(via The Guardian’s Tech blog) What is it about the relative anonymity awarded by the internet that turns some people into monsters? Read the story of the Catsouras family, where gruesome pictures taken after the tragic death of their daughter started being distributed all over the internet. Nikki Catsouras had Read more…
Old-time favourite game City of Heroes has made a giant innovative leap by being the first massively multiplayer online game to implement user-generated gaming. While other games and virtual worlds offer user-generated content, what makes City of Heroes unique is that it has created a system that allows players to Read more…
What better way to kick-start the internet after Easter break than a good old cyber-censorship row? All the ingredients are there: giant e-commerce company with large share of the market, gays, religion, porn, erotica, geeks, twitter… mix and watch the blogosphere and the twitterverse go “Kablooey!” During the weekend I Read more…
I have read with interest Henry Porter’s scathing indictment of Google in yesterday’s Observer, an article generating some heated discussion online. While I often enjoy his writings, I have to say that on this occasion he has written a thoroughly misinformed article that seems to conflate concepts and technologies. I Read more…
Yesterday was World Day Against Cyber-censorship [insert snarky comment about the abundance of “Days against X” here]. To celebrate (is “celebrate” the right word?), Reporters Without Borders has released a report on the state of internet control and surveillance. The report labels 12 countries as “enemies of the internet”, claiming 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…
The Digital Britain parliamentary commission has presented its interim report, which has been met with the usual journalistic brouhaha and bombastic statements. The more progressive media has kept a distrusting tone, while the usual suspects at the Telegraph and the Mail have hailed it as going in the right direction Read more…
In the history of bad ideas and misguided Internet regulation, I do not think that I have come across something as ludicrous as the latest proposal from the Rt Hon Andy Burnham (Labour – Leigh), the Secretary of State for Culture. Mr Burnham (I’ll dispense with the honorific for now) Read more…
Today Britons have woken up to the fact that they are also browsing the Internet behind a firewall similar in some ways to the much maligned Great Firewall of China. Every news outlet is reporting that Wikipedia has been censored in the UK. Several UK ISPs are accused of filtering Read more…
A Federal jury in Los Angeles has convicted Lori Drew of three misdemeanour counts of computer fraud, specifically accessing a computer without authorisation. This is not unusual in itself, but the novelty of the decision is that Ms Drew’s conduct was to create a fictional MySpace account to bully neighbour Read more…