Category: Stories
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The Tragedy of the Creative Commons
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Andrew Orlowski
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The Creative Commons initiative fulfilled a major ambition last week – but it’s taken only days for the dream to turn to crap. Google granted the wish by integrating the ability to search images based on rights licences into Google Image Search. Yahoo! Image Search has had a separate image search facility for years, but…
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The bogus logic of ‘sustainability’
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Andrew Orlowski
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Did you know people in Haiti, Burma and Armenia are all better off than in Britain? And the Congo is happier than the USA? That’s what the London think-tank New Economic Foundation reckons in its second “Happy Planet” rankings. But even NEF admits that its “happiness” rating or HPI doesn’t really measure human happiness, and…
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Google’s vanity OS is Microsoft’s dream
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Andrew Orlowski
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No one will be happier than Microsoft about Google’s vanity venture to market computers with a Google-brand OS. It gives us the illusion of competition without seriously troubling either business, although both will obligingly huff and puff about how serious they are about this new, phoney OS war. Since both of these giants are permanently…
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BBC pulling back from the DAByss?
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Andrew Orlowski
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Simply because Tim Davie, the BBC’s new radio chief, has a background in advertising and marketing, that isn’t a reason to assume everything he says is a lie. It’s more charitable to say he’s well practiced in the dark acts of spinning, having learnt the trade at Pepsi and Proctor and Gamble. And so you…
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RIP, Pirate Bay (Notes on an Exit Strategy)
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Andrew Orlowski
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“So The Pirate Bay has executed the Web 2.0 business plan to perfection: give someone else’s stuff away for free – then find a bigger idiot to buy the company.” It’s actually not so different from the potted history of every media company that rises to popularity on the back of a new medium –…
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Spotify founder hints at video, P2P sharing, world domination
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Andrew Orlowski
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Ek said the buying habits of 80 per cent of Spotify users were unchanged, 10 per cent were buying more music, and 20 per cent were buying fewer sound recordings. No, this doesn’t add up to 100 …Read more at The Register… Read More