Now, some of you may not know what SOPA or PIPA are, even though you read this blog, so I’ll try to explain it simply.

PIPA and SOPA are bills that are being pushed through the American government that would essentially allow the entertainment industry a really easy way to block any website in America that they feel like.

Most people and companies in the tech industries are against this, including big companies like Google, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon etc, because it doesn’t help fight “piracy”, it censors the internet in America and has wide-ranging consequences for everyone, not just people in America.

It would break DNS (the fundamental force of the internet), cause legitimate websites to be blocked (it has been done before, that things to get rid of piracy have cause legitimate websites to be blocked) and force many people outside of America to block these sites even though there is no law saying they should…as the governing bodies of the Internet are American organisations, and therefore subject to their laws.

The fundamental problem is…this will not stop piracy. Pirates will go around these issues and you cannot stop that. There are always ways around these things. You need to either go after the money…or don’t try.

If you want to help (even if you aren’t in America, you can still do something) – go to this website: http://americancensorship.org/ - it explains everything. Scroll down a bit and you can petition the American State Department to stop being hypocritical.

In solidarity with the websites that are going black on Wednesday the 18th, this blog will also be going black from 00:00 GMT till 00:00 GMT on the 19th. That is a full 24 hours it shall be out.

• There will be at least 1 upgrade to either ps3, 360 or wii at E3. Most likely will be the wii, as I think it is the 1 most needing an upgrade. We haven’t heard any rumours yet, but that makes this one more fun. PS3 will hopefully not, as it should have a long time left in it as we haven’t reached its potential yet (and I’ve only had 1 for a year…) 360 will probably get 1 next year.

Wii U was announced. Wasn’t released, but I think that counts

• Google TV will have its Hero moment (arguably the point when android on phones became properly usable for everyday users). It will have a couple of upgrades, and actually start to be usable by normal people. This will then cause people to buy it, and make it useful and fun.

Well, I was right about the update. It was quite late in the year, but the Honeycomb update for Google TV made it really nice and useful and fun, and people are starting to like it. But still…not many people are buying it.

• We will drown in tablets and e-readers. The first colour e-reader will be released, and this will be kinda rubbish, cause the refresh rate will still be pretty crap. Better devices will not be released until 2012 (probably until after an Apple colour eReader, an i-nk-pad perhaps?).

Hmmmm. Ok partly right about the first bit. Wrong about the second bit. But technically probably will be right about the last bit? (not the Apple bit though…).

• The Notion Ink Adam will be released?

It was. And what an anti-climax that was. I never ended up getting one. Got a transformer instead.

• New iPad, iPhone and iPod touch (pretty obvious…) No MacBooks this year though. They seem to be going off MacBooks and releasing them with more than 1 year gap. They will slowly be turned into the iPad with a keyboard.

I was right, right and right. But then I was wrong. There was a Macbook refresh. Maybe even 2…can’t quite remember.

• Windows 8 will be announced, but will not be released till either the end of 2012, or beginning of 2013, but they will say beginning of 2012. It will look exactly the same, but will have great “security” features. Including, but not limited to, something “unhackable” and also a new “uncrackable” activation code system, that they seem to spend a lot of time on…

Right to start with, but then very wrong. It is nothing similar in look and feel…hello Metro interface.

• Commercially available 4K tv. People start to hear about it, forget about 3D. Although, people will continue to say that the number of pixels I have just now is fine, thank you very much. But they will buy one eventually anyways…

Nope. Sad times. Sometime though.

• Android 2.4 and 3.0 will be released within the year.

Hmmmm. Well, I was wrong about the numbers…but 3.0 and 4.0 should count I’d imagine. Who would have known exactly what would have happened with all this crazy tablet only version of Android and stuff. But I’ll take that as a win.

• Canonical will continue alienating people and projects, and will continue on its mission to mac-ify the Linux desktop.

Hmmmm wow, I was feeling snarky that day wasn’t I. I’ll just leave this one at the side for just now.

• Hulu will get off their backside and start their UK service. People celebrate…

Nope, and we didn’t even get Netflix last year In fact, apparently, Hulu just gave up. This is weird, and I wonder whether Netflix got some of these deals and managed to make them exclusive first? Who knows what actually happened. I guess we never will. The whole industry seems to be giving up on Hulu anyway.

All in all, a reasonable year. Lets just look forward to another year of awesome technical innovations. I’m excited. I hope you are too

1. Amazon release Adwords competitor.
2. Amazon opens first physical shop in Q4.
3. High street starts to change into what it’ll be in the future (blog post coming in a few days/weeks, hopefully)
4. Google starts to drop content businesses, becomes mainly service oriented.
5. Google TV starts to become popular, people realise how useful it can be. Many new ways of interacting with TVs will be announced and shown off at CES, and many will be released quite soon into the year.
6. A few point releases of Android, followed by Android 5.0 (Jelly) at the end of the summer
7. Apple TV (never to become iTV btw…) adds native apps.
8. Apple releases new iPhone in June, despite 4s only being out for ~8 months at that time.
9. Wii U released, flops quite spectacularly, like the 3DS.
10. New Xbox at least hinted at, at E3. Possibly not officially announced, but I think it might be.

