Pirate Bay Trial:Guilty

And so the the verdict on Pirate Bay case was handed down by the Swedish courts and they were found to be guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. All 4 defendants were to be jailed for a year and pay $905,000.

At this point I’m not sure what to make of the case because there is still an appeals process, but I am just hoping that this does not affect the fight for net neutrality. Don’t get me wrong, those distributing ‘pirated’ materials should really be addressed because there’s are a lot of people who worked hard on producing them. What I am worried about is that this seems like a point that big corporations will use to advance their desires of having ‘censorship’ over the Internet.

The Internet is what it is because of the freedom of information. I know there’s viruses, spam, hacking, etc. but these are things that needs to be dealt with, the same as there is crime, scams, cons, etc. in the physical world. If these big corporations get a firm hold of the Internet and do as they wish, then the days of the World Wide Web as being a tool for research, networking and exchanging ideas might be in jeopardy.

Airline Travel Tools

It’s that time of the year again for us to buy tickets for our trip back home to visit Manila. Its especially stressful because there is so much variation on what you would pay and what service you would get based on the time and the method you use in booking your tickets. So its especially important to reasearch so you can get the best deals possible.

I’ve been using these websites to help me decide on what to do when booking flights:

Flyertalk
This is the best place to get advice and figure out what’s going on with your preferred airline or with the industry in particular. People post their experiences booking, flying, dealing with agents, etc. so it really helps for you to make that informed decision. The main part of the forum is divided into the different airlines so you can just pick which one you are a frequent flier of and let that be your starting point.

The forums will also allow you to be up-to-date on the different deals and promotions going around. Most airline deals require registration prior to booking the flight, so if you did not know about the promotions, you can potentially miss out on savings or perks.

Expertflyer
This is a paid site so the usefulness and the value is dependent really on your flying needs. This site lets you search information on the availability of seats, awards, fares, etc. This is especially useful if you are trying to get that hard to find award seat on an airline. One of its best functions is the ability to create alerts based on what you are looking for. If a seat or an award opens up, Expertflyer can send you an email so you can act quickly.

Expertflyer was useful to us this time around because we were trying to use some certificates to upgrade our class of service on our flight home. We needed a certain fare class to open up which will allow us to use the upgrade certificate on a particular flight. After receiving the alert, we immediately booked the ticket and used the certificates.

Kayak
There are a lot of travel search engine sites out there but Kayak is the most reliable and the easiest to use. There are a lot of sorting functions which you can use when searching for a flight that makes it easy to pick an airline or a destination. It even allows you to search alternative airports close to your location or destination which might have cheaper airfare.

Safe travels!

Happy April Fools, fools…

I have to say, the Internet is funnier on April 1. I fired up my laptop this morning and logged into Gmail, and I have to say, Google gets better at this every year. They had me thinking about CADIE until I saw the sample responses, haha.

My other favorites for this year include: Warner Bros acquires Piratebay (what a hoot!), Youtube videos are upside down if you add ‘&flip=1′ to the URL, and Slickdeals is renamed Celerydeals.net.

Here’s a link to a list of jokes all over the web.

Happy April Fools!