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Lights out, Britons told – we’re running out of power
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Andrew Orlowski
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Carbon quango The Energy Saving Trust has come up with a new reason for Britons to save energy in the home. Our power stations will soon close, and you’ll need to do your bit. That’s what one Reg reader discovered, after enquiring about the Trust’s calculations on the effectiveness of new low-energy bulbs.…
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Pirate Bay’s neo-Nazi sugar daddy
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Andrew Orlowski
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The trial of the Pirate Bay operators in Sweden has generated huge amounts of media coverage. But one of the most interesting things about Pirate Bay hasn’t got a mention. In his daily dispatches for WiReD, court correspondent Oscar Schwartz swoons over the boyish charm of “likeable” and “winning” Pirate Bay PR guy Peter Sunde.…
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Web 2.0 and feedback loops: a conversation with James Harkin
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Andrew Orlowski
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Don’t judge a book by the title. Especially if the title is something like Cyburbia. James Harkin, who worked with Adam Curtis on The Trap, has produced the first proper full-length critique of Web 2.0 – tracing the daftness back to the cybernetics pioneers of the 1940s. It’s odd that something with so much hype…
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The BBC, Thermageddon, and a Giant Snake
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Andrew Orlowski
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Listeners to BBC World Service’s Science in Action program got a nasty surprise last week. In the midst of a discussion about the large snake fossil, a scientist dropped this bombshell: “The Planet has heated and cooled repeatedly throughout its history. What we’re doing is the rate at which we’re heating the planet is many…
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Twitter’s Jam Festival
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Andrew Orlowski
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Writing about Twitter is the journalistic equivalent of eating the fluff from your navel. The posh papers love it. Menopausal middle-aged hacks love it. The BBC is obsessed with it. Instead of telling us something we didn’t know before, Twitter makes churnalism so easy, it practically automates the entire job. The rest of the world,…
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Virgin puts legal P2P plans on ice
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Andrew Orlowski
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Big label pressure has forced British cable ISP Virgin Media to suspend plans to introduce a legal music sharing service for its subscribers, just weeks ahead of its launch, The Register has learned. The radical initiative, tentatively branded as “Virgin Music Unlimited”, represented a major investment for the ISP, and would have been the first…