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Tony Wilson
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
“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
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
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
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…
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Why (almost) nobody wants a music tax
In Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, set in WW2 London, a character called Slothrop begins to realize that everywhere he has sex, a V2 rocket subsequently lands on the same spot, obliterating the area. If you dig a little, you may notice something spookily similar with the idea of a Music Tax in the media. Back…