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.

This is the news!

Being late to the party, I just watched Newswipe while eating breakfast, thereby setting myself up to be thoroughly confused for the rest of the day. Superficially, the show is like a news-oriented version of Brooker’s first-rate TV-bashing Screenwipe being smashed into The Daily Show with a hammer.

Although superior to previous BBC4 Daily Show wannabe The Late Edition—primarily a vehicle for Marcus Brigstocke to be smug and patronising, and Steve Furst to be as unfunny as humanely possible—Newswipe at times left me bewildered, and may just be the instrument that propels reality into a whirling vortex of postmodern news doom.

The problem with Newswipe is the news itself. When Chris Morris parodied the genre, in 1994, via The Day Today, he was remarkably prescient, but still able to stroke the absurd stick until it burst, exaggerating every aspect of the news to comic effect. Unfortunately, the news subsequently became The Day Today. While idiots in 1994 somehow mistook the Morris show for real news (“Sacked chimney sweep pumps boss full of mayonnaise”/”Headmaster jailed for using big-faced child as satellite dish”), today, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the real from the fake, such is the flash, sound-bite-oriented, ratings-grabbing and absurd nature of modern news broadcasting.

And so with Brooker, the show begins with him being Chris Morris (the newsreader and the comedian), talking in Chris Morris fashion about real news, which is being portrayed in a manner like The Day Today, without irony, and continues to dissect news broadcasts that look like they’re written by Chris Morris by highlighting the absurd nature of them by sometimes being Chris Morris and by sometimes being absurd.

Overall, the show—bar the odious poetry section—is still worth a look. Brooker’s entertaining, and he briefly waggles his fact muffin to debunk a few of the wilder news claims. But I couldn’t help feeling that the show is almost redundant. The news has become a parody of itself, and trying to create a comedy vehicle around it (albeit one concentrating on satire and deconstruction) results in the frustration of a show being slightly drier and more serious than what it’s reporting on, which is supposed to be dry and serious in the first place, but isn’t.

It’s enough to make your brain hurt.

Sometimes the best things in life start with a little mischief. That’s definitely the case with Bring Down IE6, a .net magazine microsite that I designed (using artwork from the wonderful people at ilovedust) and that launched on March 12.

Dan Oliver, the editor, was the culprit who lit the fuse. Knocking ideas around with me for features, he wondered if there was mileage in an article on the “growing trend to f—— IE”, meaning IE6, which even Facebook now hates. Being a web designer and also happening to know a lot of people who waste many hours dealing with IE6, I had a sneaking suspicion that, yes, this might just appeal to the mag’s readers.

The feature was duly commissioned, and I got to work, interviewing the likes of Jeff Zeldman and Bruce Lawson. I wrote the article, submitted it, and that was that. And then the mag hit the newsstands. Unusually, the article ended up online at the same time, rather than being delayed a few months, and there was one major addition: a badge.

Someone at .net had started a rallying cry, asking readers to download the ‘Bring Down IE6’ logo and link to the feature. But it didn’t seem loud enough. A spark went off in my head, and the microsite idea was born. It was then designed, built in suitably standards-compliant fashion, and IE6 was ignored bar an ‘upgrade’ notice that IE<7 users see. The finished site now sits at www.bringdownie6.com. Time will tell if it proves a success, but I’ve already seen the badge creeping out there and being attached to various designers’ blogs, which is heartening.

And despite the provocative and somewhat humorous tone of the site itself, the aim is deadly serious. It really is time for web designers to unite and finally get IE6 dealt with in some way. We need to move on, and together we will win.

The BBC reports that London mayor Boris Johnson is planning changes to the iconic road-crossing symbol. Once, both signs and usability were very similar in a huge range of countries, and in the UK you grow up learning that ‘a little green man’ means ‘walk’, and a red man means ‘walk only if you fancy getting run over’. (Of course, some countries have alternate crossing icons, including the USA, which unfortunately often favours using English—walk/don’t walk—in favour of language-independent icons.)

In recent years, I’ve noticed a surprising and disappointing trend towards diversity. When Fleet high street (Fleet being the town in Hampshire where I live) was revamped, so were the crossings. Rather than looking across the road at the ‘icons’ to see whether it is safe to cross, you now have to look towards the symbol on the same side of the road as you. I’m sure someone somewhere surmised that this was a more logical thing to do, but convention has long been otherwise, and I’ve watched people in my town—particularly young children—struggle with this upheaval.

In London, Johnson is planning on taking things further, replacing the standard icons with a countdown timer, primarily to hurry people across the road. However, with existing iconography so ingrained and clear, there’s a massive danger that pedestrians will have to revert to assumption when it comes to safely crossing. In general design, such as icons on websites, assumption is never a good thing and can hamper usability. But in road systems, it’s downright dangerous.