Yeah I know, the Pirate Bay aren’t exactly the last bastions of copyright law, but it’s important to realise that they don’t peddle piracy, they merely allow those who want, to share what they have. Again, the word “Pirate” in their name doesn’t exactly lend themselves well to the RIAA or MPAA or the other myriads of money driven anti-copying corporations. But then that doesn’t immediately make them criminals. If that was a fact then Maersk or P&O would be held responsible for dealing with stolen cars, transported by their container ships - which is obviously not the case. This is just ridiculous and highlights how little the legal system knows or understands how torrents or the servers that hold them work. [SHOW ME]

According to Tiscali, the use of the BBC’s iPlayer is having a detrimental effect on their network. All very interesting, considering that other ISPs (BT and Virgin Media) are quoted as saying they can’t see a difference in their network performance. And if things don’t get any better, Tiscali say the users are going to have to foot the bill. Tiscali must be smoking the crack pipe again.. Why are the users going to have to pay more for a service they’ve already paid for? Is this going to be pencilled into the T&C’s at the last minute? At what point is internet activity normal activity in Tiscali’s eyes? What are the real issues here?

There are 1 of 2 things going on with Tiscali, which is painfully obvious. It’s either that Tiscali’s network infrastructure is so bad and so close to collapse that one more service used over it’s network will grind it to a halt - and they don’t want the general public to be “aware” of their problems (search for “virus effect” on my blog for more information.) Or the other reason could be to make a quick buck. I don’t believe that use of the iPlayer can have that big an impact on your services if your services are robust to begin with. I also haven’t really understood why Tiscali think they can get the BBC to chip in a little something for the strain - although I guess the BBC and other big corporations have very deep pockets. It all appears to be a big smokescreen to Tiscali’s connectivity problems to me. After all - Youtube hasn’t been approached to part with cash, and the bandwidth from them must be massively higher than that from iPlayer. [SHOW ME]

After successful trials in the States, Amazon are going to offer their music store globally now which will be direct competition with Apple’s Music Store. The big difference with Amazon’s offering is that the music will have no Digital Rights Management (DRM) tied into it - meaning anyone can buy the songs, and download to the mp3 player, phone or computer of their choice.

Record companies are flocking to Amazon as they realise people that buy music want to keep it & use it under their terms, not Apple’s. It would be nice to choose the format of the music - but it looks as if “mp3″ is the way forward, for the meantime at least, for Amazon. [SHOW ME]

If you’re not familiar with the term “wall walker”, I think you’ve probably seen the thing I mean: They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, an octopus, spiders, a man & even cars. They have a sticky underside and they slowly make their way down to the bottom of a door or wall. Where else in the world would you think to take an innocent child’s toy, make a 5ft version and let it walk down a skyscraper? Japan that’s where of course! It has a great ending too. [SHOW ME]

You know, I actually remember this advert. This word-processor (when they used to be dedicated machines) was aired circa 1985 - one of my favourite lines is “has a big 256K Memory.” Wow, really? But then we have to remember this was the time when the 128K spectrum had just been released… And all this for a paltry £465 ($930.) Actually the printer was with it, and was aimed squarely at the office market (as you can tell at the end of the ad.) [SHOW ME]

Well after the [shock news] of two of the major film studios running away from the HD-DVD format, it appears that the news has not been missed by the general buying public. Many thought that the only listeners to the threat that HD-DVD would crumble, would be the geeks, but I’ve got news for you people - the man-on-the-street isn’t as stupid as you think!

In this Computer World article, the NPD Group (A market research firm) have announced that HD-DVD player sales are down by more than 87%. And that’s in just a month. Blu-Ray’s sales, in comparison, are up more than 49%. As always, the consumers are voting with their feet. [SHOW ME]

If you sign up for the initial flights with Virgin Galactic it will set you back a cool £100,000 with a 10% deposit on booking your flight. For this, though, you will “officially” go into space and experience weightlessness. A bargain at twice the price (or at least in my opinion!)

The company, funded fully by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, looks to be the first commercial offering space flight to actually get airborne. Even though Virgin Galactic are ahead of it’s opposition, the focus is on making sure everything is right (especially safety) before the go-for-launch order is given. The first lucky passengers are set to go up next year, Virgin announced yesterday, if all goes to plan. Read the full press-release [HERE]

H2O Networks, based in Merseyside, are soon to install a fibre network into the sewers of either Bournemouth, Dundee or Northampton. The choice is up to the local councils apparently in who gets their paperwork ready first. The first “fibrecity” project will be announced in April, and will take approximately 18 months to complete. So we can expect the city to be live hopefully sometime in 2010 - and the speeds? A minimum of 100Mbit/s!

Using the sewers is nothing new - hundreds of miles of pre-installed pipes deep under the ground have always looked like the easiest way to provide homes with the next generation of connectivity. The only thing that crosses my mind is what happens if a sewer pipe breaks and takes the fibre with it? Legally, the sewer pipe is the responsibility of the people “up-stream” from the break (if it’s private) so that means everyone the sewer serves has to get it fixed jointly. If people disagree it means no internet. It’s good however to see some changes for the better and a positive drive to increase bandwodth in the UK. And this soon after parliament recently voiced their concerns over connectivity compared to the rest of Europe. [SHOW ME]

A student of MIT (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is going to fight back after being threatened and ordered to pay a fine by the RIAA for sharing mp3’s and other types of music over the internet. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) are renowned for singling out students and single mothers to scrape together the highest amount of money-per-head possible by concentrating on the most vulnerable and most likely to pay. MIT aren’t prepared to back up their student, so he’s decided to go it alone and face the RIAA himself.

This will be the next BIG case that will go public in, what seems, the war against the RIAA. How long can the RIAA go on extorting huge amounts of money from people for downloading a single track? The punishment should fit the crime, as they say so maybe the RIAA will be shown in their true colours to the public, after this case - a corporation that tries to make examples of people for minor crimes by taking away their money & dignity for the sake of a CD single… [SHOW ME]

In a story that has made an appearance in Tech.co.uk today, the East Japan Railway Company have installed piezoelectric generators in the floor of a ticket gate in a bizarre field study. The generator will capture the commuters’ stepping power as they walk through the gates. The amount of power produced at the gates is irrelevant - I think the real story is in the moral implications.

If it proves to be efficient enough at the ticket gates, what’s to stop the railway from putting the floors throughout the different areas of the station? And then other stations? Or on the trains? Pretty soon the technology would become common place and perhaps even be used in different buildings or complexes? Using this system, essentially means a corporation is harnessing energy from it’s rail service passengers without their permission. I don’t think people would mind as long as they would see benefits & they were asked for their opinion on it. But then how will it work? Would you sign something to say “JR-East can harness my energy”? It’s a really cool idea that needs to concentrate on execution, I think, but sounds too easy for it to fail.. [SHOW ME]