It's all Legalese anyways

Some updates about the various happenings online~ (Thank you, Techmeme!)

TPB Trial Continues

The Pirate Bay Trial is rocketing along at a pretty breakneck speed, and all I can really see from it is that everyone who is suing The Pirate Bay is coming off as ignorant and greedy... Now, this might be because the only people who seem to be chronicling this whole affair are TPB guys themselves, or Torrentfreak Bloggers (which I would call "biased" in a hyperbolic understatement) but even with a shred of truth, it's becoming painfully obvious that these big companies (with Sony as the one being named the most clearly in the blogs) have no idea how Bittorrent technology actually works.

By the 2nd day, half the chargers were dropped. It's not as impressive as it sounds - the judge more or less said that half of the accusations were technically untrue (mainly because the people suing have no idea what they're suing against, exactly). The corporate entities are touting this as a non-issue, but TPB guys feel it's a pretty big win.

By the 3rd day, TPB Lawyers have brought out the King Kong Defense, (reminiscent of the Chewbacca Defense...). While the strategy itself is nonsensical, the point of the matter is the same one that they've been stating over and over again - that the people being sued don't exactly upload movies and music themselves, so suing them is fruitless. I can't believe they're wasting tax dollars on it.

And the logic behind the numbers they're suing for is ridiculous! "Every download is a lost sale" - . I don't think anybody downloads as an alternative to buying. I get the feeling most people download stuff they would never ever pay for.

So, in summation - this trial = stupid, pointless, and yet the actual, final result of it will be a groundbreaking landmark, so I'll keep you posted.

Google fought the Law, and Google won

Google won some trials today - mainly because they were stupid, proving once again that most cases that make it to court are frivolous and unnecessary.

First of all, Google won it's antitrust case. Essentially, the company was suing because Google was not displaying their spam high enough on search results (not sure if it's Adwords related or not). I don't feel bad for them.

Google's counter-argument more or less becomes "they don't have to use Google."

Google won this one too, but I feel less good about this. Google Street-View really is an invasion of privacy (though how they can get away with Friend-Connect and Latitude is even worse, in my opinion), but they won the right to use their van to film even private areas. It would have probably gone better if the people suing had not gone about it in such a disorganized, haphazard, and sort of foolish way. Really doesn't help that their name is "Boring," too. Tough to get excited there.

While this is going on, somebody from Google was out giving a speech about how powerful Google has become. That's like flipping the bird at the people suing them, for all intensive purposes. Probably not the best timing for Google, though awesome for me scrolling through Techmeme and seeing those stories right next to each other...

Facebook backtracks

Anyone on Facebook has seen this announced on the front page by now. Some people are skeptical, but whatever.

They're switching back to their old terms of use. Which, frankly, were not very good, anyways, so I don't know why people are happy about it. The only difference is, they're not "new," so nobody bothers to read them, (like EULAs). Trust me, the old Terms of Use were nothing to celebrate, either...

Customer Service can't GET worse

Read this and feel the rage.

Congrats, Consumerist! You're now one of my news sources. I may as well toss in Gizmodo and, (to a far lesser extent) Kotaku to the list. I'll think about Lifehacker too, but I don't have much experience with it.

Something less depressing

Here's a fun and useful little site: Mailinator. It gives you unlimited temporary email accounts (lasting 10 minutes long) so you can sign up for stuff online without giving away a real email. Wish I had heard of this sooner, since I just used to give a "Spam" Hotmail account away (currently sitting with 300+ emails in the inbox that I plan to delete all at once). The thing uses hardly any power, which isn't bad considering they handle like 185 spams per second.

I found it on this thread on Reddit. It's so true, too... I've been 24 for like 9 years now. Gametrailers is especially egregious with the 3-box date of birth thing.