When DARPA came up with the idea of an interlinked network of computers, the whole reasoning behind it was that a Soviet attack on one part of the system should not prevent communication. Now governments are putting themselves into the Soviet commander’s seats to play war games. Tecnobitsdeclares, we’ll be the Russians.

When an earthquake ruptured the main physical connection between Taiwan and the rest of the world, it was a bad day for BIOS downloaders. Any connection to Taiwan’s main technology companies dropped to a trickle almost instantly.

But there was a trickle.

Right now, the war against piracy over the web is at a critical stage, with governments press-ganging ISPs into the fight (often against their will, with court orders and the like) – determined to cut off the supply of TV shows, films and music that some people get for free.

But the internet, by its very nature, is all about ‘resilience’. It’s all about ‘OK, so there is a block here, no problem, I will route around it’.  And with modern networks/data transmission rates, it’s not like the Taiwan cable rupture – because the ‘fall back’ networks are also amazingly fast.

So what happens next?

Well, first up, it seems that Pirate Bay has declared itself to be some kind of political party, standing for various rights and freedoms. Tecnobitsis no legal expert, but that has to create some new challenges/tensions/difficulties for the governments that wish to battle the pirates.

The first of these is that, it seems, in most of these legal hearings in Holland, the loser would have some kind of right to lodge a statement. That looks to have been denied to Pirate Bay – but maybe as a political party, they would have more rights and it would be illegal to censure their speech in most countries outside of North Korea, Saudi Arabia and <insert name of your favourite dictatorship here>.

What also seems clear is that if Pirate Bay had been allowed to broadcast a message to the world, then it would have started with “Oh, by the way, here’s the fastest way around the block” and the court would have been obliged to print those instructions.

If we use a real world analogy, a government has decided that Scotland is an illegal place to visit – and it has shut the main motorway. However, there are several ‘A roads’ which allow you to drive to Scotland and back quite quickly. The court has decided that publishing an alternative map to Scotland is not legal. They have not managed to nuke Scotland, just trying to block people in England from knowing that you can drive there – in the hope that English people will, instead, visit Scottish stores (run by the UK government) and buy ‘approved’ Scottish products’.

The truth is that people who wanted to buy ‘Scottish goods’ would have already been getting them from the most conveniently located store – and those who were making the trip to Scotland and back had no intention of buying locally anyway – so it’s hard to know if this is a genuine win.

In fact, there is a strong argument to say that it was the constant influx of Scottish goods – from Scotland – that encouraged locals to buy more from the government-approved Scottish shops.

OK, we has stretched that analogy to breaking point – so we’ll leave it there.

Pirate Bay rebrands as a political party, Queen Elizabeth and her love of piracy – alongside a dubious graphic for the copyright defenders people (who 'borrowed' the design in the middle – ooops)

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.

While Citrix’s moves ahead with CloudStack and its abandonment of the OpenStack cloud computing platform dominated the news recently, let’s not forget that OpenStack has enormous backing and a well-funded foundation forming around it. In our post "OpenStack’s Partnerships Give it a Leg Up in the Cloud Race," we detailed some of the many tech companies that are developing around the OpenStack platform.

Hewlett-Packard, for example, has announced its Converged Cloud services and platform tools, based on a "hardened" version of OpenStack. And now, HP is ready to deliver the public beta version of its HP Cloud Services, which could mean a lot for the struggling company.

HP has delivered public, open beta versions of three OpenStack-based services: Cloud Compute, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network. Users will pay only for the services they consume, and while HP has gone out of its way to position its services as different from Amazon’s you can bet that HP will be competing closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud.

Along with HP’s announcement, there are many partners and supporters making related announcements. Opscode, which specializes in cloud infrastructure automation, has announced integration with HP Cloud Services. And Standing Cloud, a provider of cloud application management solutions, has announced support. Standing Cloud offers a simple way to deploy, manage and distribute applications in the cloud. You can find the full details on HP’s partner community here.

HP’s pricing is very fully disclosed everything will come down to support. Many of the companies "backing" OpenStack are contributing code or pursuing other forms of community contribution, but a unified, robust support effort is what will really make a difference.

HP Cloud Support is up and running, and you can find more details on it here.  Can HP become a major player in the cloud by betting on a flexible, open source platform? We’re about to see, and this should be interesting to watch.

Sony suffered through its worst year ever in 2011, and not just because of the high-profile hacker attacks that compromised millions of user accounts and resulted in extended downtime to the PlayStation Network. The real reason Sony can lament 2011 is because of the fact that it posted a net loss of $5.7 billion, the company’s largest loss ever in its 66-year history, and the fourth straight year of sitting in the red.

If there’s a silver lining to the dark and gloomy cloud, it’s that Sony had previously forecast a loss of $6.5 billion. Overall, however, it was an obviously crummy year for the electronics juggernaut, and not for any single reason. Sony blamed the poor performance on foreign exchange rates, earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, floods in Thailand, and general “deterioration in market conditions in developed countries.”

According to VentureBeat, Sony CFO Masaru Kato indicated that “This year remains crucial for a recovery in our electronics business. A fifth straight year of losses should never be tolerated.”

Investors reacted negatively to the news with shares of Sony on the Tokyo Stock Exchange sliding 6.43 percent to 1,135 yen, a 38 percent drop from this year’s high of 1,832 yen back in March, and the lowest it’s been in three decades, The Register reports.

The full financial report is available here (PDF).

Image Credit: Flickr (Jami3.org)

Microsoft is dipping its search brush into its paint bucket and getting ready to swipe it across Bing, the world’s second most popular search engine behind Google. The new-look Bing will take on a three column design that Microsoft says is “the most significant update” to the search engine since it launched three years ago. Microsoft is looking beyond simple keyword searches and putting a big part of its focus on sharing search results by incorporating a Facebook column on the right-hand side.

“Now it’s possible to do more than find pages with search. You are able to share nearly everything you do, including where you are and who you are, in real-time,” Microsoft explains. “From rich multimedia content to real-time streams to social conversations to applications that let you take action in the real world, digital connections are created that present the opportunity to do something. This presents an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how search should work. Suddenly an index of documents that does not embrace these changes is insufficient.”

The social sidebar is always present and supposedly “never intrusive.” It will appear as part of every search query, though it’s whisked to the right side of the browser. Most of the social content that used to appear in the main search pane will be shuttled to the side. You’ll be able to share links and comment directly to Facebook using the sidebar.

It isn’t all about social networking, however. The other two columns will consist of core web results, which will take up the largest third of the screen, and a ‘Snapshot’ center column with relevant information and services related to your search, such as maps, restaurant reviews and reservations, and more.

You can read more about Bing’s redesign here.

Microsoft have Google’s search engine in their sights as they prepare to change BING to offer new search terms, including Facebook and Twitter information.

Microsoft are betting that people will like the new search options and they are planning to continue expanding their connections with social networking. If you are logged into your Facebook page for instance when searching via Bing you will often get related search information from contacts on Facebook. This could be shared interests, hotels they might have stayed in before, and other related terms.

Qi Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division said “This is a fundamentally different way to look at search.” Marking the changes, which are the biggest in their history over the last three years.

Bing has been failing badly against Google, generating a loss every year for Microsoft. The online services division lost $2.6 billion in the last fiscal year. Both Microsoft and Facebook are trying to compete against Google, so it made sense for the companies to try and connect their services together.