Just Another Weblog

From InformationWeek :

A Swedish court has ruled against the founders of the Pirate Bay, a file-sharing Web site. The four men, on trial for infringing on film and music copyrights and making the copyrighted works available, were sentenced to jail and fined Friday.
Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstroem were sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay compensation and damages totaling $3.6 million. A message on their site before the judgment vowed that "the losing party will appeal."
After the verdict Friday, this message was posted on the Pirate Bay:
"So, the dice courts judgment is here. It was lol to read and hear, crazy verdict. But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That's the only thing hollywood ever taught us."
The Pirate Bay was charged with making copyrighted materials available to Internet users for free through BitTorrent.
BMG, EMI, Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG, Universal, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. were among those accusing the Sweden-based peer-to-peer site and its operators of copyright infringement. They sought more than $12 million in revenue losses.
The defendants caught a break from prosecutors in February, when charges were reduced. Prosecutors acknowledged that the Pirate Bay didn't copy or produce the copyrighted material, and pursued instead charges that the site's operators were complicit in making the copyrighted works available.
The move was attributed to "largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against the Pirate Bay," Peter Danowsky, the lawyer representing the music companies in the case said at the time.
The Pirate Bay launched in 2003.

I didn't because I was too busy when it all began, oh well. Looks like I've got a lot of reading to do. Did you take part? Give a shout about it!

I'm now a proud member of the Opera Campus Crew! It feels great to be with the community and to be helping other people to understand the World Wide Web. Feel free to comment.

Safari 4 is a significant refresh of Apple's browser and looks like a Windows native app. It features a great set of enhancements and features including their Nitro JS engine (formerly known as SquirrelFish). It runs JS up to 3 times faster than Firefox 3 and 42 times faster than IE7. It however was the first browser to fall in the PWN2OWN event which shows that although it's easy to use, it's also easy to hack.
IE8 has made a name for itself when they introduced a switch in Windows 7 to turn it off! That's right, Microsoft made IE8 optional probably due to the EU troubles they've been having.
Mozilla have changed Firefox 3.1 into 3.5. Shaver said “It’s important to note that 3.5 represents a better labeling of our current scope, and not an indication that we intend to significantly increase this release’s scope any further.”
Google Chrome 2.0.166.1 has full screen browsing but it's not really needed due to the lack of chrome Chrome has (bad pun). 2.0.169 fixes a few stability problems and glitches with this feature and includes an updated version of V8.
We are uncertain what impact Carakan and Vega will have and if IE8 is the last IE with Trident or will be the last of IE. Happy browsing everyone!

Wow. It's all I can say, wow. The Opera 10 alpha is astonishing. I'm not talking about the features, but I'm just amazed at the sheer speed of the Presto 2.2 engine (but IMO Presto is a feature, a great one too.)
Plus I got my Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD today! Also, I'd like to say congrats to the Opera Desktop Team and everyone who made it possible. Happy surfing (and good luck on Opera 10!)