Tech news

It's been a busy week in the technology world. Here's a quick round up of the main articles:

The Pirate Bay founders refused appeal

The founders of the popular torrent hosting and tracker The Pirate Bay were denied an appeal by the Swedish Supreme court, thus making their previous sentences final. Guilty of "assisting in making copyright content available", Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde are sentenced to one year and in jail and to pay around 3 million euros all together as reparations.
From Sunde's blog:

"From having the minister of justice pressured by the US to illegally make a case of TPB, through the police officer responsible for the investigation (Jim Keyzer) 'just happened' to get a job at Warner Brothers the weeks before I myself got promoted from a witness to a suspect to the judges in the court cases being either board members, or in one case the actual chairman of the board, for the Swedish pro-copyright society, it was clear to us that the supreme court – where many of the judges make a lot of money on their own copyrights – would be hard to persuade to take the case." 

The site moved to the domain www.thepiratebay.se , but taking the recent event with Megaupload, it is quite possible that their site will be taken down by the US justice department, despite SOPA and PIPA not passing. It would seem they never needed those laws in the first place to blatantly censor the internet; they were just an mirage.

Apple's appeal to ban Samsung products in Germany fails

An appeal to ban Samsung smartphones and tablets was rejected by the Munich Regional Court. Apple Inc. claimed these devices to be in violation of their patents on who knows what. At the end, the final verdict was "Apple should go eat some oranges, this is just a case of sour grapes."

Google with new privacy policy

In case you haven't seen it all over their internet empire, Google is implementing a new blanket privacy policy that will replace and unite the old, separate ones, from their many services, starting March 1st. However this comes with criticism from rivals Microsoft: "The changes Google announced make it harder, not easier, for people to stay in control of their own information". There is speculation that these new policies will be put in effect to compete with Facebook's way of gathering information to sell to advertisers. What you do in Youtube could be connected to what's offered to you in Google+ and other products, for example.

Facebook goes public

The ever growing internet social network turned multi billion dollar company is going public with their shares, going the same path that rival Microsoft and Google had gone at their time.
This move will be likely followed by a big injection of cash, given the interest people have in this expanding enterprise, and that money would be used to expand even more. Some say Facebook could go after Yahoo, who has been struggling to compete for years, or even Twitter. It could be the start of a bid for the company to go play with the giants of the industry.