The weekly Samknows.com news round-up continues, making sure nothing slips you by in your travels through cyberspace. This time we’re looking at alchemy, Big Brother and a Quantum of Torrents.

With a launch expected very soon, it looks like Microsoft is planning to ditch the “Kumo” moniker from its new search engine and go to market with an altogether different name. The Redmond giant is reportedly putting aside a hundred million dollars to market its new Google wannabe and, if the name does end up being “Bing,” it could need every cent.

The BBC is bringing the download version of the iPlayer (as opposed to the streaming video version) to Mac and Linux users by using Adobe’s AIR cross platform technology. AIR allows flash type content delivery in a standalone executable outside the web browser and will also provide the Digital Rights Management (DRM) required to time-limit [...]