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Happy Birthday to GNU
by
Andrew Orlowski
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No longer will the Free Software Foundation be the target of advertisements for novelty condoms, Ibiza package holidays and extreme sports gear. It’s leaving the 16-24 yoof demographic behind. Today the GNU project celebrates its quarter-century. It was on 27 September 1983 that MIT slacker Richard M Stallman made his announcement that he intended to…
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Tony Wilson
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Rare was the day when Anthony Wilson, the Manchester music impresario and local TV presenter who died yesterday, couldn’t walk down the street in his home city without a murmur of “wanker” and “twat”. It was as much as a part of the city as the incessant drizzle. But Wilson revelled in the role of…
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Ancient satire foretold AOL’s privacy disaster
by
Andrew Orlowski
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“The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population” – Joi Ito “Igor, to the machines – we have a sample” One thing seems to have been forgotten following AOL’s careless, but quite magnificent data dump of the internet’s “hive mind” at play this week.…
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Apple (finally) tries to patent BluePod
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Apple will fill in some long-awaited missing features from its iPod and iPhone mobile players, a patent application published this week suggests. There’s just one problem: Much of Apple’s “invention” was dreamed up by Reg readers several years ago – and one embodiment is already on the market.… Read More
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FCC: making a rulebook out of metaphors
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Regulators and network operators across the world will be watching events unfold in Washington DC with some astonishment today, as the US telecoms industry becomes embroiled in a bureaucratic farce. Late last week, the US regulator the Federal Communications Commission issued a landmark assertion of authority over how American operators should manage their networks –…
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MS-DOS paternity suit settled
by
Andrew Orlowski
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An overlooked court case in Seattle has helped restore the reputation of the late computer pioneer Gary Kildall. Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software…