Category: Hell in a handcart

  • It’s not child labour if you don’t pay them

    Unbelievable. AOL’s Huffington Post and Patch are recruiting unpaid bloggers as young as 13.  ikoni

  • Column: here come the internet police

    BT has been ordered to block newzbin2, a Usenet archive site largely devoted to sharing movie rips and other infringing content. I don’t think this can end well. The BT ruling is worrying because it turns ISPs into censors, and of course copyright infringement isn’t the only kind of content people would like to block.…

  • A plague on all their houses

    Simon from No Rock’n’Roll fun does a typically excellent job of skewering Microsoft and Apple for their blatant attempts to capitalise on Amy Winehouse’s death: Arguably, acknowledging people would have been searching the store for her music anyway and making it easier to find is slightly less ghoulish than using her death to try and…

  • “Sign up with Groupon if you’re going bankrupt”

    I wrote a column a few months ago where I suggested that any economy that reckons Groupon is worth $5 billion is about to go pop. In the few weeks since I wrote that, its valuation has skyrocketed past $30 billion (those are American billions, but still…) Most of the reporting of Groupon so far…

  • Facebook is coming for your children

    I do a wee news roundup for Techradar each week, and this week social networks were the main story. Facebook, it seems, is coming for your children. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like the way the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act prevents Facebook from giving accounts to under-13s. But it’s not because he wants…

  • “I swear if someone touches my kids I’ll do time”

    I’m increasingly convinced that, with the honourable exception of this site, you should never read beyond the end of a product listing or online article. Comments are where the crazies live. As you may have noticed, Kate McCann has written a book about her daughter’s abduction and the aftermath. Over to you, Amazon reviewer Matthew…

  • “You’re all our bitches now”

    Good news for the BPI: BT and TalkTalk’s appeal against the Digital Economy Act has been rejected. It turns out that the Act is perfectly fair and decent and nothing to worry about whatsoever. Amazingly, I have an opinion about that. “Shareholders and customers of BT and TalkTalk might ask why so much time and…

  • This is, like, quite interesting, you know?

    What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness: The decline and fall of American English, and stuff I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know,…

  • Stay classy, National Enquirer

    I wrote this two years ago. It’s relevant again, with the National Enquirer running a particularly horrible story about Steve Jobs based on that old medical procedure, “showing a media-friendly doctor a photo and publishing whatever shit he says”: Steve Jobs doesn’t have his finger on the nuclear button, he doesn’t run the world, and…

  • Panorama and videogames

    Last night’s Panorama programme – the BBC’s flagship current affairs show – was dedicated to the evils of videogames. I haven’t seen it, but I do know that John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun is an eminently reasonable and trustworthy writer, so I’m linking to this piece he wrote about it. I believe that there…