Category: Hell in a handcart

  • Life, death and the Digital Economy Bill

    The Digital Economy Bill gets rushed through Parliament today, potentially leading to whistleblowing sites being blocked. I’ve written a wee bit about it: The bill doesn’t include anything about banning sites politicians and the military don’t want you to see, but it doesn’t need to. By including a clause that could enable the blocking of…

  • Something kinda ewwwwww

    I have no idea whether this is real or not, but it certainly isn’t safe for work. As Metafilter puts it: The Joydick is a wearable haptic device for controlling video gameplay based on realtime male masturbation. Heyho’s comment cracked me up. I’m comforted by the idea that any guy who’d be interested in this…

  • Other people’s privacy

    I meant to blog this earlier and completely forgot: it’s a typically incisive piece by Nicholas Carr on Google, Facebook and privacy. Reading through these wealthy, powerful people’s glib statements on privacy, one begins to suspect that what they’re really talking about is other people’s privacy, not their own. If you exist within a personal…

  • Keep taking the Apple tablets

    Time for a rumour round-up! So what do we really know about the most anticipated bit of technology since the USB lava lamp? Come with us as we filter the River of Rumour for the Shiny Nuggets of Truth.

  • Ticketmaster and Live Nation: spot the difference

    October 2009: The Competition Commission’s provisional findings on the multimillion-pound merger, published today, said that the deal would make it harder for new entrants to break into the ticketing marketplace. The commission also warned that combining the two major players in the music market could mean the price of tickets went up, or result in…

  • Climate change and shouting down questions

    I’ve always assumed that people who question climate change are in the same camp as creationists and people who believe wireless networks are cooking their brains. Maybe that’s because that’s how they’re painted by the media, or at least the media I consume. Squander Two has put an interesting post together on the subject: I…

  • Oh come on, you’re not even trying

    Blatant PR crap masquerading as editorial is nothing new, of course, but you’d think the Metro might at least *try* to conceal it. Nope. Here’s a story about bras. John Lewis revealed that sales of point bras are up by 33 per cent compared to the same time last year. The department store has seen…

  • Who needs facts when you have faith?

    There’s a truly extraordinary article by AN Wilson in today’s Daily Mail which, after something of an online storm, has been tweaked – so it’s no longer illustrated with a picture of Hitler, as it was this morning.  I’m not going to link to it because I’m increasingly convinced that the Mail runs really crazy…

  • What’s wrong with banning file sharers?

    I thought this comment on The Guardian website was a pretty good explanation of why the proposed three-strikes rule is a bad one: The specific problem with FAC, FACT and this government is that they are colluding to (1) turn a civil allegation into a crime, (2) make the taxpayer foot the bill for prosecuting…

  • Perhaps it’s Scotland’s politicians that need “rebalancing”

    Oh joy, the new Scottish booze legislation comes into force today. Supermarkets are reorganising their displays, pubs are spending thousands of pounds on applying for new licenses (which, in the case of North Lanarkshire, mean some 25 pubs won’t legally be able to sell booze from today due to delays in the application process. Council…