Culture and Society

I haven’t decided if this is really cool, another milepost on the road to civilizational perdition, or just worthy of cold cost/benefit analysis weighing the price of a new IBM computer (about $1400) against the insanity inducement of having your computer screen break for a commercial every 20 minutes. In …

Any attempt to modify the reprehensible DMCA is to be applauded no matter how unlikely its passage. The more times someone makes the effort, the more aware the public becomes and the greater the outcry will be. Look at how FCC media ownership deregulation finally roused the public to indignation …

Most excellent Blogcritics reader Dan Cordella sends on a link to a hysterical and oddly moving pseudo-Bollywood musical short from ABSOLUT that traces the origin of the mullet – like that of the gypsies – to India. Doubt not the babe-osity rampant in India. The production numbers are worthy of …

In addition to all the companies building their own digital music stores, Loudeye now offers a prepackaged program that companies can brand. When middlemen start popping up, you know a business is maturing: Seattle-based Loudeye and the software giant said Monday that they will work together to handle the infrastructure …

At the World Summit on the Information Society organised by the UN, 170 countries found common ground on the notion that the Internet is good and poverty is not so good, and that acces to the Internet may make for less of the latter: The declaration of principles and action …

For those of you who think Canada is nothing but a great white wasteland, I beg to differ. They have everything we have except 90% of the people are missing, and you can legally download music from the Internet: Downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks is legal in Canada, although …

The US alone dumps 30 million computers a year – many end up in India or China: Some 70% of the heavy metals in landfills come from electrical equipment waste. Now concerns are being raised on the impact the dumping – particularly evident in India’s computer heartland, Delhi – is …

At the Geneva UN digital summit, Iranian president Mohammad Khatami claimed that only 240 sites are banned: He said the ban only applies to sites that are incompatible with Islam, and a government official added that “all political sites are free”. Online censorship in Iran became a big issue at …

We mentioned the groovy counterintuitive download technique known as BitTorrent back in May: BitTorrent is a “swarming” file download system. After you download the file, your computer automatically hosts it for other people to download, instead of everyone downloading from the same congested server. The more people there are downloading …

Check out this coolness: a listing of presidential candidate sites and the features each offer on them: Presidential campaign is in full swing on the Web. Most campaigns are building a multi-site Web presence by sponsoring different kinds of sites. Click stars in the Campaign Web Sites section of the …