Now that I’ve hung up my hat at the Open Rights Group, I actually have time to read stuff for pleasure again. And it has been with great pleasure that I’ve read the two pieces listed below. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’re writing about – the quality of your prose sings through. In the [...]
Categories: business, censorship, copyright, freeculture, law, media, networks, open source, politics
This week’s column is about the Home Office’s alleged new plans to keep a centralised record of the nation’s communications traffic data:
Can you “persuade others of the benefits of proposals or the value of a particular interpretation”? Then perhaps the recently advertised position of senior information officer at the Home Office’s new Intercept Modernisation [...]
Categories: newstatesman, politics, surveillance
This week’s Reboot column is on The Best of 2600: a Hacker Odyssey:
“That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently: a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant tales, and a novel called Middlemarch, as to which [...]
Categories: censorship, law, newstatesman
This week’s New Statesman column is on sousveillance:
Watching Amy Winehouse lash out at Glastonbury this year (YouTube brings out the worst in me), I was surprised by the number of cameraphones the star had thrust in her face by the front row of the Pyramid Stage crowd. When your fans start treating you as badly [...]
Categories: newstatesman, surveillance
Digging this new theme (Thanks, James!). Because my New Statesman column doesn’t have a dedicated RSS feed, I’m going to do my best to post links to my columns here, so those who wish to can keep updated.
Here’s this week’s column, on touching up your holiday snaps (see one such touched up snap, right):
My youth [...]
Categories: newstatesman, silly
Over Christmas, this story broke, and it made me laugh so hard I couldn’t let it pass without commenting. From the Guardian:
Egypt is planning to pass a law that would exact royalty payments from anyone found making copies of the country’s ancient monuments or museum pieces, including the pyramids.
Although the story is clearly barmy, it’s [...]
Categories: copyright
This week’s column at the New Statesman is a reaction to all the silly season stories calling for a complete ban of Facebook/YouTube/the internet.
Some people are so quick to judge. At the beginning of August, the national treasure that is Sir Elton John was reported, albeit by that other great national treasure, the Sun newspaper, [...]
Categories: media, networks, newstatesman, openrightsgroup, politics
A few weeks ago, I was having tea and cakes with a friend, talking about the usual stuff – Second Life, DRM, the BBC’s iPlayer. Together we came up with a rather implausible train of thought, which said friend dared me to turn into a piece for my New Statesman column. I think it’s turned [...]
Categories: business, copyright, law, media, newstatesman
I thought Bongboing would pick this up, but since they didn’t here’s the late, breaking news that will confirm what Tux fans suspected all along – that mankind is in fact descended from a race of giant penguins.
Read the real story here.
Categories: silly
Our conference packs here in Buenos Aires included a map I had not seen before – showing the distribution of royalty fees paid in 2002. From the site, creator, Worldmapper:
Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of [...]
Categories: business, copyright, development, freeculture