Stories

Sadville bans usury

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The global financial crisis has encroached on that escapist Garden of the Id, Second Life. Linden Labs is to ban virtual banks from the virtual playground, the operator said in a statement yesterday. The problem is that the virtual money-lenders operate rather too much like their real world counterparts. wrote Ken D., yesterday “Since the … Read more

A Puny Wind

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Domestic “microwind” turbines, recently championed as “power from the people” by opposition leader David Cameron, are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. A study of domestic turbines was published by renewable energy consultants Encraft in December. According to the study, only one of the 15 household wind turbines generated enough to power a 75W … Read more

Kevin Kelly: the first human/Martian hybrid?

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Interbreeding between humans and aliens is a recurrent theme of science fiction – and late night talk radio. But could an example we’ve unearthed from near San Francisco, California, prove to be the first living example? Scientists have been able to identify human DNA for over 40 years. And here at The Register, we have … Read more

EU plans to regulate online niceness (and ISPs)

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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 involved anyway.

In a statement issued yesterday, the EC identified four areas for action – with the most ominous being a good behaviour pledge for online service providers.

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DRM: Paranoia and panic is the default setting

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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 … Read more

Radiohead backs WW2-style austerity program

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Radiohead on tour?

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 all for the sake of “the environment”, but as we’ll see – it’s a very peculiar and selective version of environmentalism.

Singer Thom Yorke told The Observer:

Unless you have laws in place, nothing’s going to happen…

Nothing of this is going to be voluntary. [sic] It’s a bizarre form of rationing that we’re all going to have to accept, just like people did in the Second World War.”

It’s the War On CO2, of course, and Radiohead will be doing “their bit”.

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Teachers: Feel my Truthiness – Jimbo

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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 yesterday. This time he’s pitching Jimbo’s Big Bag of Trivia at teachers and lecturers.

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Nokia radical bundling deal deserves applause

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You could be forgiven for thinking that Nokia’s music announcement yesterday was yet another subscription service. The phone giant didn’t help dispel the notion by omitting some details from the official press material. However, we were able to put more flesh on the bones of the announcement last night. It’s beginning to look as if Nokia’s move, blessed by the world’s biggest and most aggressive record company, represents a radical new direction for the music business.

Essentially, the deal bundles digital music for “free” with a Nokia phone. You can acquire unlimited songs for a year through the Nokia Music Store, then keep the music you’ve acquired if you don’t want to continue the deal. You’ll be able to play the songs on a PC (alas, not a Mac or Linux) and your Nokia.

By contrast, most music subscription services on offer today time-bomb the music, so that when you leave the service, it dies. That’s fine if you think of it as a sort of “cached” on-demand radio, but not as a way of acquiring a permanent collection; it’s proved unacceptable to consumers, who are used to keeping the music they’ve acquired for life… or until they’re burgled, or the house burns down.

In other words, it’s a loyalty program for Nokia customers, with music as the bait.

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How Web 2.0 concentrates power, and makes Microsoft stronger

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One IT Manager, bemoaning his lot to me, recently compared the rise of Web 2.0 enthusiasts to the problem the Police has with Freemasons. The blog and wiki evangelists within are not as secretive, of course, but they’re equally cult-like: speaking their own language, and using the populist rhetoric of “empowerment” for relentless self-advancement.

He couldn’t care less that employees were “wasting” time on Facebook – that was a “problem” for their line managers to deal with, and not an IT issue. (Why should IT be blamed if staff played with Rubik’s Cubes all day?) He had always encouraged people to try new software, so long as it remained within the firewall. The real problem, he thought, was that the Web 2.0 cult is loyal to what’s perceived to be good for the greater “Hive Mind”, not the organisation.

This resulted in staff with conflicting agendas.

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I’m in privacy trouble … bitch

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Three weeks ago, Facebook unveiled a three prong strategy to monetize its active base of 50m users. (See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/09/facebook_analysis/.) It hasn’t taken long for one those prongs to go prang. Facebook’s privacy-busting referral scheme called Beacon is to be modified. If you buy something elsewhere on the web, this information is piped back into your … Read more