“A new brain-scan study may help explain what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles - sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or [...]

Despite not blogging for months, I read this article in January and kept a note of it. While the expansion of the National Grid resulted in increased wealth and prosperity for many individuals, the expansion of the Internet has resulted in job losses and increasing concentration of wealth. Whereas businesses which expanded with electricity required [...]

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 [...]

“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 the [...]

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 subject, [...]

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 [...]

“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 News [...]

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 made [...]

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 [...]

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 post [...]

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. [...]

The Olympic stadium in Beijing won’t be the only thing covered in a cloud of smog next year. Chinese authorities also seem to be doing their best to create a smokescreen over other issues in the country, ranging from spitting in public to major human rights abuses. While lifting the cloud of smog which hangs [...]

“By effectively doubling the working life of every PC, re-use provides a simple and practical way for companies to reduce their environmental footprint and successfully re-distribute such valuable learning tools.”
The BCS Ethics Forum argues that we should preferentially re-use the 125 million PCs that we get rid of each year, rather than recycling them. As [...]

There are quite a few interesting articles out there which look at the problems arising from having “walled garden” social networks. ZDNet has an interesting article which looks at the “social capital” people have locked up on different sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Kottke talks about Facebook specifically, comparing the closed network with the [...]

Picture this. You’re a reporter who wants to go undercover at a security conference in order to catch someone confessing to a hacking crime. However, your intentions are revealed online days beforehand. The conference organisers have your name, and ask four times whether you would like a press pass, but you refuse. Yet you still [...]