Category: Hell in a handcart

  • Sky-high ticket prices: there’s no shortage of bad guys

    Me, on Techradar: Truly, these are wonderful times: never in human history have there been so many places to pay ridiculously inflated prices for tickets. …is your favourite artist ripping you off?

  • Screw you, Yahoo!

    Mic Wright has got his hands on an email from Yahoo! that the firm doesn’t want widely circulated: it’s going into the “crappy articles for insulting rates” business. As he writes in a related post: “It is the mark of a dysfunctional industry that the senior executives of major newspaper groups retain salaries touching of…

  • Cynical book-flogging bastards

    One of my friends has discovered the dubious joys of Young Writers’ literary competitions for children. Young Writers and similar programmes are well known in some circles, but parents’ knowledge of them tends to begin when their excited offspring tell them they’ve won a writing competition of some sort: Having been showered with congratulations by her…

  • Tech subcontracting and working conditions in China

    Some really interesting comments from Chinese readers on the New York Times’ article about working conditions in Apple’s subcontractors: If not to buy Apple, what’s the substitute – Samsung? Don’t you know that Samsung’s products are from its OEM factory in Tianjin? Samsung workers’ income and benefits are even worse than those at Foxconn. If…

  • So much for “there’s no copyright in ideas”

    Words can’t express how ridiculously, ridiculously stupid this verdict is: Photographers who compose a picture in a similar way to an existing image risk copyright infringement, lawyers have warned following the first court ruling of its kind. The images in question are here (PDF) if you fancy a look.

  • Tabloid-fuelled Twitter hate

    The parents of missing child Madeleine McCann appeared at the Levenson inquiry into newspapers’ bad behaviour yesterday, and Twitter proved beyond doubt that it’s the original story, not the retraction, that many people remember. As the McCanns described some extraordinarily evil behaviour by newspapers and their hired help, all kinds of apparently respectable people posted…

  • The slippery slope: now BT’s being urged to block The Pirate Bay

    It’s not a surprise, but it’s still deeply worrying: BT, the UK’s biggest ISP, is under pressure to block The Pirate Bay.  The BPI chief executive, Geoff Taylor, said The Pirate Bay was “no more than a huge scam” defrauding the global creative sector. “We would not tolerate Counterfeits R Us on the high street…

  • Kindles and iPads are the Tescos of tech

    A wee Techradar piece about something that’s been nagging at me for a while: As a gadget fan, I’m well aware that closed ecosystems such as iOS or the Kindle deliver the best possible end user experience. But I can’t shift the nagging feeling that when we welcome our new retail overlords we’re buying into…

  • 78% of burglars are not using Twitter and Google Street View to plan crimes

    There’s a news story doing the rounds today: in the words of Metro, “A massive 78 per cent of ex-burglars” believe that other burglars are using social media and Google Street View to commit crimes. I’ve nothing against advising people to be careful – the survey’s part of a national crime awareness week – but…

  • Ticket rip-offs strike again

    I thought I’d seen every booking fee rip-off going, but apparently not: this morning I discovered that if I want to buy four concert tickets from Ticketmaster, I have to place two orders for two tickets apiece – which, on top of the booking fees, means I’m paying eleven quid in postage for four pieces…