Category: Stories
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Free Ride: Disney, Fela Kuti and Google’s war on copyright
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Andrew Orlowski
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Wars over creators’ rights are pretty old – much older than copyright law. In one of the first “copyfights”, in 561AD, about 3,000 people died, writes Robert Levine in his new book Free Ride. St Colmcille and St Finnian clashed over the right to make copies of the Bible, with the King castigating Colmcille for…
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Panic in The Chocolate Factory
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Andrew Orlowski
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Is Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility is good for Android, or an expensive mistake for Google, made in a moment of irrational panic. Columnist Matt Asay thinks it “spells iPhone doom“, and he’s not alone. John C Dvorak thinks it’s “pure genius“. This supposes that Google performed a cost-benefit analysis and calculated that the cost…
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Murdoch and Mythology
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Andrew Orlowski
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Keyser Sose If children didn’t believe in Santa, thousands of grown men wouldn’t dress up in fur-trimmed red jumpsuits, put on false beards, and give children unwanted gifts in tents every year. Perhaps some would, but they’d probably be arrested. For the past fortnight, TV and newspaper editors in the UK have pushed aside stories…
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Len Sassaman
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Andrew Orlowski
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Len Sassaman, a cryptographer and security researcher of high repute, has died aged 31. Sassaman maintained the Mixmaster remailer and he contributed to various other privacy projects, including OpenPGP. He also co-founded the annual CodeCon conference with Bram Cohen. He was security researcher and doctoral student at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven. Len was a…
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The Cube: Apple’s daftest, strangest romance
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Andrew Orlowski
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Ten years ago on Sunday, Apple called it quits on one of its oddest products ever, the G4 Cube. The Cube was a strange and wonderful machine that continues to fascinate today – but it was widely perceived to have failed. Some people thoroughly enjoyed the failure, thinking it served Apple right. Dull people will…
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Captain Cyborg: Computers are alive, like bats or cows
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Andrew Orlowski
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Self-harming attention-seeker Kevin Warwick has admitted to snooping on the public in a previous life. Warwick made the creepy confession on Radio 4, recalling an earlier job as a GPO engineer: “I remember taking ten different calls and plugging them all together; one call would continue, the other nine would listen in. Then I’d patch…