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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…
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Bulwer-Lytton
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Andrew Orlowski
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A Microsoft employee has won the Oscar of bad prose – and no, he isn’t even a weblogger. Every year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest honors the best attempts to parody bad fiction. It’s judged by Professor Scott Rice at San Jose State University in California, and is now in its 22nd year. It’s an impressive…
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After Grokster: why (almost) everything we’re told about P2P is wrong
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Andrew Orlowski
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Grokster! Is it the end of the world as we know it? No, it isn’t. But before we examine how the two lobbies, the technology lobby and the recording industry lobby, have let us down so badly, let’s pause for a moment to consider how the press has let us down this week, too. The…
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Tag me stupid, baby!
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Andrew Orlowski
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This postbag contains small pieces of irony or humor which may choke small children or law professors Perhaps we should call them The New Literalists. Or is Nitpickers a better word? Or how about Pixel Pedants? The Road to Hell looks like it’s going to be Tagged With Good Intentions, if you pardon the twisted…
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On Computers, Creativity and Copyright
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Andrew Orlowski
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“We’d run out of ironic things to say” Neil Tennant Creative Commons is an intriguing experiment to granulize the rights a creator has over his or her work, and to formalize what today is largely spontaneous and informal. What we rarely see when it is discussed, is a genuine attempt to answer the question “Why…
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Are you trying to be funny? If so check [ ] this box
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Andrew Orlowski
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The return of the irony tag After ten years of the net, few amongst us have yet to realize that computer networks can be a lousy communication medium. Against all the good things that we’ve gained – such as the disappearance of physical distance, traversed by very slow moving postal workers – we must stack…