If you’re in the UK, the MP expenses row sparked by the Telegraph can’t have escaped your notice. My current highlight: an MP who claimed for two packets of Tampax for himself. One wonders what a male MP could want with Tampax in order to do his job, but then it’s probably best to stop thinking about that rather quickly.

What grates right now is the typically weaselly manner in which most politicians are addressing this problem, using typical ‘politician speak’. At best, this is insulting; at worst, it’s showing they’ve learned precisely nothing (which is probably unfair—I’ll bet they’ve learned that in future they need to be a hell of a lot more cunning regarding fiddling expenses). So, in time-honoured tradition, here are some helpful hints for our lovely MPs:

When asked about the expenses scandal, don’t look all mournful or forthright (depending on what you think will get more sympathy) while rattling on about how “the system is broken” and how “the system must change”, unless you’ve never made what amounts to a remotely dodgy claim. If you knew the system was broken and you were exploiting said system, you were involved in what’s tantamount to fraudulent behaviour. The correct answer is not that the system needs to change—it’s that MP attitudes need to change.

When asked if you feel guilty about your conduct, have the integrity to provide a straight answer, using one word: ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Either you did or you didn’t do something wrong. Don’t spin the response to say “every MP should say sorry”. You are not every MP. I’m looking at you, Alan Duncan MP—and, believe me, I’d rather be doing something else… anything else.

When considering making claims in future, here’s a handy tip: when working in a job, you claim what’s required to do that job. It’s really quite simple. When I worked in a design agency, I claimed for a graphics tablet and some software. When I did client visits using my car, I claimed for petrol. Things I didn’t claim for, just to pick a few items at random: having an aga serviced, cat food, horse manure, and having a piano tuned. (On the last of those, I’ll forgive the MP in question if they make a total arse of themselves doing a live performance, tinkling the ivories on prime-time television.)

Also, when considering claims in future, bear in mind that since you’re earning at least £64,766, and no doubt have your fingers in lots of stodgy business pies, you can probably afford to pay from your salary for things like a quiche flan dish and a Vileda supermop. It might shock you to understand that not only do most of your constituents earn significiantly less than you do, but they also don’t get to claim for things like a toilet brush holder (unless they clean toilets for a living, and although MPs plumb the depths are are often surrounded by sh*t, that’s usually only in a figurative sense).

Of course, the real way to deal with this scandal is for all you MPs to stop being conniving, manipulative, shallow, lying, cheating, self-serving arseholes (perhaps learning from the rare odd exception lurking among you), but, hey, you’re MPs, right? Good luck in figuring out your replacement expense plan and working out how to use that to exploit the masses!

Love and kisses,

The general public

All the recent excitement about The Pirate Bay dragged uncomfortable arguments to the fore. Yes, The Pirate Bay was rather flagrant about its enabling access to copyrighted material. But when it boils down to it, The Pirate Bay is merely a search service for finding torrents—torrents that can also be legal, such as videogame demo downloads.

A whole bunch of people noted that The Pirate Bay was being singled out, in an attempt to provide a high-profile casualty and scare similar sites into shutting down. But much larger sites also provide access to torrents, notably Google (via a ‘filetype:torrent’ query).

The logical upshot of this was The Pirate Google, available from thepirategoogle.com. This site merely provides a front-end to a torrent-specific Google search, in the same way thousands of other sites provide access to Google Custom Search. The point is to show that Google’s functionality isn’t, in some cases, a million miles away from The Pirate Bay’s.

Google, apparently, thought differently. At the time of writing, Google’s blocked access to The Pirate Google. I’ll bet the official reasoning is down to the site’s name, in suggesting there’s some link between ‘piracy’ (bootlegging) and Google. It’ll be interesting to see if Google does the same if someone decides to create an identical site with a less controversial name.

