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?

If you’re unlucky enough to live outside of the UK, the US or Germany, then you will notice that the free use of last.fm to stream music has been taken away.

A move that in keeping with the current economic climate, and the acquisition of last.fm by CBS, means that users outside of the 3 lucky countries will have to pay a subscription fee of €3 a month. Of course, if you have access to a particularly fast proxy server in one of those countries, you can escape the charge..

There goes another year! During the past 12 months, we’ve had lots of stories here on Tech Snake and some changes to the website. Because of this I thought I would compile the most interesting and important stories for 2008. So sit down, take a load off and lets have a look through the last year together..

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Deal after deal have fallen through, and now Sky Broadband are the latest on the list of companies unwilling to front the £600 million asking price.

Sky, only prepared to part with £450 million, ended talks with the Italian owned ISP (who also have Pipex & Homechoice under the Tiscali umbrella). Of course, you can argue that the company should be worth less anyway, after loosing 37,000 customers since it was announced they were looking for buyers.

I personally have a lot of history with the ISP that includes appalling download rates and congestion. I also have friends and family that have had similar stories to mine. However, I do understand that cheap broadband breeds that sort of thing – and as many people around the country have already done, you should vote with your feet.

So with Tiscali’s bad press will a buyer ever be found that is willing to cough up £600 million?

The Beta tag has been taken off – which must be the quickest in Google’s history, after Chrome is updated to version 1.0.154.36!

Among the most recent updates are:

• Improved Speed (with more apparently due in the future)
• Stability & performance tweaks for the inbuilt plugins (flash etc.)
• Bookmark import/export & management options

Good changes I’m sure all agree – I’m still itching for the add-in engine though, enabling users to start producing their own code to enhance the browser. Especially an ad-blocker! That would be the magic ingredient to make Chrome the must-have application. Until this happens, Chrome is always going to be playing second fiddle to the likes of Firefox and IE.

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Google has updated it’s RSS reader visually as well as adding some features that users have requested.

Announced on the Google Reader blog, firstly they’ve cleaned up the look, removing what Google calls "visual clutter" – choosing to keep the colours toned down a bit, in comparison to the old reader. On the left, noticeably, the menus are condensed a little more, with logical groups, collapsible to save space if needed – including the whole menu if needs be. And the other major change? The ability to hide your unread counts! I’m guessing that people didn’t like the idea of being told how many unread items they had! Personally I just click the button at the top of the screen that says "mark all as read" but it seems that some people were getting a complex about it…

Other than that, the reader works the same way as before so it shouldn’t be too much of a shock when you go to use it. Bare in mind, that much like anything Google, you may have to wait a few days before you see the new look yourself. In fact, in the space of writing this article, my own Google Reader has been morphing slowly into the new version before my very eyes! Even though it’s a new look, and functionality is the same, I’m guessing there are plenty of people out there that will be complaining about it – just because it’s different and they weren’t told about it. And if you haven’t used Google Reader before, perhaps now is the perfect opportunity to take the the aggregator for a spin.

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.

Tired of your tired looking GMail? Well you’re in luck, because along with the already growing customisations, there are now selectable themes. Previously only enjoyed by browser hacks, the option is now open to everyone. Some of the new ways to customise your inbox:

To select the skin theme for your GMail account (assuming you have one of course) go to your settings when looking at your email, and there is a new "Themes" tab. Don’t worry if you don’t have it, Google are rolling them out for everyone over the next couple of days, so check back every day or so until it appears..

The new version of Google Chrome looks at stability issues with some of the plugins (Flash most notably) but also addresses the major carpet-bombing security flaw. Other things affected in this release appear to be the speed, as reported by various websites, giving a small boost over the previous version (which was quicker than anything else anyway!)

If you already have Google Chrome installed, it should update automatically and silently in the background – however if you want to speed things up, go to the spanner icon in Chrome and select About Google Chrome where Chrome will do a quick check and prompt you to upgrade if necessary. Of course, if you haven’t downloaded it yet, you can get your copy from here.

Personally, I’m getting impatient for major updates to the platform. The reason is that I want to use it full-time, instead of Firefox, just because it’s so quick and clean looking. However, until there are real updates so that users can install add-ons, perhaps with the ability to block ads (conflict of interests?) then Chrome will always be a test browser as far as I’m concerned.

A quick post – I just found myself at what is possibly one of the best font sites I’ve seen for a long time. A huge collection of fonts, in every style you can imagine. If you’re into Photoshop, fancy letterheads or DTP, dafont.com is going to be like gold to you.