The data was made available a week ago by a user who trawled the original Pirate Bay site and created a torrent – virtually mirroring all of the data.

Well, the 19Gb’s of data, which includes a demo site and all the php required to get a usable site up and running is now mirrored at btarena.net! This is good news for it’s users, as the original Pirate Bay will be switched over to a new site by the buyers (Global Gaming Factory) before the end of the month.

The employees of FriendFeed will move across to work for Facebook but there was no mention of how much the online aggregator was sold for.

Does this mean the beginning of the end for FriendFeed? Is it going to be another app in the long list of those already in Facebook? Or will the technology be incorporated into Facebook without bringing across the raw functionality? I for one like the idea of FriendFeed, but only have limited interest in Facebook. Where are people like us going to be left when the details are worked out? Only time will tell I guess

Commemorating Comic-Con’s 40th Anniversary, many famous comic artists have been involved in creating the latest set of themes for iGoogle. Over 50 comics are represented, ranging from the classics of Superman, Spiderman & X-men, to Japanese Manga & even newspaper favourites like Peanuts.

Having a look through the huge list, I found some of my favourites – namely Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I loved as a teenager. And Dilbert, who I can relate to now! Have a thumb through the list yourself and it might inspire you to set iGoogle as your homepage again.. Of course it would be very cool if some of these themes made their way into GMail, where I think people would get to enjoy them more.

The court in Sweden have handed out a 1 years prison sentence for Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde. The court also ordered the 4 to pay damages of £2.4 million. Peter Sunde is quoted as saying, "Nothing will happen to TPB [The Pirate Bay], this is just theatre for the media."

It’s interesting in that the people who run the website are technically doing nothing wrong, although you could argue they are facilitating and condoning the committing of a crime, they aren’t downloading the music or films themselves – just giving others the ability to search on available illegal downloads. Does it warrant a prison sentence? In my mind, it doesn’t. What sort of society do we live in when this sort of corporate bullying can be tolerated, and where even a court of law, it appears, follows their lead?

A move that in keeping with the current economic climate, and the acquisition of last.fm by CBS, means that users outside of the 3 lucky countries will have to pay a subscription fee of €3 a month. Of course, if you have access to a particularly fast proxy server in one of those countries, you can escape the charge..

January
Two major movie studios step away from HD-DVD

The writing was on the wall for HD-DVD after Paramount and Warner Brothers made the announcement that they will be exclusively supporting the Blu-ray format in the future. Chosen for cost-cutting reasons, it seemed as though everyone was starting to look away from HD-DVD for the first time, after the battle was very closely fought, January saw HD-DVD take the first real blow, and started a chain reaction that would eventually mean the end for the format.

February
Microsoft wades in on Yahoo, and Freedom of Speech under threat

Firstly, the biggest story of the year in the tech industry. Microsoft makes it’s first steps towards Yahoo! with an acquisition deal.

This story started a to-and-fro news story between the two companies that saw rejections, renewed interest, and Carl Icahn threatening to overthrow the board of directors for Yahoo! In the end the amount offered wasn’t enough for Jerry Yang and the board, Carl Icahn was voted onto the board, and Yahoo’s stock is now worth a fraction of what they were. Jerry Yang is also stepping down as CEO, although how much pressure there was after this fiasco internally, will never be known. The story I’m sure will continue into 2009, as there are still rumblings of Microsoft after a piece of Yahoo!

Secondly, our freedom of speech was put under threat when wikileaks.org was taken down by the US government.

Wikileaks.org is a place for confidential documents to be released anonymously for everyone to read. Having it’s good and bad points (as true freedom of speech means complete transparency) certain legal bodies in the US decided that they should remove the server’s A records, as the domain wikileaks.org was hosted in the US. Essentially making the server unreachable by it’s domain name, it wasn’t long before people had worked out ways to circumvent the court order (and indeed Tech Snake also had a good work around) Of course, banning the website was enough to propel it from underground status, to front page news – normally the case as “no news is bad news.” The decision was reversed in March by the same judge.

