I have always been interested in the depiction of computers in popular fiction. One early computer meme represented the percentage crunching computer/robot that would helpfully tell the protagonists the percentage rate of survival for X situation (“You have a 2% chance to survive that jump”). While computer predictions are not Read more
Electronic evidence and data gathering are becoming an important part of modern litigation. When Viacom requested data from Google pertaining their massive litigation, they did not just ask for all the usage information related to their own content, they requested everything. All information about every single video uploaded to YouTube Read more
It’s been quiet here in TechnoLlama for a while after knit-gate and the story about gold spammer executions being picked up by the always excellent Terra Nova. I am now off to Brazil for a conference, and as a reluctant traveller and Internet addict I am always very interested in Read more
The Internet is broken. You may have noticed some of the signs: slow connections, sluggish downloads, constant disconnections, lost emails, tons of spam. Who broke it, and how can we fix it? This was part of a very interesting talk by Chris Marsden at BILETA 2008, an earlier version of Read more
Technology news sites have been reporting this story, but I think that its importance has been downplayed. Last Friday, Pakistan Telecom blocked access to YouTube inside the country as a measure to censor the site because it contained criticism to the Prophet Mohamed (PBUH). However, this blocking exercise went slightly Read more
I fear to utter the word “paradigm shift” because it is overused (and often misunderstood). However, 2008 is promising to be a year of true changes in the media environment. If the markets shift, will we get the regulation of the new market right? Why do I say that the Read more
Various news sources have been reporting that the Beijing High Court has ruled in favour of popular search engine Baidu.com in a copyright infringement suit brought by major record companies. The dispute arose by the existence of a dedicated music search function called Baidu MP3, which allowed users to find Read more
(via Ars Technica) EFF has released a report outlining several practices at Comcast, a popular American ISP. This is controversial, because some ISPs sell themselves as high-speed with no restrictions, which would be violated by bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping. Comcast claims that it delays bittorrent traffic, and does not Read more
(via David Berry) This is an awesome guide to setting up a show downloading service on your computer. With NBC terminating their contract with iTunes in the USA, and with iTunes UK TV shows being sold at a prohibitive price, consumers are voting with their feet and choosing to download Read more
The Washington Post reports on action being taken by some ISPs in the United States to curb high traffic. Comcast is reportedly terminating users’ accounts based on high bandwidth usage, although it seems like there is no specification of how much is too much. I’m surprised by the move, as Read more