This Kraken fights for good
If you're up on your pirate lore, or perhaps have your Pirates of the Caribbean plot flow-chart handy, you'll know that sea-faring criminals are no friends of Johnny Depp-devouring monsters. As it goes on the high CGI seas, so follow the stormy waters of the Firefox add-on world. Yesterday's Pirates of the Amazon plug-in, which adds torrent links to songs and movies in the Amazon.com store, is met today by The Kraken, a plug-in that adds Amazon.com links to torrent Web sites.
The Kraken adds Amazon results to MiniNova and The Pirate Bay searches.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The Kraken is extremely simple and there's no configuration required. When you visit popular torrent Web sites The Pirate Bay or MiniNova and search, Kraken will insert its own results box at the top of the site's search engine results that links back to Amazon.com. Kraken did not work with ISOHunt, Torrentz, or TorrentReactor when I checked them.
The plug-in defaults to showing only one result during your first search. To see more hits, click on the Show Top 10 Items for a longer list, or click on the Show All link at the bottom of the list to jump to the relevant Amazon.com page. Share opens a window to quickly e-mail off your Kraken results.
The Kraken obviously isn't going to change anybody's mind about torrenting copyrighted media, but it's encouraging to see that at least somebody out there has a sense of humor instead of firing off threatening and specious letters that probably cost more in attorney's fees than in recovering theoretically lost earnings.
Seth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you don't have to. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2. You can follow him on Twitter. 
- by tikoro December 17, 2008 12:34 PM PST
- stryder302: You have no concept of risk-free purchase do you? Companies either don't back the products they sell, or it's such a hassle to get them backed. It's nice to have some form where you can try it before you buy it, and if you don't like it...*Delete*. As opposed to other "try before you buy" nonsense that if you don't like it, you have to call to attempt to cancel with some pushy salesperson and then ship the product back, or pay S/H to get it in the first place.
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(4 Comments)To lump everyone in the category as people that just straight up want something for free and will never pay for it is like me saying "all people with "stryder" in their online identifier are twits". It's neither true, nor makes you less of a presumptuous ass.