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On Pirate Bay.

As you’ve probably already heard, last week the four co-founders of torrent-tracking website The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright offences in Sweden. Many folk have suggested that if you can do these lads for merely linking to pirated material then are Google going to find themselves sued sometime soon? Well, no. Not according to this piece anyway.

I had been wondering if the use of “pirate” in the site’s name might have helped a guilty verdict be reached - and it did, sort of. I mean, had the site been called “Linux Bay” and its original purpose had been for searching for torrents of Linux distros but it’d ended up being used by people for other material, would they have gotten into trouble? Probably so but perhaps they might have had a better chance of getting away with it…

…

On a not entirely unrelated matter, i came across this article the other day which mentions Iran having no copyright laws… so everyone there (including the government) just uses knocked-off copies of MS Windows, etc. I’ve no idea if this is true or not, and the article is 5 years old anyway, but it struck me as odd that an entire country would be allowed to get away with this. OK, they have no law against it but if i were to setup my own country somehow/somewhere and did the same would Microsoft’s (or whoever’s) lawyers not come-a-calling…? Hmm. Maybe the Pirate Bay chaps were onto something after-all…

Now with added twitter feed.

As you should have already spotted, the blog now features my latest twitter updates (“tweets”) in the sidebar. It wasn’t difficult to get the feed in place (i just installed the Twitter Widget) but i’ve had a bit of a headache getting it looking right. The CSS of the Simplex theme that i currently use for the blog was doing some nasty stuff with tweets that contained URLs, be they actual links or just usernames in the twitter @username convention. In hacking the theme’s CSS (/simplex/style.css) to try and overcome this things ended up looking mighty squashed up. I thought i’d resolve it with some padding or margins but i ran into problems with my new CSS being ignored by the browser in favour of existing code. Fortunately a very kind soul told me about “! important” which forces use of the CSS line you want to use and all was sorted. Sure it’s probably not the best solution but this thing already employs a few cheap hacks anyway.

For those of you that are interested, here’s the code (based on some i found here btw) that i tagged onto the end of the style.css file to sort things out…

#twitter_div {
  padding-top: 10px;
}

#twitter_div span {
  color: #000000;
}

#twitter_div ul li {
  border-bottom-style: solid;
  border-bottom-width: 1px;
  border-bottom-color: #EEEEEE;
  padding: 10px 0 10px 5px ! important;
}

#twitter_div ul li a {
  text-decoration: none;
  background: none;
  padding: 0;
  display: inline;
}

#twitter_div ul li a:hover {
  text-decoration: none;
  background: none;
  background-color:#E8C8C8;
  padding: 0;
  display: inline;
}

Some things what i saw on twitter.

I’ve not been using twitter for long, but it has already taught me several things…

Disney Templates – Disney artists aren’t afraid of borrowing their colleagues work. (via Phil Jupitus)

Cake Wrecks – It’s difficult to ice a cake well, even for “professionals”. This being a particularly fine example. (via Peter Serafinowicz)

Twistori – Twitter can spawn some wonderful things. (via a link in the twitter sidebar)