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Google hires ‘Astro’ Cerf
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Andrew Orlowski
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Vint Cerf, co-author of the TCP/IP protocol, has become Google’s latest trophy hire. The ad broker must be hoping that Cerf, hired for the PR position of “chief evangelist”, can add some gravitas to the operation after weeks of bad publicity. A poorly judged flounce saw Google vow to shun CNet’s reporters for a year, and the…
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Burning Man, meet Drowning Man
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Andrew Orlowski
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Silicon Valley’s freak-out meets Katrina, with a bump The writer had found an elusive internet connection, and reaching beyond exhaustion was finding words to record the madness around him: “We are operating on something beyond tired, beyond care, beyond recognition,” he wrote. “You just keep going, because you have no choice.” New Orleans? No, Burning…
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File swapping MSPs – the future of digital music?
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Andrew Orlowski
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Don’t expect Bono to descend from a cloud. Or orgasmic praise from the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. When PlayLouder quietly rolls out its music service in the UK, it won’t initially match the razzle-dazzle of the iTunes Music Store launch, Rhapsody or the other million dollar marketing blitzes. But the initial, low-key ‘soft launch’…
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Pimplier Batgirls and Sawdusty Barmen
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Andrew Orlowski
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Whacking Google’s wordlist woes Earlier this week the NCSA released a study that attempted to compare the respective merits of Google and Yahoo!’s search engines. (See My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours!). Unfortunately, the only thing it proved was which search engine was publishing the most gibberish it had collected – a fact apparently…
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My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours!
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Andrew Orlowski
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Last week Yahoo! claimed it had sailed past Google by indexing 20 billion web pages. Because as much as a third of the wild wild web consists of artificially-generated pages of spam designed to promote commercial web sites, this isn’t much to boast about. Many of the fake pages are ‘splogs’, or spam blogs, or…
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FCC opens door to ISP wipe-out
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Andrew Orlowski
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Re-monopolizing the phone service US telecoms regulator the FCC has signaled the end of the independent ISP, a move which will leave DSL provision concentrated in the hands of just a few large providers. The move, which turns local DSL provision from a regulated monopoly into an unregulated monopoly, also has repercussions for rural telephony…