So, these are my predictions for this year. I shall write a post going over what I said last year and see what came true etc. I also have my post about the future of the High Street coming up. Both of these will be hopefully soon, but I do have exams coming up, so it might be a week and a bit before they get up. Either way, I’m going to start blogging more again, because I’ve really not been doing much recently.

All sound like good things, don’t they? You’d have to be a pirate, thief or criminal of some sort to oppose one of these things yeah?

Of course you would. Or, that’s what we are told. You can’t oppose this legislation, it protects people. That is what we are told time and time again. Well, we shall not fall for that. We shall not be bullied into agreeing with your crappy rules that make no sense.

In America, there is a big fight happening about the SOPA and PIPA legislations that are trying to be pushed through into law. And last year, in Britain, the DEAct was pushed through in the run up to the 2010 General Election. We are told that these will protect jobs. They will protect legitimate jobs, and punish those who do wrong. Now, there are 2 main issues here:

• Piracy costs money and jobs

This is the second issue people normally come to when we come across this issue, but IMO, it is the main one. There are a number of people who pirate things

1. Those who can’t afford.
2. Those who don’t want to pay because they feel entitled to content.
3. Those who are against the “man”.
4. Those who can afford but want to try it out first.

For both 2 and 3, these people will never pay. If they didn’t get the things illegally, they wouldn’t pay. They never will. There is no point in fighting these people because either they will continue to get your stuff or they won’t. Lost causes, all of them. And yeah, I agree that these people are doing wrong things. But theres no point. Such a waste of time and money.

For 1, the only way to solve this is by giving them more money. So stop wasting money on ridiculous bills like this.

For number 4, they are the people who spend more money on content than people who don’t pirate. They already give you loads of money, and they aren’t going to give you more if they can’t get their tasters. They might even spend less.

So, basically…I don’t believe that piracy costs money or jobs. If you can prove that people would buy it if they can’t get it illegally, then I’ll retract my statement. But I think its rubbish.

• We have to break the internet

This is the other issue. Which, to be honest, is kinda moot after my last statement. But even if you do take the stance that it needs to be stopped, for goodness sake think about this properly. This is whack-a-mole. You can’t get rid of these sites by breaking DNS (and no matter what Lamar Smith says, this is breaking DNS) at all. You have to go after the route cause. Most films are pirated before they are even released in the cinema. How does this happen? Inside jobs. Go after your own people for goodness sake.

I’m a man with a website that has copyrighted material. My domain disappears. What happens? Most of my clients are clever enough to find ways around it. And if they aren’t, well…I set up another domain, or I tell people an IP address to get to. Etc etc. They are probably all following me on twitter, Facebook, google+, identica, etc. Think you can stop this by taking domains off the internet? Really? In that case you are insane.

In summary…there is no need to do this, and even if there is, this is the wrong way to go. For goodness sake, spend all that money you are spending this on important things. The American government could spend the money on getting rid of their TRILLION DOLLARS OF DEBT. And the industries could spend the money on making better films? Or maybe helping people who are starving in this world while you are worrying about a few 15-year-old getting a free copy of your film. Boo hoo for you.

My main point is, stop with these Bill names that are a way of saying “This is good, no matter what it says, if you oppose it you are a criminal.” I’m fed up of it.

Anyways, this weeks’ video is about the new Humble Bundle. You will all have heard of it if you read my blog. The Humble Bundles are games that you can name your price for a cross-platform, drm-free awesome game and help charity at the same time. This is the video promo for the new one, and I quite liked the video so thought I would share that as well as telling you all to go buy this game. I would if I had any money just now, but it looks pretty awesome.

Best quote from the video : “Whatever the verb for Google+ is”

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On booting up the ISO, the boot screen is still not great. This is 1 thing that Ubuntu has annoyed me with for a long time. It tries so hard to get everything to look nice and shiny, but yet when you get an error on the boot screen, you have this horrible looking splash screen replacing the normal one, and the error is normally even wrapped across more than 1 line.
When installing, it does, however, have a really nice looking hard drive chooser. You get 2 options: “Use entire hard drive” or “Do something else”. This is fantastic, IMO, as it is essentially giving a really easy option to people who don’t know what they are doing.

The rest of the install is fairly basic for Ubuntu. Like previous versions, it starts installing and asks you your personalisation options (a thing that I really love for the record). Location, keyboard and user settings. And then a bunch of information about stuff included in Ubuntu while you wait. For the record, the user settings is simplified a bit I think. Really simple. I like.

