It may be a week overdue, but I finally got round to finishing the changes I wanted to make, so the site’s back up and running. Over the last week, I’ve made tonnes of minor changes to the code that should hopefully make it just that bit nicer to use, including adding Lightbox functionality to [...]

As the title suggests, you shouldn’t expect any posts on here for at least the next five days as I’m off to a party at my mate’s house. Chilling, drinking copious quantities of beer, going out, playing paintball, trampolining and driving around the Yorkshire Moors on an old London Routemaster bus are all on the [...]

The Guardian has an interview with Andrew Keen, Internet supervillain and author of The Cult of the Amateur. Keen rails against Web 2.0, claiming not only that the proliferation of blogs, social networking and other user-generated content is “dumbing down the Internet” but also that it is killing off old media such as newspapers. While [...]

I love xkcd comics Original post here.

“The UK’s reputation was damaged when the government hesitated in calling for an immediate end to the Lebanon war last year, MPs have said … The foreign affairs committee also said it was ‘counterproductive’ not to talk to Palestinian militant group Hamas. “ The foreign affairs committee is clearly correct in both cases. However, whether [...]

“Telekom Malaysia sent Yahaya Wahab a bill for 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit, or about $218 trillion, for charges to the account, along with a demand from the company’s debt collection agency that he settle the alleged debt within 10 days, or get a lawyer.” Not only did the company claim the man owed them roughly 17 times [...]

In another post that I never got round to blogging, Boing Boing linked last month to a new study into copyright. Economist Rufus Pollock takes into account that the optimal copyright period on intellectual property will fall as costs of production reduce, and that the optimal level will fall over time in general. Putting this [...]

“When all the pieces of the global economy work together smoothly, all the players involved benefit. In this decade, a clear pattern emerged: China became factory to the world, the U.S. became buyer to the world, and India began to become back office to the world.” In an excerpt from her new book on the [...]

The founder of Perfect 10, a website which specialises in “tasteful nude images”, has announced that he is suing Microsoft. Norm Zada’s convoluted claim argues that because some people illegally copy and post his images on their own sites, and because Microsoft in turn indexes and displays these images in its search results, Microsoft is [...]

This amazing video is over 8 minutes long, but well worth watching. A herd of lions attack a baby buffalo, a crocodile crawls out of a nearby lake and joins the fight, and then an entire herd of buffalo stampedes towards the fray to save its own. Incredible. From YouTube, here. Found via BBC News, [...]

“The BBC currently dominates the free-to-view [online] content market with 80% of clips originating from the corporation, according to researchers Screen Digest.” This figure seems incredibly high, but with News 24 available online 24/7 and the vast majority of BBC content being downloadable through its iPlayer software , it may well be about right. BBC [...]

TechCrunch reports on the recent security failure at Facebook, where a misconfigured web server meant that source code to the homepage was leaked and published on a website. As the article notes, this raises concerns about the security of the site, which holds a great deal of personal information about its users including credit card [...]

“Government officials have secretly briefed ministers that Britain has no hope of getting remotely near the new European Union renewable energy target that Tony Blair signed up to in the spring – and have suggested that they find ways of wriggling out of it.” For Britain to be trying to go back on promises it [...]

The BBC reports that Google Video is to shut down its premium content service, leaving users who have purchased videos from the site high and dry. While the DRM’d media will stop working, Google is refusing to refund users and is instead only offering credits for its Checkout service. That’s bad enough, but factor in [...]

Joel on Software looks at the badly implemented “off” function in Windows Vista, where the user has to choose between 9 menu options whenever they want to exit Windows. It may be a small example, but it highlights the problems resulting from bureaucracy within the company. Cutting the red-tape would mean better-designed Microsoft products and [...]

Reproduced by permission of Chris from The Book of Biff, here.

Time has a fascinating article on Chinese gui gouwu zhongxin – “ghost” mega-malls. Developers are building increasingly enormous shopping centres, but filling them with designer shops out of the reach of the vast majority of the population. Banks, eager to loan money, show little restraint and few caps on lending. As a result, while 7 [...]

“I’ve known about this program of [sic] a while, and being heavily involved in local search, I think it’s being severely misunderstood. It’s not about a sales force – it’s about local business content and customer awareness … One of the challenges about local search is up-to-date accurate content.” Brad Geddes has an interesting short [...]

Casey McKinnon writes about the legal pitfalls for amateur video-makers, who US broadcasters are increasingly asking for rights to use their content. However, the article notes that the legalese-filled contracts companies expect people to sign often leave them with little recognition or rights over their work. Many braodcasters are unwilling even to credit the creator, [...]

“It looks as if a serious class-action lawsuit is brewing against Google, as a music trade association joins a growing list of unsettled copyright owners looking for reprieve from YouTube’s copyright-violatin’ ways.” When Google bought YouTube, it was widely expected that copyright holders would eye the tech company’s massive cash reserves and start suing. However, [...]