Category: Stories
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Nathan Barleys mourn Great Lost Quango
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Andrew Orlowski
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Soho’s Nathan Barleys were in mourning yesterday after Ofcom chief Ed Richards abandoned his shape-shifting flagship, the “Public Service Publisher” quango. Richards said in a speech to the Royal Television Society on Tuesday night that the “the PSP as a concept has served its purpose and we can move on to the relevant questions for…
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DAB: A very British failure
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Andrew Orlowski
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Emergency talks to save digital radio are taking place in Manchester today, the FT reports. Unloved, unviable, and often unlistenable, DAB is a technology the public clearly doesn’t want; so it comes as no surprise to learn that coercion will be used to persuading the public to get on board. With DAB, we’re expected to…
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Trivia crisis: Wikipedia’s bogus Professor resigns
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Andrew Orlowski
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After pressure over the weekend from Wikipedia’s Il Duce Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s most illustrious fake professor Ryan Jordan has resigned his post at Wikia Inc. An assiduous editor with the nickname “Essjay”, the 24-year old Jordan passed himself off as an older and more mature character: a Professor of Theology with two PhDs –…
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An interview with Feargal Sharkey
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Andrew Orlowski
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Feargal Sharkey needs little introduction. A chart-topper in his own right, and as the lead singer of one of the greatest pop groups of all time, The Undertones, he subsequently crossed into regulatory and policy work – constantly agitating for musicians, songwriters and performers. At the start of the month he joined British Music Rights,…
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Should P2P filesharers be paid for filesharing?
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Andrew Orlowski
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Take that, pigopolists! A novel idea has been proposed to take the fight to the RIAA and the BPI. Since P2P filesharing has a discovery element which permits people to discover new music at no cost – why shouldn’t filesharers be compensated for filesharing? The idea was floated on the Open Rights Group discussion list…
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Why you don’t need TV news to tell you you’re in an earthquake
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Andrew Orlowski
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Houses shook across much of Britain as the country experienced its biggest earthquake for thirty years early this morning. Impressively, within ten minutes of the tremors, CSEM (EMSC), the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, revealed the cause: a 5.4 magnitude quake with an epicentre 10 miles north east of Lincoln, in the East Midlands. (Within an hour,…