Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

Month: December 2008

  • Joi Ito’s Vanity Photo Album: Eicher

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Powerful aristocrats throughout history have commissioned portraits by master artists to immortalize their achievements. Now amateur photographer and Creative Commons advocate Joi Ito is offering that immortality to bloggers, bureaucrats, coders, CEOs, and other obscure Free Software functionaries, in an expensive limited-edition “blook,” Freesouls. Ito muses, “Now the question is whether the demand for this…

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  • Google cranks up the Consensus Engine

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on…

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  • Jim Griffin’s Choruss

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    The plan to provide US students with compulsory flat-fee music finally has a name, it emerged this week. Choruss LLC will provide participating universities with a replacement for their current subscription services such as Rhapsody, and has the backing of the the EFF and the tacit support of the RIAA. That alone indicates the magnitude…

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  • Junk science and booze tax – a study in spin

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    “Let’s find out what everybody is doing, and stop them doing it” – A P Herbert Putting the price of alcohol up to a minimum of 40p a unit would keep 41,000 people a year out of hospital, save the NHS £116m a year, and avoid 12,400 cases of unemployment, a report from Sheffield University…

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  • The hitman, the Pirate Bay and the Freetard professor

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?! FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression! REG: It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality – Monty Python’s Life of Brian Everyone’s a prankster these days – it’s all in the name of art. On Monday…

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  • Profiting from climate change: Ben Pile

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Imagine an unpopular, impotent, and fragile UK Government, trying to make political capital out of a looming crisis. To avoid being embarrassed by criticism of its shallow policies, it appoints an independent panel of experts, to which it defers controversial decisions. Now imagine that the panel proposes measures from which its members and their associates…

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