Right…now on with the actual OS:

• Dash

• Window buttons

It would not be an Ubuntu release, without something about the window buttons. If you look at the screenshot to the right, the top is the bar with the mouse hovering over it and the bottom is without that. There has been many a discussion about that, so I will just give a quick opinion about it, and that’ll be all. I think its a great idea, but there is 1 issue with it. Its not obvious how to get to it. Once you are used to it, it is. But there is no obvious visual cue that you need to hover to get this. And that’s my only issue with it.

• Software Centre

• Settings menu

This is something I asked for from Ubuntu a year and a half ago, and hey presto…we have it. A concise Settings menu that gives you all the options the average user could want. It is simple, obvious and actually pretty good looking. You get there by clicking on the power menu (top right) and choosing System Settings. Then do what you want…exactly what I wanted

• Thunderbird!

All in all, it seems like a very nice release. Seems much nicer for people who don’t care how their machine works, and people who like unity should like everything that has changed. I apologise for the amount of stuff in here, and I’m sure many of you will suffer a case of (TLDR), but if you really care about what I feel is important, then I’m sure you skimmed the bits you didn’t care about. Let me know what you think about it in the comments…and what your favourite/worst thing about it. Trolling won’t be accepted

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We also heard about the new Kindle Touch, which is an e-ink Kindle with an infrared touchscreen. Looks aweseome. Also has more efficient e-ink (so longer battery life) and larger internal storage. However…its US only.

What is Amazon’s obsession with US only things?

Amazon appstore, Amazon cloud player, Kindle fire, Kindle touch. Many many Amazon products that are only available in the US. Yes, sure, I understand, many other places do this as well and then release to the rest of the world. But, this is a huge thing to not ship to other countries. I also understand why the Fire is not shipping anywhere else, as many of the apps on it are US only. However…can someone tell me why the Kindle touch is US only?

Amazon…we want your products. You aren’t a US only company.

Anyways, enough prefab…lets get on with the awesome video.

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If you have been reading tech blogs over the last few months, or listening to pretty much any TwiT or Sixgun (yeah, that’s right, I put them in the same category now ) podcast, you will have heard the opinion that patents were origionally invented to encourage openness.

Now, there is many an opinion that patents are there to protect people from their ideas being stolen. But, it appears that patents were, infact, designed to encourage people to tell the world how they did this, and in return they got a temporary monopoly on this particular technology. Now, however, patents seem to be a way to get as many obvious things as possibly patented so you can make lots of money…

Lets take some of the new patents from Apple as an example:

• Solar powered charging for iDevices

Now, maybe its just me…but where on earth does taking a widespread technology, and putting it on another widespread technology make it unique and patentable? Now, I’m not an expert in legalese, but from reading the patent document, it seems like they are just saying “We will stick a solar charger on our devices…”.

An apparatus for operating a portable electronic device, comprising: a voltage converter having an input and an output, wherein the input is capable of being coupled to a solar power source and the output is capable of being coupled to a portable electronic device, and wherein the voltage converter is configured to convert solar power received from the solar power source to power the portable electronic device

I have a solar battery charger. If you consider a portable battery charger as a “portable electronic device”, then this describes my battery charger almost exactly. What on earth is unique about this patent? Connecting a solar panel to an electronic device is not new, innovative or clever…

• “Rotating the display orientation of a captured image.”

Do I need to say anything about this one? Digital cameras have done this for about 10 years…I’m sorry but this one is ridiculous.

• “Automatic configuration of peripherals”

Erm…I don’t really understand this one, I’ll be honest. Are they just saying making a peripheral do soemthing automatically when you plug it in? This seems extremely vague and the complete opposite of revolutionary.

• Cover flow for videos

Right, finally we are actually at something that is more possibly patentable. However, lets think about this. Apple technically already have a patent for cover flow in general. Not getting into whether or not this is a decent patent, it shouldn’t be patentable a second time. Using video instead of pictures is not a hugely revolutionary step, and if it is, its already been done.

You could argue quite easily that cover flow is now an “obvious” thing because its been around for such a long time. Heck, I have a coverflow style window switcher on my Linux desktop. Google has it in their new music app. Etc etc, and Apple isn’t pursuing anyone around these patents, so clearly it agrees with me that it is obvious. Therefore, using video in this way (which the netflix app on google tv uses) is not really revolutionary.

Ok, there are 3 problems with all of these patents. None of them are revolutionary, none of them actually are in a working product from Apple, and they are all generic “ideas”. For a patent to be patentable, they should be new and revolutionary, they should have at least a working prototype not a vague wishy washy “we might do this in this sort of way…”, and they should be specific implementations, not vague ideas. This is just getting ridiculous and the system needs an overhaul, if not a complete scrap. But at least an overhaul…