Thursday , March 28 2024

Science and Technology

Revenge of the Remixers

We mentioned last week Madonna’s attempt to thwart file sharing of songs from her forthcoming American Life album (out tomorrow) by placing “dummy” song files in P2P networks like Kazaa. The files are the same length as the songs being “spoofed” but are blank other than the charming 44 year-old …

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Pals

It’s very easy to look at large corporations as impersonal monoliths, but often the business they transact is very personal. Take the relationship between AOL’s Steve Case and Bertelsmann’s Thomas Middelhoff: Mr. Case, 44, who formally departs next month as the company’s chairman, still communicates often by e-mail and instant …

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Avuncular

Understanding Napster is essential to a grasp of how we got where we are now with P2P, the hysterical flapping of the music industry, and the various possible entertainment-delivery futures. We ran an excerpt from Joseph Menn’s All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster from the …

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Ashcroft’s Justice Stomps Civil Liberties Again

There's Patriot Act 1, which I was willing to live with until Justice refused to reveal what actions have been taken under it, and now they want to make its provisions permanent. There's the dreaded Patriot Act 2 in the works, and now Justice has sided with the RIAA in the Verizon case. Ashcroft seems to be engaged in a War on Civil Liberties.

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Feel the Vibe

Remember the old Sergio Valente jeans jingle? “Oh oh, Ser-gi-oh-oh.” I think Audio-Oh should adapt the jingle to their own uses: “Oh oh, Au-di-oh-oh,” and people who are using it can discreetly signal to their fellow stimulatees, like an auditory wink. I also had a hard time figuring out which …

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More on the Redesign

We appreciate all of the passionate feeback regarding the new design very much – it’s very gratifying to see how much people care. Besides a steady stream of suggestions since the site went that we move to a horizontal format, the immediate catalyst for the switch was the addition of …

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New Blogcritics Site Design!

We all owe a huge debt of thanks to Phillip Winn for redesigning Blogcritics.org. We have moved to a horizontal format with jump links to the various sections from the top for easier reading, which many of you have asked for. The new design also loads much more quickly. We …

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Another Spammer Spanked

In an effort to combat the exponential growth of Internet junk email (about 8 percent of all e-mail traffic in late 2001, about 40 percent today) AOL, congress, state courts have all taken strong anti-spam action of late. Now the FTC has filed suit against prolific porn spammer: The lawsuit, …

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WiFi Marches On: From the First Amendment to Iraq

First, Cory Doctorow presented comments to the FCC (on behalf of the EFF) asking it to allocate unused TV frequencies to unlicensed use under the same terms as the 2.4GHz spectrum in which WiFi runs: The First Amendment calls on government to eschew regulation of who may speak and how …

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Edward Felten Interview

Interesting Slashdot interview with Fast Eddie Felten, Princeton computer science prof, purveyor of the Freedom to Tinker blog, DRM cracker, and pro-tech/information freedom gadfly: Some legal issues, some technical issues, a little personal insight… This is what Professor Felten gives us here. Some excellent questions rose to the top in …

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