The famous and infamous Pirate Bay has recently lost its legal battle in which the site’s owners are accused of aiding and abetting copyright infringement. However Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström who were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. $3,620,000 USD), after a trial of 9 days, will appeal against the verdict. The website to date has been unaffected and remains online.

The Pirate Bay verdict appears to be achieving the opposite to the outcome intended by the copyright advocates with support for the site and its political offshoot, the Pirate Party reportedly going from strength to strength.

Future victories for copyright holders are looking increasingly shaky as Bittorrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay are about to be replaced by applications such as the Tribler which uses no centralized server, making it harder for authorities to track and prosecutions be braught against any one body of focus. Anonymous VPS services such as iPredator, will also offers file sharers protection. So its an ongoing arms race.

Piracy

Social networking sites are enticing more people to them than porn sites. A recent study by Bill Tancer, a self-described "data geek" and General Manger of the Internet tracking company Hitwise, has concluded that porn searches have gone flaccid while people seem to be more interested in social intercourse. He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased, young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites.” Tancer said.

Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters", said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people's behavior. 

Tancer said the change in communication patterns was one of the most noticeable shifts in society in the past five years — a key point for marketers seeking to learn about their audiences.

In terms of behaviour, Tancer says his study also shows searches for anti-depression drugs spike around Thanksgiving, people are more interested in tropical storms since Katrina.

Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined – and there is no sign that this is waning.

This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.

"A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families," he said.

The hype machine has busy again. The new kid on the block of search engines, cuil.com has not delivered what it promised. Granted it is early days for the search engine, the disappointing results it provides from its searches will probably mean that it is quietly forgotten.

The following article goes into more depth on the failings. 

Cuil Search Engine: After Hype Wears Off, Nothing Remains

Careful what you post online, be very careful.

Steven J. Murdoch , a security researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory recently had his WordPress blog hacked. The hacker created an administrator account on the blog. However Steven quickly deleted it. He then began investigating how this happened. In the process of doing this he was curious about the password that the hacker used.

WordPress stores raw MD5 hashes in the user database. It is believed to be computationally infeasible to discover the input
of MD5 hash from an output. Someone would have to try out all
possible inputs until the correct output is discovered.

Steven looked at various lengthy methods of uncovering the password, but in the end he turned to Google. It seems that many sites use hashing for query strings. His search led him to a genealogy page with the surname of Anthony. Bingo, this was indeed the password.

More detail can be found in his original posting about Google as a password cracker.

Want to find out the latest secret nuclear submarine technology? Then just pop along to Google Maps or Microsoft's Virtual Earth and seek your nearest top secret naval base.

A man looking for a new home on an online mapping service has stumbled across an aerial image of a US nuclear-powered submarine in dry dock showing a part of the vessel that wasn't meant to be seen.

The image which appears on Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping service – is of the seven-bladed propeller used on an Ohio class ballistic missile submarine.

A similar incident occurred recently when Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, spotted an aerial image of China's new Jin-class nuclear-powered submarine on Google Earth.

One has to really wonder about military and security establishments don't you. They really don't have any grounds for demanding that internet be sanitized for the sake of national security do they. So much security, and secrecy yet a commercial satellite snaps sensitive information, so who knows what the spy satellites have got.

Maybe nations could seriously reduce their (excessive) military spending and just use the internet to find the latest "secrets". It seems to work for everybody else.

Following a posting by Adrian Lukas, I was reading Web 2.0 is now Business as Usual 2.0. They raise some interesting points. There was one in particular that grabbed my attention.

Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years

The only reason you’ll watch these videos is because you trust me to add value to your lives and not sell links.

 Now, I don't know the poster, and therefore can confer trust to them, but the title was enough for me to watch the three videos on offer.

• Part I Social Graph Based Search by Scobleizer
• Part II Social Graph Based Search by Scobleizer
• Part III Social Graph Based Search by Scobleizer

Robert Scoble is of the opinion that the business models of the large search engines such as Google are so locked into their search methods, that they will not be able to change and keep up with innovations and expections. He points out that current search engine results are suffering from the new industry of Search Engine Optimization. People have become so adept as optimizing their pages, that it is become in difficult to find meaningful results. Even the search engine designers are complaining.

Scoble then goes on to say to say that there is a new future in search, and that being via social networks, such as Facebook. He goes on to explain that a website suggested by a social network friend, and one that has considerable social network behind them carries more more weight. The proof in his argument being that the only way you came to view his discourse was via social networks, he did not publicize it any other way. So the search engines of the future will be driven by social networks, as people come to expect more quality and less marketing pumped at them.

He's got me thinking. 

Google has long been the top dog of search, with all of the others trailing far behind. But could that be about to change with the announcement of Yahoo's customizable Alpha Search Engine?

Yahoo Inc. is quietly testing a search engine which users can customize
by adding, removing and rearranging components, suggesting that the
company may plan to make it easier for users to tailor search sites to
reflect their interests. Having done some preliminary tests, it appears to do a good job. Initial searching is easy, but to customize the engine one needs to register. Yahoo Alpha Search is still in beta, so there could more changes to come. Time will tell if it delivers want people want.

 The original article can be found on PC World, Yahoo Tests Customizable Alpha Search Engine.

Increasingly, Google Inc's impartiality is being called into question, especially when it comes to living up to their motto, "do no evil". From complying to requests from the Chinese government to censor search results, to allowing the American military to post video clips of Iraq operations on it's newly acquired YouTube, to the recent doctoring of Google Maps satellite imagery. Up until this week, Google Maps displayed the damage to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Google Maps now displays pre-Katrina imagery of the city. One is left questioning why.

Google Maps returns to pre-Katrina status, leaving some wondering why

One is also left to remember that we are dealing with a corporate giant, and it of course has vested interests. We tend to forgo the thought of any bias, and look to Google as our trusted source of answers and information. How much of our online business is being shaped by the designs of one company? The term "google" even has a place in dictionaries now, a clear mark of the impression Google has on our minds. Is Google really that a good of a search engine, providing us the results we want, or have we now been trained to provide Google with the information it wants? 

When we talk in terms of SEO, it is almost always in terms of what Google wants.