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Panorama on the Digital Economy Bill
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Andrew Orlowski
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BBC1’s flagship current affairs program was devoted to file sharing last night, and contained something to piss off a range of lobbyists. Usually when this happens, BBC producers often conclude “they’re doing something right”, and pour themselves a large, congratulatory drink. They shouldn’t, because while the program succeeded in trying to be “fair”, it failed…
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BBC: Grasp the high-speed runaway cloud nettle
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Andrew Orlowski
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Hats off to BBC Online’s Silicon Valley correspondent Maggie Shiels, who on her dot.maggie blog offers some defining purple prose for the new era in computing. Attending the RSA conference, Maggie reports on the race to offer ‘cloud computing’ services: ensuring security is not a “Johnny come lately” idea and that the clock was ticking…
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LibDems drop net blocking, blame activists
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Andrew Orlowski
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LibDem peers agreed to drop their controversial net-blocking clause from the Digital Economy Bill after the government advised that the proposal would be legally unenforceable. It means the Bill now heads for the Commons with one of the key copyright infringement countermeasures up in the air, although it’s likely to be a return to Plan…
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Ad industry: You write the cheques, we’ll drown the puppies
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Andrew Orlowski
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The UK advertising industry has bravely decided it can continue to accept millions of pounds from the state to create alarming climate advertisements, despite inaccuracies and a storm of complaints from parents. The principled decision, from the admen’s self-regulatory body the ASA, follows 939 complaints about the UK energy ministry DECC’s “Drowning Dog” prime time…
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Why BBC3, BBC4?
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Andrew Orlowski
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Conservative culture front bencher Jeremy Hunt is asking what’s the point of BBC3 and BBC4? It’s a good time to ask the question. In an interview with the Independent, Hunt queried why £100m was being spent, merely to attract “very, very small” audiences. This is some way short of calling for the channels to be…
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Whatever happened to the email app?
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Andrew Orlowski
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Musings on the state of email clients. Which might have something to do with the state of email… Is the email program dead? Did the whole world just migrate away from Hotmail over to Facebook when we weren’t looking? Does anyone else care? Weirdly, the answer seems to be yes, yes, and no. Email has…