machine-envy

I was intrigued by this report in today’s Guardian about an article in the NYTimes that had been blocked from the eyes of British users on the NYTimes website and that grounded the entire UK shipment of the paper yesterday.
So when I opened up my inbox to find a good friend had sent me the […]

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is about darknets, anonymisation and crypto-anarchy. Horray!

“People who want to hide their activities online already have the tools to do so. We’re just giving those tools to the general public.” These were the words of Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of Sweden’s Piratpartiet (Pirate Party), when he revealed that […]

When I was a kid, I used to think working in the music industry would be, like, the coolest thing ever. In my early twenties, I started doing music writing, and started having my doubts. Then, as a tech journalist, I started meeting people from the BPI and I knew the mirror had cracked.
At twelve, […]

This week’s column for the New Statesman is on AOL’s search data blunder of a fortnight ago.
Since filing, there’s been some interesting developnments worth linking to, such as this story from the NYT of one searcher who identified herself from the data and this piece in the WSJ on what the search trends say about […]

This week’s column in the New Statesman celebrates 15 years of open source:
“Fifteen years ago this month, when the internet was the domain of the geeky and the good, a young computer science student from Finland sent an e-mail to a message list of programmers. ‘Hello everybody out there using Minix,’ began the message, ‘I’m […]

Via Technollama, this story in last weekend’s Sunday Times focuses on Cliff Richard’s campaign (blogged here in 2004) to extend the term of copyright on sound recordings, and on the Blair family’s habit of holidaying at Sir Cliff’s Barbados pad gratis since 2003. From a written record obtained by the newspaper of an internal Labour […]

Well, not quite. But this week’s New Statesman column is a response to a post Guido Fawkes wrote criticising openDemocracy after the New Media Awards last week (which we won, by the way). I admit it was a bit mean of me to pull him up on his misspelling of smorgasbord:
“When I was a little […]

With news in today’s UK papers that the Deleting Online Predators Act went down a storm at the House of Representatives last week, this fortnight’s column for openDemocracy asks if legislation is the right response to cases of child molestation involving social networking sites:
“Warning: this article cites language that some readers may find […]