With news emerging that Windows 7 Starter Edition only runs three applications simultaneously (and pundits amusingly trying to justify this as an OK thing), we can exclusively reveal that in the depths of Redmond is yet another flavour of Windows 7 about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Codenamed ‘Shackle’, this low-end version of Windows 7 is designed to drive you as crazy as possible, by only offering out of the box support for Windows and Word. If you try to run anything else, the error pictured above appears. Try a second time and your PC will bark “I’ll show you!” (using the voice of Steve Ballmer), before loudly exploding.

When asked for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson said: “Look, everyone you speak to says they ‘only really use Word anyway’ on their PC, so what’s the damn problem?” When we suggested Microsoft’s multiple Windows flavours and absurd restrictions would likely make more people jump to the competition or increasingly use web apps from Google, Microsoft’s spokesperson whipped out a Zune, turned it up loud, played a sample of Steve Ballmer barking “I’ll show you!”, and set fire to our shoes.

This morning, The Pirate Bay Four (a name that the media isn’t using to make the four people involved in The Pirate Bay sound evil, honest) were found GUILTY of being evil, nasty pirates, and sentenced to a year in prison each, slightly short of the ‘death by having eyes gnawed out by rabid squirrels’ punishment major Hollywood studios, record labels and videogame companies were aiming for.

But, in the nature of this site’s ‘helpful hints‘ series, here are some facts (or FAQs, if you’re so far gone into Web 2.0 that your skin tone is now a gradient) for any news organisations too stupid to understand what’s been going on:

1. These people aren’t actually pirates. Pirates are genuinely nasty people who go around in boats and attack other boats for hostages or huge piles of ‘stuff’ they can offload for ‘cash’. Nor are these people facilitating piracy. Piracy is the act done by the aforementioned people who go around in boats, attacking other boats. It could be argued that The Pirate Bay was, by the nature of the technology used, facilitating bootlegging, but that doesn’t sound nearly as exciting.
2. The Pirate Bay isn’t the only site where you can download copyrighted material. This will come as a huge shock to many news outlets, but at the last count there were—to use a technical term—a f*ck-load of similar sites around. I should know—my latest book appeared as a ratty, badly scanned PDF on most of them approximately three seconds after being put on sale.
3. BitTorrent isn’t a technology for “illegally sharing movies” from “poor widdle Hollywood companies that are going to cry real tears of pain” if you don’t buy their DVDs with over-inflated prices (six months after the USA gets that chance, if you live in Europe). In fact, it’s just a file-sharing technology (working in peer-to-peer fashion, thereby avoiding single-point-of-failure and reducing bandwidth resources for any one ‘sharer’). Idiots in the media might want to read the main bit of that bit again. BirTorrent is just a file-sharing technology. The Pirate Bay, despite its knowing name, therefore actually allows you to download a whole range of material, and in a manner that doesn’t make a single provider scream for mercy.
4. This could have been welded to the previous point, but it deserved its very own number: Far be it for me to point out the very simple fact that many of the companies crying their widdle eyes out are the same ones releasing a shed-load of material via BitTorrent, to get it spread more quickly and save on bandwidth costs, thereby being ably assisted by torrent trackers. You know, torrent trackers like The Pirate Bay.

Google Street View has been a controversial development. Most people seem initially excited by it, right up until the point where they use it and find on display their car, their garden, their house, and, sometimes, their front rooms.

In the UK, the response has been largely negative, perhaps due to Labour increasingly turning the country into a surveillance society. However, in today’s BBC article, Villagers challenge Google camera, Google makes a particularly weaselly statement:

“Imagery is taken on public property and is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

Technically, this is true—Google’s car drives along public roads, and takes photos that anyone could take. But this ignores the all-inclusive nature of the photography—I doubt ‘anyone’ could take the sheer number of photos the Google car does, even in a single town, without massive investment.

Also, I bet if ‘anyone’ tried to emulate Google, either driving or walking around a major town, taking dozens of photos every few metres, and subsequently published them online, they’d be arrested, not defended, by local police forces.