Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

  • Pirates and the politics of spite

    Pirates and the politics of spite

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    If “digital rights” becomes reduced to gesture politics, only one group can win: the one with the biggest, boldest, daftest gesture A clear winner is emerging from the Digital Economy Bill – and it’s the UK Pirate Party. The penny only really dropped for me yesterday, after the Open Rights Group’s big demonstration at Westminster.…

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  • Greatest Living Briton gets £30m for ‘web science’

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    As an alliance of the desperate, this one takes some beating. The Greatest Living Briton (Sir Timothy Berners Lee) has been thrown £30m of taxpayers’ money for a new institute to research “web science”. Meanwhile the Prime Minister waxed lyrical today about the semantic web – how “data” would replace files, with machine speaking unto…

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  • Google knew YouTube ‘did evil’ – but bought it anyway

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Do no evil? Google execs knew YouTube was in the wrong, but swallowed hard and bought it anyway, emails disclosed to a US court show. In 2006 execs at the Chocolate Factory were aware that the startup was less than wholesome, describing it as a “rogue enabler of content theft” whose “business model is completely…

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  • The problem with ‘substitution’ studies…

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    A study for the international chamber of commerce reckons 2.7 million jobs have been lost since 2004 in Europe because of unlicensed internet downloads, and warns economic losses could treble to €32bn by 2015. The report is backed by trade unions, including the TUC. The work was led by Patrice Geffon, an economist at Paris…

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  • Panorama on the Digital Economy Bill

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    BBC1’s flagship current affairs program was devoted to file sharing last night, and contained something to piss off a range of lobbyists. Usually when this happens, BBC producers often conclude “they’re doing something right”, and pour themselves a large, congratulatory drink. They shouldn’t, because while the program succeeded in trying to be “fair”, it failed…

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  • BBC: Grasp the high-speed runaway cloud nettle

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Hats off to BBC Online’s Silicon Valley correspondent Maggie Shiels, who on her dot.maggie blog offers some defining purple prose for the new era in computing. Attending the RSA conference, Maggie reports on the race to offer ‘cloud computing’ services: ensuring security is not a “Johnny come lately” idea and that the clock was ticking…

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