Category: Stories
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Unravelling the history behind Google’s Trojan Horse
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Andrew Orlowski
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When people buy software – buy it in seriously large amounts – it isn’t just today’s binary they’re choosing. They’re buying what they think is a bit of the future – they’re buying a piece of risk insurance. This explains why very mature and well-proven systems often lose out to the Newest Kid on the…
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Happy Birthday to GNU
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Andrew Orlowski
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No longer will the Free Software Foundation be the target of advertisements for novelty condoms, Ibiza package holidays and extreme sports gear. It’s leaving the 16-24 yoof demographic behind. Today the GNU project celebrates its quarter-century. It was on 27 September 1983 that MIT slacker Richard M Stallman made his announcement that he intended to…
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Tony Wilson
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Andrew Orlowski
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Rare was the day when Anthony Wilson, the Manchester music impresario and local TV presenter who died yesterday, couldn’t walk down the street in his home city without a murmur of “wanker” and “twat”. It was as much as a part of the city as the incessant drizzle. But Wilson revelled in the role of…
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Ancient satire foretold AOL’s privacy disaster
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Andrew Orlowski
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“The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population” – Joi Ito “Igor, to the machines – we have a sample” One thing seems to have been forgotten following AOL’s careless, but quite magnificent data dump of the internet’s “hive mind” at play this week.…
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Apple (finally) tries to patent BluePod
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Andrew Orlowski
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Apple will fill in some long-awaited missing features from its iPod and iPhone mobile players, a patent application published this week suggests. There’s just one problem: Much of Apple’s “invention” was dreamed up by Reg readers several years ago – and one embodiment is already on the market.… Read More
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FCC: making a rulebook out of metaphors
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Andrew Orlowski
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Regulators and network operators across the world will be watching events unfold in Washington DC with some astonishment today, as the US telecoms industry becomes embroiled in a bureaucratic farce. Late last week, the US regulator the Federal Communications Commission issued a landmark assertion of authority over how American operators should manage their networks –…