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.

Microsoft’s latest advertising campaign is a slightly odd one in many ways—it thrusts dollars into the hands of normal people (well, actors acting out the role of normal people) and gets them to buy a new computer. Obviously, they look at Macs, spit on them and grab a PC. At the same time, Microsoft continues to crow about the so-called ‘Apple Tax’.

Aside from the obvious danger in an advertising campaign that puts forward the argument that the only benefit your product has is price, the Apple Tax argument is one that holds little water when explored fully. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to put into words a succinct argument why the Mac side is typically better, and therefore why someone can justify spending more on what many people initially see as the same thing—‘just a computer’. Phrases like “it’s just better” and “you won’t get it until you try it” only work when someone has tried it and then tries to convince someone else to ‘cross over’ at a later date.

One of the better attempts of recent times arrived yesterday, courtesy of Harry McCracken in his article Eight Reasons Your Next Computer Should Be a Mac. He says: “Next time I encounter a Microsoft executive tsk-tsking about the onerous ‘Apple Tax’ imposed by a Mac’s needless glitz, I’m tempted to ask him what car he drives—and whether he chose the model with the cloth seats and hand-cranked windows, or one with a few creature comforts.”

The thing is, even this argument often falls on deaf ears, which makes me ask the following question: why are computers still considered dreary, strictly functional devices to so many people? When consumers have the money, they want a flash car with nice stuff, a decent mobile phone with bells and whistles, a good-looking television, and a sparkly watch. They don’t want the near-junked car with manual windows, the mobile phone that barely manages to make text messages, a TV from the dark ages, and a 1980s Casio digital watch.

With computers and the internet becoming near ubiquitous in so many people’s lives, it’s strange that so many people, as Stephen Fry put it when I interviewed him, “spend their lives in front of a screen […] in a Windows environment, the equivalent of a ‘sick building syndrome’ office, with strip lighting, ugly furniture and no freshness, sexiness or imagination in design. People are dragging out their lives in the computer equivalent of a sink estate and no-one questions it.”

I regularly question it, but I still haven’t found any answers.

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.

Given how much care Apple usually puts into its products, and especially into the small details, it’s amazing that the App Store’s ability to count is worse than Sesame Street’s resident vampire after a full-frontal lobotomy.

The iPhone’s App Store app is terrible at doing this, regularly flagging a certain number of updates and getting the total wrong. But iTunes is even worse. The Applications sidebar item will cheerily tell you about new app updates, you’ll click it, and you’ll then be told no updates are available. Cleverly, the Applications icon won’t then update, sticking to its guns that there are updates to be had, despite the fact there clearly aren’t.

This morning, the farce was in full swing. “One app update,” exclaimed the Applications item. I click it. There are six items ready for download. Duly downloaded, the App Store happily tells me there are no more updates. Inexplicably, the Applications item now claims there are two apps ready for download.

This probably sounds needlessly picky (and, to some extent, it is), given that no other company has come close to emulating the App Store (and, frankly, I think few will, even in the long term). But it’s hard to always sing the App Store’s praises when the damn thing can’t even count.

UPDATE: Purely by chance, I today discovered that this ‘quirk’ is down to there being multiple accounts on my Mac. Although one account was up to date, another had apps ready for download. Of course, iTunes doesn’t actually bother telling you this might be the case, and so it’s still a black mark for Apple, for an unusually unintuitive UI decision.