold an eye-popping 148 GB per square inch, or the equivalent of three full-size Blu-Ray disks. Over a 60-minute tape, that equates to 185 TB of data.

But don’t expect to be using this tape to store your huge music collection any time soon – for one thing, you’ll probably find yourself rewinding and fast-forwarding the tape for DAYS. One of the reasons cassette tapes are mostly used for storing data that isn’t intended to be regularly accessed, is because tape is a linear storage method. Files are stored one after the other; so to retrieve a single file, the entire tape has to be ran through until the specific file needed is found. This process is likely to be thousands of times slower with the new tape’s huge level of storage – but that’s hardly a concern for the long-term, industrial-sized data backup performed by the world’s largest data centres, where storing data is paramount but very little is expected to be regularly accessed later. Sony also isn’t saying when or if this new type of tape is expected to hit the market, but assuming it’s only a matter of building the hardware and marketing it, then it’s just a matter of time…