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One-Click™ colonialism
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Andrew Orlowski
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The music industry has a long and shameful history of robbing black artists of their rights. Now along comes some new software that will help speed up the job. Think of it as a sort of 1-Click “non-payment” system. Liblicense is a project that Creative Commons hopes to integrate with MIT Media Lab’s OLPC, or…
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Smart radios are still pretty dumb
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Andrew Orlowski
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More than three years ago, your reporter got a good taste of how miserable technology utopians can be. It was at Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco, and the debate was about liberating analog TV spectrum for exciting new digital uses. The analog switchover is slated for February 2009. On behalf of Microsoft, Google, and…
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Google Health offers reputation massage
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Andrew Orlowski
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“Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog!” fantasised the writer Clive Thompson in a recent WiReD magazine cover story. “The name of this new game is RADICAL TRANSPARENCY, and it’s sweeping boardrooms across the nation,” burbled the mag. But the perils of allowing employees to “blab and blog!” were…
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‘Fucked’ record companies in ‘cataclysmic’ meltdown – Tim Clark
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Andrew Orlowski
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As some of the biggest figures in the music business weighed in on the future of music this week, there were very mixed views on its future. “If Ford’s revenues were down 40 per cent, the shareholders would be revolting,” said Tim Clark, former Island Records MD and co-founder of management company IE Music, whose…
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Psion: The story of the Last Computer
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Andrew Orlowski
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This long (40-page) history of Britain’s last computer company, Psion, was written over four days. It’s the longest piece The Register has ever run, we made it available as a PDF (for a small fee). Included are full transcripts of interviews with David Potter, Martin Riddiford, Mark Gretton, David Tupman and Nick Healey. (Charles Davies…
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Parliament must listen to the blogger in his pyjamas
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Andrew Orlowski
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Parliament may soon be debating whether to legalise incest, reclassify insomnia as a mental illness, microchip all children at birth … or give pantomime actor Richard Griffiths a Knighthood. That’s if opposition leader David Cameron has his way. A Conservative Party task force examining democratic participation proposes that online petitions should help set the parliamentary…