Last week, Megaupload was shut down by American law enforcement agencies, charging the owners with…

Conspiracy to commit racketeering.
Conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.
Conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Criminal copyright infringement.

The people running Megaupload and its sister websites have had all their possessions confiscated, including more than 20 luxury cars and face jail sentences of up to 20 years. This comes around a month after Megaupload’s last controversy, their advert starring well known artists such as Kanye West and Lil Jon, which was pulled from YouTube due to a bogus copyright claim by Universal. The video has since been reuploaded numerous times by users and Megaupload has retaliated by launching a law suit against Universal.

This sudden move by American authorities to shut down a file hosting website (especially considering the state of the web concerning legislation such as PIPA and SOPA), has caused other well known file hosts to change their policies. Here is a summarised list of the changes carried out by file hosting websites since Megaupload was taken offline:

Turned off file sharing. You can only download what you have uploaded:
Filesonic
Fileserve
Filejungle
UploadStation
UploadBox
x7.to

Shut down:
Megaupload

Blocked US traffic:
Uploaded.to

As I’ve said before, it really is a tough time for the Internet. We need to fight against censorship of the web, otherwise we will be left with an Internet resembling nothing of today’s.

SOPA’s been in the news recently due to the 24 hour blackout of high profile websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, BoingBoing and more. I even took my site down (as my 2 readers may have noticed) and replaced it with this:

If you can manage to survive reading a wall of unformatted text, Jeff sums SOPA up pretty well:


Now it looks like the bill will be rejected when it comes time to vote. Members of Congress’ websites suffered from downtime from the sheer amount of people trying to contact their local representative. The owner of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch has been slated for his involvement with SOPA, more so now after he claimed Google was a piracy leader.

It isn’t over. SOPA needs to be stopped for good. Keep informed. Save the Internet.

This week, I’ve started using a new website called Codecademy to learn how to program. More than 245,000 people have pledged to learn to code in 2012 and I’m one of them. The website lets you progress through lessons at your own speed, which immediately makes it better than taking a physical class and also, it’s free!


So far, I’ve done the very basic Javascript lessons, which haven’t been too taxing. Hopefully when I’ve progressed through all the Javascript lessons, I’ll be able to put the lessons to use and add more functionality to my websites (such as this one). I’m not sure how many courses there are but so far, I’ve unlocked 3 of them.

From what I’ve seen, the website itself is coded brilliantly, allowing you to try out what you’ve learned on the page, without the need to use your own programs. It even has a section called labs, which allows you to practice coding without the need to download a code editor or IDE.

Codecademy has received some great publicity from well known sites such as Wired, TechCrunch, Mashable and LifeHacker. A couple of days ago, even the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg said he was going to take the course.

From what I’ve seen and used, Codecademy seems to be a great way of learning to code and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn to code.

The Steam Holiday Sale has just finished and I’ve managed to resist the majority of their very tempting offers. Out of the hundreds of games that I browsed (including publisher and genre packs), I only succumbed to two games – one I’ve been meaning to get for a while and another on the spur of the moment after seeing Jeff buy it.

I’d been meaning to buy Terraria for a long time, especially after watching TotalBiscuit and OMFGCata‘s hilariously brilliant Terraria collaboration series on YouTube, and bought it the first time I saw it go on the Daily Deals section on Steam. It should have been around £10 but it was on sale for only £3 so I thought it was a decent bargin; that was, until two days later it was even further reduced to £1.50. This was slightly annoying as I essentially lost £3 (I bought another copy for Josh too) but the majority of it goes to the developers so I don’t particularly mind as they’ve made a fantastic game and deserve the cash. All in all, Terraria is a great game and I recommend it to everybody. I’ve made some fantastic architectural feats which I’ll post as soon as I get back to Cambridge in a couple of weeks.

DEFCON was another game I purchased during the sale. I haven’t played it yet but by the looks of it, the game’s going to be good. I’ve seen a few reviews before and it’s not exactly a new game (in fact, it’s around 5 years old) so I splashed out £1.50. To be honest, I’ll probably forget all about it when I get back to my PC in Cambridge and it’ll probably just sit on the Steam games shelf with the other 31 out of 64 games that I’ve bought but never played.

I’ve just got back to my university flat and have been working to set up my new equipment. I got a new monitor, which resulted in me re-arranging my whole room again to make them both fit on the desk:


I’ve had a few coffees from my new Dolce Gusto coffee machine and they’re fantastic! Here’s a snap of it in action:

Happy new year everybody! Just finished watching the London firework display and set our paper lanterns off into the field:



But of course, most of the lanterns didn’t make it off the ground very far and were left smouldering on the ground or burning away in the field at the back of the house.


Have a happy, healthy new year everybody!

Here’s the London fireworks display from 12:00 a.m: