I seems that Flickr has been blocked in China. Well, let’s see whether I can manage to get the same honour. I just checked Google Analytics, and I get a decent amount of visitors from China. Always happy to keep public officials occupied, let’s see whether me posting an image from the 1989 Tiananmen […]

I can be long and short about this, but Google trampling privacy laws by publishing recognizable pictures of people with its new Street View feature means that my doubts about their “do no evil” PR slogan have vanished - it’s indeed just a PR slogan, not something they actually believe in and adhere to.

I’m a […]

And the number is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 - apparently a (admittedly revokable) key used on lots of HD-DVD’s. The blog post also points to information on a more permanent hack which seems to indicate that the film industry again hasn’t been able […]

Tonight, I was discussing with some guys to re-license a package I wrote some time ago, JDBM. It’s an interesting little Java package, used by some other open source projects, and for some reason I slapped a home-made custom license on it.
I think I’m getting really old - I have been discussing open source licensing […]

Ok, you won’t see an announcement of the new Google Censorship Beta product any time soon, but it is a fact that Google happily cooperates with the Chinese government in hiding some, err, facts from the Chinese citizenry.
Juan Vuletich notes an interesting example. This is what the international audience sees when looking for […]

Just stumbled over this (by way of an opinion piece on the music industry in the Register that’s worth a read): Pandora uses data from the Music Genome Project to create personalized radio stations based on artists you like (or not, if you’re masochistic enough). Songs you like can be bought immediately in the iTunes […]

Well, well. Looks like the legal department has succeeded in waking up the Sony bosses - the class action lawsuit in New York is going to be settled, according to The Register, and with terms that even us DRM haters would welcome, I think.

On BBC News and probably lots of other sites, the breaking news that the EU has approved a directive that requires telecom and internet companies to keep traffic data for 6 months.
The directive, of course, is completely nonsensical, because there are enough ways to completely defeat traffic analysis. It just shows how far politicians can […]

Great–someone is busy whipping up a Wikipedia Class Action Lawsuit. I wondered who this was, so did a bit of research. The domain running the nameservers, baou.com, is run by some club that seems to do PR/Spin stuff, funded by a trust fund, and all the contact details match with the class action lawsuit page. […]

Apparently, French press agency AFP is sueing Google because indexing their website for Google News is not “fair use”. In the article, Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, says:
“The value of content must be understood by consumers so that new business models can evolve. Industry must have legal certainty and the confidence that […]