March
Windows Vista gets a much needed update

After constant bad press and poor adoption by the corporate markets, Vista was in need of some confidence from consumers. Microsoft had their fingers crossed when they released the first service pack for their latest workstation OS. Fixing issues with UAC and improving security and speed, meant that from this point onwards, the press slowly started to warm to the new operating system.

April
Psystar sell their own version of the Apple Mac

Written in the EULA for Max OSX, Apple state that you can’t install their operating system on anything other than officially produced Apple hardware. Psystar (and a lot of people that ordered) believed this was a little out of order, so decided to create hardcore PCs with OSX installed as an option. Doubtless to say that over the coming months, Apple were going to release the lawyers. Psystar are still going strong and will continue to sell their PCs until the courts order them to stop.

Sky, only prepared to part with £450 million, ended talks with the Italian owned ISP (who also have Pipex & Homechoice under the Tiscali umbrella). Of course, you can argue that the company should be worth less anyway, after loosing 37,000 customers since it was announced they were looking for buyers.

I personally have a lot of history with the ISP that includes appalling download rates and congestion. I also have friends and family that have had similar stories to mine. However, I do understand that cheap broadband breeds that sort of thing – and as many people around the country have already done, you should vote with your feet.

So with Tiscali’s bad press will a buyer ever be found that is willing to cough up £600 million?

The Beta tag has been taken off – which must be the quickest in Google’s history, after Chrome is updated to version 1.0.154.36!

Among the most recent updates are:

• Improved Speed (with more apparently due in the future)
• Stability & performance tweaks for the inbuilt plugins (flash etc.)
• Bookmark import/export & management options

Good changes I’m sure all agree – I’m still itching for the add-in engine though, enabling users to start producing their own code to enhance the browser. Especially an ad-blocker! That would be the magic ingredient to make Chrome the must-have application. Until this happens, Chrome is always going to be playing second fiddle to the likes of Firefox and IE.

So why has Google Chrome dropped out of Beta if there are still features not implemented, but promised? Well according to Google, it all comes down to their initial goals with the browser. Their focus had always been on the stability and the performance of the application to elevate it’s status, but not security – odd.

There is no doubt, of course, that the security of Google looks very good on the face of it, with individual tabs and plugins "sandboxed" away from the main application, and hopefully the system it’s running on. I guess Google were confident enough with this fact that they haven’t needed to significantly develop it since Chrome’s first appearance September 2nd of this year.

Other improvements promised for the near future include an auto-filling form feature and RSS, essential to any browser in today’s modern market.

Announced on the Google Reader blog, firstly they’ve cleaned up the look, removing what Google calls "visual clutter" – choosing to keep the colours toned down a bit, in comparison to the old reader. On the left, noticeably, the menus are condensed a little more, with logical groups, collapsible to save space if needed – including the whole menu if needs be. And the other major change? The ability to hide your unread counts! I’m guessing that people didn’t like the idea of being told how many unread items they had! Personally I just click the button at the top of the screen that says "mark all as read" but it seems that some people were getting a complex about it…

Other than that, the reader works the same way as before so it shouldn’t be too much of a shock when you go to use it. Bare in mind, that much like anything Google, you may have to wait a few days before you see the new look yourself. In fact, in the space of writing this article, my own Google Reader has been morphing slowly into the new version before my very eyes! Even though it’s a new look, and functionality is the same, I’m guessing there are plenty of people out there that will be complaining about it – just because it’s different and they weren’t told about it. And if you haven’t used Google Reader before, perhaps now is the perfect opportunity to take the the aggregator for a spin.

For the last couple of days, however, the main website for "HavenCo" is not hosted on Sealand anymore. This almost certainly points to the end for HavenCo after a troubled recent history. Although the idea initially is pretty good, it’s such a niche market that the customer base must have been pretty small to begin with. Couple that with the reality that any traffic that flows through the Sealand servers, also flows through the UK, and it seems less and less attractive.

Personally, I’ve always seen Sealand as a bit of a quirk. And once the novelty wears off (worn off?), it’s just an old heap of bricks in the middle of the channel.