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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?
by
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
by
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!
by
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…
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Google snubs press in privacy fury
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Andrew Orlowski
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Google has thrown a hissy fit and blacklisted tech news site CNET’s News.com – vowing not to provide quotes or statements to the site for a year. “Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story,” noted reporter…