Do you ever wonder how things work? Here at TechnoLlama we spend an obscene amount of time wondering precisely how applications and gadgets work. How does a media server allow me to watch downloaded TV shows in my PS3? How are long files negotiated between a Mac and a PC? Read more
Before being attacked by the Lynne Trusses of the world, the title of Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End is not missing an apostrophe. The book is named after a retirement community which was chosen by either “an everyday illiterate or someone who really understood the place.” Vinge is part of a Read more
The Guardian has an excellent post on the Amazon Kindle controversy. The Author’s Guild threatened legal action against Amazon because the Kindle’s read-aloud function “is not paying anyone for audio rights”. Neither does my sister when she reads books to my nephews, but I digress. What a sad state of Read more
GikII returns! Wait, we’ve tried that one before. GikII Strikes Back! Nah, George Lucas does not deserve it. Thy Geek Will Be Done! Better… After three successful runs dealing with the legal implications of Harry Potter, tattoos, knitted Daleks, Buffy avatars (or was it Angel’s avatar?), robots behaving badly, and Read more
Ireland has been suffering a bit of a copyright nightmare recently. Firstly, Eircom was sued by the music industry, and settled out of court conceding that it would implement some form of “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” policy. As Sheldon from BBT would say “It is a sports analogy. Baseball to be precise”. Now Read more
Some people didn’t get the memo. Curiously though, I think I know who the person in the cartoon is!
An interesting development in the latest cybercrime trends has been a marked increase in attacks against online games and virtual worlds, as I have posted previously. One element that I have missed in the discussion about game hacking has been the methods with which cyber-criminals obtain login details and passwords Read more
(via Jonathan Gray) 5th COMMUNIA Workshop: Accessing, Using and Reusing Public Sector Content and Data when: 26-27th March 2009where: New Academic Building, London School of Economics, London UK Across the world there is a growing recognition of the social and commercial value of public sector content and data: be that Read more
The PirateBay’s copyright infringement trial has gotten under way in Sweden. The press has been promising that it will be the “internet piracy trial of the decade” (I guess Grokster is chopped liver), but as Mathias Klang astutely points out, the likely result will be an appeal to the Swedish Read more
And now back to our favourite sport, Microsoft bashing. Slashdot reports some unnerving built-in features in the new MS operating system: “That Photoshop stopped functioning after we messed with one of its nag DLLs was not so much a surprise, but what was a surprise: Noting that Win7 allows programs Read more