It’s been a story that’s been going on for years. Whether or not the guys who run the Pirate Bay website are actually committing a crime or not. Well it seems that a court in Sweden have decided that they are.

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?

I was recently sent a copy of Partition Manager Server 3.0 from EASEUS so I decided to check it out and see if it was any good.

Firstly, the software itself is simple to install and get up and running. Although aimed really at the techie, the software does have a comprehensive help system, which as well as explaining the operating of the program, it also gives a good introduction into some partitioning terms. Although you could argue that the user would know perfectly well what partitioning was and how it worked, and if they didn’t they shouldn’t be touching this piece of software anyway.

Read all of this article…

The old fort, which it’s owner (Roy Bates) declared a principality – although the UK still claim it’s within their waters – was involved in hosting data off-shore, in an attempt to circumvent internet hosting laws in most countries.

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.

The "Jaguar" in Tennessee, USA, has been crowned the fastest computer in the world and is to be used for science.

The new champion, consisting of 284 Cray supercomputer cabinets, will be able to crunch an amazing 1.64 Petaflops – 1,640,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. Tested so far up to 1.3 Petaflops, the team at Oak Ridge National Lab are hoping to crank the machine up to it’s full potential soon.

Specification:

45,000 Quad Core Opterons (AMD), 362 Terabytes of RAM (that’s 370,000 Gigabytes!), 10 Petabytes of storage (or 10,485,000 Gigabytes)

Performance:

578 Terabytes per second Memory bandwidth, 284 Gigabytes per second bus bandwidth (to move data around the system)

All in all an impressive machine which will knock the current champion, Roadrunner (at 1.34 Petaflops), off the top spot when it’s up to speed. Read The Register article, and also check out the top 500 supercomputers on Wikipedia (soon to be updated I’m sure!)

A job everyone can relate to – especially me as it’s something I do during the working week! System Administrators are the key to any IT systems in a business. They’re the people that keep things running on a day to day basis. They’re the ones who keep everything secure and well-oiled. So it comes as a surprise when somebody who works in such a high position of responsibility goes bad. Thankfully it’s not something you hear about every day, although fairly recently I wrote an article about the sysadmin in San Francisco who failed to hand over the passwords to the mainframe! Anyhow, on to the story:

Priyavrat H Patel, a sysadmin who worked for a screwdriver company, was convicted in the US for Computer Intrusion. He will spend 6 months behind bars, pay $120,000 in restitution, and be under house arrest for a further 6 months after release, and still be answerable to the courts for another 2 and a half years to make sure he stays an upstanding citizen. Apparently, the fuel that caused Mr. Patel to remotely access the servers and bring down their email and network systems? The demon drink of course! Read the full Register article for the rest of the details.

Of course it begs the question, why weren’t the passwords changed when the guy left?

A collection of photos I’ve been hunting around the web for – servers, computers and server rooms that have found out what it’s like to lose a fight against fire!

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The micro-blogging app, Jaiku, has moved from it’s previous hosted servers to a Google data centre, following problems with the system.

Jaiku, who had been acquired by Google in October of last year, had always planned to migrate their systems to Google’s servers, in readiness for integration with Google Apps. However due to some problems they had last weekend, they decided to make the leap a little earlier than planned. Jaiku is still in a closed Beta, but now allows current users to give out unlimited invitations. If anyone wants an invite from me, drop a comment on this post.

In another anti-Microsoft post (God I’m getting good at these recently) it appears Microsoft’s email servers are down.

Just remember, don’t fret if you see the “Service Unavailable” message when trying to access your hotmail account – maybe it’s fate just whispering gently in your ear – “time to move to gmail…”

And we know what starts in the server market finishes on the desktop. Intel released details to Sun of their next chip and wanted them to keep it pretty secret, however Sun let it slip on a public server over the weekend – oops. Maybe Intel won’t be so eager to announce their intentions to Sun in the future! [SHOW ME]

There’s a serious “Geek alert” on this article. If you don’t know what IPv4 or IPv6 is then I suggest you look away and read the next article.. For those who are still reading, IPv6 address have been implemented on almost half of the root servers which means that IPv6 systems can communicate with each other without any legacy IPv4 stuff being used.

Why do we care? Well the number of IP addresses that are currently allocated on the internet is going to hit a very real limit in about 3 years time. This is because the pool of IP addresses available within IPv4 is nearly all used up. Of course back when the IPv4 standard was drawn up in the 70’s, it was never thought that there would be a need to address more than 4 billion computers on the internet. Thankfully with the IPv6 standard, which has had a real push for implementation, that upper limit of IP addresses goes up by a factor of 4 – a number roughly equivalent to 3 followed by 38 zeroes. Hopefully this will be enough for another 30 years! [SHOW ME]