Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

  • EU plans to regulate online niceness (and ISPs)

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Europe’s most powerful quango, the European Commission, says it wants to accelerate a “single market” for online music, film, and games – and is threatening legislation to bring it about. Although the EU’s Telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding sees the market for digital entertainment quadrupling (to €8.3bn by 2010), she feels the bureaucrats need to get…

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  • Climate Models vs. Reality: Anton Wylie

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Climate models appear to be missing an atmospheric ingredient, a new study suggests. December’s issue of the International Journal of Climatology from the Royal Meteorlogical Society contains a study of computer models used in climate forecasting. The study is by joint authors Douglass, Christy, Pearson, and Singer – of whom only the third mentioned is…

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  • How to copyright Michelangelo: Eicher

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Commissioned as a Christmas special for 2007, this was a couple of years in the making. Some of the world’s greatest artworks are turning into copyrighted properties. Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Today, those images are copyrighted. How can ancient cultural icons become commercial properties, centuries after they fall into…

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  • DRM: Paranoia and panic is the default setting

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Seven years ago, it was an effort to get people interested in DRM issues. Today, as the internet pulsates with rumour, paranoia and conspiracy, there’s a different kind of problem. This constant background noise – and people’s willingness to jump in fear at their own shadows. Instead of information scarcity, there’s information overload. So to…

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  • Radiohead backs WW2-style austerity program

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Misery will be compulsory, if top rockers Radiohead have their way. The band have thrown their weight behind a “World War 2”-style programme of austerity measures: including restrictions on behaviour, and higher taxes. Last week, two newspaper columnists called for a return to the kind of social coercion only ever seen before in wartime. It’s…

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  • Teachers: Feel my Truthiness – Jimbo

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Yes, it’s that time of year when children eagerly gather round a kindly old man with a beard. He makes great promises to them, if only they just work hard enough. But they just get a load of obscenities back. Only it’s not Santa. Wikipedia’s Maximum Leader and peripatetic salesman Jimmy Wales breezed into London…

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