Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

  • The BBC, Thermageddon, and a Giant Snake

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Listeners to BBC World Service’s Science in Action program got a nasty surprise last week. In the midst of a discussion about the large snake fossil, a scientist dropped this bombshell: “The Planet has heated and cooled repeatedly throughout its history. What we’re doing is the rate at which we’re heating the planet is many…

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  • Twitter’s Jam Festival

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Writing about Twitter is the journalistic equivalent of eating the fluff from your navel. The posh papers love it. Menopausal middle-aged hacks love it. The BBC is obsessed with it. Instead of telling us something we didn’t know before, Twitter makes churnalism so easy, it practically automates the entire job. The rest of the world,…

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  • Virgin puts legal P2P plans on ice

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Big label pressure has forced British cable ISP Virgin Media to suspend plans to introduce a legal music sharing service for its subscribers, just weeks ahead of its launch, The Register has learned. The radical initiative, tentatively branded as “Virgin Music Unlimited”, represented a major investment for the ISP, and would have been the first…

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  • Manx P2P for €1 a year?

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    The Isle of Man’s e-commerce minister says he wants to legalise P2P music file sharing – taking just one Euro a year from broadband subscribers. Tim Craine told us today that such a scheme would be voluntary. The Manx government is hopeful that blanket P2P schemes would be rolled out in other countries – including…

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  • Why animals shouldn’t be able to sue you

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Obama’s “regulation czar” Professor Cass Sunstein wants animals to be able to sue. Animals can’t reason or express themselves, naturally, so the litigation would be handled by human lawyers, acting as ventriloquists on behalf of the animal kingdom. Think Mister Ed the talking horse, crossed with Eliot Spitzer. “Any animals that are entitled to bring…

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  • 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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