Category: Stories
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Are you a Nouveau-Reithian?
by
Andrew Orlowski
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How to fund a great BBC … without creating 142,000 new criminals a year Not one Hollywood studio or record label company has ever incarcerated anyone merely for not paying for media consumption. A few years ago the entertainment industry filed civil suits against individuals, but received so much criticism it stopped. Now they target…
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Our ‘digital economy’ is still a circular firing squad
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Andrew Orlowski
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The British ISP industry has spent a small fortune of its customers’ money fighting the people who would, in a saner world, be its business partners – only to suffer a crushing defeat. On Tuesday Lord Justice Richards threw out BT and TalkTalk’s judicial review against the 2010 Digital Economy Act. Yet as trench warfare…
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Windows 8’s Metro means no gain for lots of pain
by
Andrew Orlowski
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By far the most ill-judged design decision I can remember – Andrew The public preview of Windows 8 has won “rave reviews” according to the Daily Mail, the newspaper that claims to reflect Middle England and is proudly conservative in every sense of the word. The Mail, it’ll have you know, is a feisty opponent…
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Peak Oil: RIP
by
Andrew Orlowski
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The idea that seized the imaginations of the bien pensant chattering classes in the Noughties – “Peak Oil” – is no longer relevant. So says the commodities team at Citigroup, and policy-makers would be wise to examine the trends they’ve identified. “Peak Oil” is the point at which the production of conventional crude oil begins…
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French National Front woos internet pirates
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Andrew Orlowski
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The leader of the French National Front party, Marine Le Pen, wants Hadopi scrapped and replaced with a blanket licence to compensate creative industries. The extreme right party’s freetard-friendly gambit has caused the Socialists, who also oppose Hadopi, to rethink their policies.… Read More
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The angry internet runs on Pseudo Masochism™
by
Andrew Orlowski
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A mob that’s filled with self-righteous fury isn’t very discriminating. In 2000 an angry crowd attacked a paediatrician after he was mistakenly named as a paedophile. Last year the Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy was abused by football fans who mistook him for match referee Chris Foy. And last month, a small Scottish farm certification agency,…