The tech press is full of people who want to tell you how completely awesome life is going to be when everything moves to “the cloud”–that is, when all your important storage, processing and other needs are handled by vast, professionally managed data-centres.
Search is the beginning and the end of the internet.
If politicians want to effect economic recovery, national competitiveness, good public health and high civic engagement, they have a duty to keep the internet free and open.
My friend told me an amazing story about his son and games. He didn’t feel comfortable with his son playing Call of Duty, which is rated T for teenager, so they agreed on a compromise. Well, sort of.
The McCain-Palin campaign fire-sale dumped a bunch of orphaned BlackBerrys, including at least one loaded with confidential personal numbers of important people, and a ton of internal campaign email. These were the people who were planning on running an entire country.
Why does all this copyright reform stuff matter, anyway? What’s at stake? Everything. Until a very short time ago, copyright was an industrial regulation. If you fell under copyright’s domain, it meant that you were using a piece of extraordinary industrial apparatus–a printing press, a motion picture camera, a record press.
This month’s announcement of a backroom deal between internet service providers and the big record companies to spy on suspected copyright infringers and reduce the quality of their Internet connections is just the latest paragraph in the record industry’s long, self-pitying suicide note, and it’s left me wishing they’d just pull the trigger already and [...]
The Singularity is a conceit of modern science fiction: a place inside vast computers where whole universes are simulated whose reality is every bit as sharp and instantaneous as the physical world we inhabit. Books like Charlie Stross’s “Singularity Sky” and the Matrix movie trilogy have done a great job of representing such alternative, computer-calculated realities.
Flagler Productions, a video production company in Kansas that spent years as Wal-Mart’s corporate archivist, is now selling access to thousands of hours of candid footage of Wal-Mart execs talking about the business’s dirty secrets. Wal-Mart fired Flagler, and gave them a lowball offer of $500,000 (7,33€) for the archive. Instead, Flagler is now selling access to the archive to researchers (mostly union organizers and plaintiff-side lawyers suing Wal-Mart) for $250/hour.
“Intellectual property” is one of those ideologically loaded terms that can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn’t in widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained exalted status as a UN agency. WIPO’s case for using the term is easy to understand: People who’ve “had their property stolen” are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than “industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated,” the latter being the more common way of talking about infringement until the ascendancy of “intellectual property” as a term of art.
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