19 Days Ago - If piracy and illegal downloaders really are killing the music industry, how come more singles have been sold this year than ever before and people who file-share spend more money on legal releases than those who do not file-share? I have to admit, it's not been a good week to be on the side of... (Read More)

Aug 24th, 2008 - The UK economy has officially ground to a halt, and is in danger of heading for recession. In the second quarter of the year growth was, well, zero actually. That means that the longest period of economic expansion in British history, some 16 years of it, has come to an abrupt end. Some... (Read More)

4 Days Ago - A lawsuit over a website's publication of a celebrity threesome sex tape is provoking some thoughtful discussion about fair use. Not to mention giving PBS, NPR, and the New York Times the opportunity to talk about sex tapes. The tape consists of Grey's Anatomy actor Eric Dane and his wife... (Read More)

Sep 17th, 2009 - Far from being made superfluous by the Internet, a recent study by the American Library Association finds that the library is often the only source of free Internet access in a community. More than 71 percent of all libraries (and 79 percent of rural libraries) report they are the only source of... (Read More)

Oct 3rd, 2009 - A company that has been attempting to obtain licensing fees from adult companies, as well as other providers such as Internet radio stations and leading satellite and cable companies such Echostar, DirectTV, Time Warner Cable, and CSC Holdings, Inc., has had its patent thrown out by the U.S.... (Read More)

Feb 28th, 2009 - A recent study shows that, while the consumption of online pornography doesn't vary a lot between states, the states with the highest rates are the ones that are more conservative and religious. The study, by Benjamin Edelman, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business... (Read More)

Nov 24th, 2008 - Symantec's research on the apparent rise in the 'black market' for goods on the Internet makes for interesting reading. That's 'interesting' if we take it to mean 'nothing much has happened so we might as well read it in case there are any odd findings'. The interesting thing for me is not that... (Read More)

Jul 31st, 2008 - I just love stories like this. There's a survey in Australia that demonstrates how few companies bother responding to e-mailed queries. Apparently some 60 per cent of large organisations simply don't bother answering questions sent by mail. I have to declare some amusement here. In 1997 I edited... (Read More)

Aug 12th, 2008 - Markets are down about 50 points in mid-afternoon trading on Tuesday, mostly due to investor worries about continued woes in the financial services sector. In short, nobody is buying the notion put forward by Wall Street optimists that the credit crunch – now one-year-old – is coming to an end. ... (Read More)

Nov 26th, 2007 - Retail stocks should see even a bigger bump this month -- and possibly into 2008 -- due to an increased demand for a product that basically didn't exist a dozen years ago -- gift cards. That's the big news coming out of "Black Monday", the newest holiday on Wall Street's docket representing the... (Read More)

Nov 24th, 2007 - The holiday shopping season seems to have started out with more of a bang than a whimper - - especially online. That wasn’t the scenario painted by the ever-negative mainstream media, who published wave after wave of articles bemoaning the lousy economic climate and predicting a disastrous... (Read More)

Jul 31st, 2008 - Erik Anderson and Rob Landley are at it again. The guys who brought us the BusyBox toolset for resource-constrained Linux and Unix systems, together with the Software Freedom Law Center, have filed yet another GPL enforcement lawsuit for copyright infringement. This time it’s against Extreme... (Read More)

Apr 20th, 2007 - Intel continues to prove their commitment to chip evolution with the demonstration of new phase-change memory. A possible replacement for flash memory, PRAM uses chalcogenide glass to switch between 1s and 0s. This method could theoretically allow for faster and smaller chips, while using less... (Read More)