Tag: internet
Opinion: Kids use age-old excuse — "everyone's doing it" — to justify media piracy. So what's new?
Andy Merrett writes…
I’m sure it’s the classic excuse for why kids and teenagers do pretty much anything their parents (or indeed, The Law) don’t want them to.
“But everyone else is doing it.”
Passing over the classic teacher retort “Well, if everyone else was jumping off a cliff [auditioning for a part in “Lemmings the Movie, perhaps?], would you” (oops), that seems to be the reasoning for kids who copy and distribute music, videos, or software over the Internet.
It has to be a lot less dangerous – at least physically – than jumping off that metaphorical cliff.
A study from the European Commission — which is seriously official and, therefore, must be true — found that a large number of kids knew that what they were doing was illegal, but still did it because they saw both their peers and their parents doing it.
The EC calls this an “implicit form of authorisation”.
I just call it kids wanting the latest music and being too poor to buy it. It could be laziness. Or the possibility that most albums contain mainly crap music and they want to make a mix tape of decent tracks.
Opinion: Facebook numpties deserve to be defrauded!
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
Two days into the week and TWO Facebook security threats appear. The first in The Guardian on Monday warned secret code from FB’s inner-workings had been published on the internet prompting warnings of a security risk for users. Boring! Code, schmode, it’s far too technical.
But then this piece of wonder appeared today in The Times and it’s far more worrying, not least because everyone I know does it – and also because it involves a frog!
Freddi Staur is a cute green frog who has stolen email addresses and mobile phone numbers from users on the social network website – in an experiment to show how easily people give out their personal information to strangers…
Google begins selling additional online storage
Google has started offering additional space to its Gmail and Picasa users, increasing storage quota from 2.8GB and 1GB respectively, and will roll out the offer to some of its other services, including Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet, in due course.
A range of plans have been introduced, from 6GB of storage for $20 per year to 250GB for $500 per year.
Opinion: Elton, how much digital music will you sell before you try to "shut down the whole Internet"?
Andy Merrett writes…
Despite his rants and raves, I’ve got a fair amount of time for Elton John, but his latest idea is just plain crazy.
According to an interview in The Sun, he’d “shut down the entire Internet for five years” in order to “see what sort of art is produced over that span”. He’s concerned that too many people are sitting at home using the Internet to blog rather than getting stuck in to good old-fashioned face-to-face communication.
That, apparently, has led to the death of long-term artistic vision.
Yours, perhaps, Elton, but c’mon – are you serious?
Opinion: Panorama fight video expose proves the web needs policing
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
It takes a lot to shock me and I thought – having worked on and with the internet for the past seven years – that I knew the majority of its positives and negatives. But I’m truly appalled by BBC1’s Panorama investigation into real-life violent videos uploaded onto the web.
Shown on the channel last night, reporters looked at the people who film the sickening scenes, those who have fallen prey to the stupidly named “happy-slapping” attacks (do you see the victims smiling?) and it also focused on the firms allowing such videos to be shown to millions of cyberspace viewers…
Opinion: Free laptop deal looks good
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
Let’s face it, who among us is ever going to turn down a free gift – especially when it’s worth up to £500. Well, that’s the prospect facing techno shoppers at Carphone Warehouse, Currys and PC World this week.
You couldn’t have failed to see the ads in the newspapers over the weekend proclaiming the gratis machines in return for signing up to broadband with the likes of Orange and AOL. ‘So where’s the catch?’ I hear you ask. ‘There’s always a catch!’
Well, you’re right, to get the free laptop you are tied into a contract with the firms for two years and yes, the machines aren’t super-spec’d enough to suit most Tech Digest readers. But in terms of getting people interested in technology and onto the interweb superhighway, it has to be good news…
PocketSurfer2 handheld mobile Internet device coming to UK in August
Earlier this month we said that DataWind’s PocketSurfer2 was coming soon, and today more specifications, and a definite UK launch date and price, have been announced.
The PocketSurfer2 is an ultra-thin and portable Internet communications device featuring a built-in GPRS modem and SIM card, GPS location information, 5 hours of battery life with 5 days standby, a built-in high performance antenna, 640×240 VGA colour screen with transreflective backlighting, and a backlit QWERTY keyboard.
BT Total Broadband don their detective caps and conclude that OMG MEN SHOP ONLINE!
BT don’t just churn out the nation’s broadband and phone services anymore, oh no, it appears they spend a heck of a lot of time doing HIGHLY IMPORTANT RESEARCH FOR THE NATION’S WELFARE. In other words, they’ve just completed a survey amongst men where the results are rather un-shocking. Turns out men like shopping after all, and that vast chasm of goods otherwise known as THE INTERNET is to blame. Is to blame for them no longer buying us women flowers, I mean.
BT Total Broadband has concluded that “the traditional stereotype of men being reluctantly dragged around the shops by their wives and girlfriends has been replaced by a new era dominated by men out-shopping their partners online from the comfort and secrecy of homes and offices across the nation”.
With 72% of men having their arms twisted behind their back and forced to decrease the alleged amount of time they spend on the net buying clothes, gadgets, and assorted other necessities, BT has dubbed this the ‘Me Moment’….
Blogging is ten, maybe twelve, or twenty-four years old
The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article over the weekend suggesting that blogging is now ten years old.
According to the article, the first blogger is “regarded by many to be Jorn Barger”, who “began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary, on Dec. 23, 1997.”
What appears to be closer to the truth is that Jorn Barger was the first person (or one of the first people) to coin the phrase ‘blog’, because other sites reckon that blogging has been around for much longer than a decade.
IWOOT opens up in Second Life
Gadget retailer iwantoneofthose.com has opened up shop today in Second Life.
The store is housed on the IWOOT island and the firm say it’s the first within the virtual world that lets you buy over the counter with Second Life’s currency Linden Dollars rather than be pushed to an outside website to make the purchase.
As well as buying real products to be posted to customers at home, the shop will also sell virtual versions of popular IWOOT gizmos to be used in the online community. It was launched in 2003 by Linden Lab and has more than seven million registered users living an alternative existence there each day…
