Category Archives: Observer

Will Murdoch lose face(book)?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Facebook is growing so rapidly that Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of MySpace, is concerned. MySpace, you see, is really a site for young persons – which is why its average personal page has the visual and aesthetic appeal of a teenager’s bedroom floor. But most teenagers eventually grow up, and presumably learn how to tidy their bedrooms, so the $1.6bn question is: where will they go when they tire of MySpace? The disturbing thought that has occurred to Murdoch is that they might go to Facebook…

Why Germans get their Flickrs in a twist over ‘censorship’

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This morning’s Observer column…

The Flickr firestorm is just the latest refutation of the enduring myth that the internet is uncontrollable. While technologically adept users can usually find anything they’re looking for, the vast majority of the internet’s 1.1 billion users are at the mercy of local laws, ordinances and customs.

Flickr users in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea are finding themselves at the sharp end of this, because Yahoo needs to conform to local laws if it is to continue to trade in those jurisdictions. The same forces explain why Google provides only a restricted search service to its Chinese users. Libertarianism is all very well when you’re a hacker. But business is business.

DRM-free publication

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This morning’s Observer column…

From the moment the internet appeared in 1983, it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that it was a heaven-sent machine for delivering bits from one place to another. This insight, however, somehow eluded the record companies, despite the fact that they had just gone digital (the CD was launched in 1982) and were in the business of transporting bits from recording studios to consumers’ CD players.

Over the next decade and a half, the music industry continued to ignore the net. As a result, the record companies failed to develop a legal method for consumers to buy music online. In 1999, Shawn Fanning launched Napster and unleashed the illicit file-sharing habits that nearly destroyed the industry…

Coffee-table booking

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This morning’s Observer column…

The most interesting event at the conference was the appearance of the two great metaphor snatchers on the same platform. So far as I know, this is the first time that Jobs and Gates have ever appeared live together in public. And it happened, wrote one commentator, ‘despite scientists’ worries that the density of their combined egos could open a rift in the space-time continuum’.

Fortunately, no such singularity occurred. The pair were interviewed, if that is the correct term for emollient ego-stroking, by Mr Mossberg and his sidekick, Kara Swisher. It was fascinating to observe the differences between them. Jobs gets more distinguished-looking as he gets older. He now looks like a Marine corps general from the Vietnam war. Gates is still a nerd trapped inside an expanding waistline. Jobs is suave, charming, articulate, manipulative and dangerous. Gates struggles to get his thoughts out via the relatively impoverished medium of English. As I watched him I was reminded of George Steiner’s description of the music of Bach: ‘Intense force channelled through a narrow aperture.’ But why not see the whole show for yourself. Just go to tinyurl.com/2b95cr – and keep that garlic handy.

Caught in the grip of geekvision

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This morning’s Observer column…

I’m watching a video stream from downtown San Francisco. It’s 1am there. The video is shot from inside a car. An idiotic music channel is pumping audiopap through the vehicle’s stereo system. The driver has recently pulled into a fast food outlet and ordered a chocolate milkshake and a steakburger. Now we’re back on the road. I’ve no idea where the car is headed. The driver has a companion, with whom he exchanges genial but low-key wisecracks…

Here’s a thought. And another one, and another one …

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This morning’s Observer column…

PG Wodehouse wrote the best evocation I’ve ever read of what it’s like to be totally astonished. He describes the expression on the face of a chap who ‘while picking daisies on the down line, has just received the 4.15 in the small of the back’. Well, I saw that expression this week. It crossed the visage of a friend who is a grizzled veteran of the print business, a man who was once deputy editor of one of our more disgraceful national newspapers. No more cynical observer of human depravity can therefore be imagined. But he was, for an instant, genuinely taken aback…

Still no sign of a triple alliance to take on Google

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This morning’s Observer column…

The strange business of the ‘takeover’ that never was – that of Yahoo by Microsoft – raises some interesting questions. First, who benefited? The story originated in an unexpected place – the New York Post, a lively tabloid publication owned since 1993 by Rupert Murdoch, where one would rarely look for a big technology story…

Blu-ray’s secret key: now showing at websites everywhere

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This morning’s Observer column…

What’s in a number? Quite a lot, it turns out, if it’s a 16-digit hexadecimal (base 16) number that begins ’09 F9′. (That’s ‘9’ followed by ‘249’ in normal – base 10 – numbering.)

Why the fuss? Well, it appears that the 16-digit number in question is the cryptographic key for unlocking the copy protection on the new generation of DVD discs. It was discovered a while back and posted in obscure parts of the web, where it languished…

Murphy’s Law

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This morning’s Observer column…

Collapse of stout conspiracy theory, then? Well, yes. But also a striking illustration of the collective intelligence embodied in the blogosphere. Memo to traditional journalists: there’s always someone out there who knows more than you…

Aw shucks. Microsoft is standing up for the little guys

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This morning’s Observer column…

Wearing his best public-spirited citizen look, Bradford Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, told the New York Times that Google’s proposed acquisition would ‘combine the two largest distributors of online advertising’ and thus ‘substantially reduce competition in the advertising market on the web’. Between them, Citizen Smith continued, Google and Doubleclick deliver ‘over 80 per cent of the adverts delivered to website publishers, so their combination in a single company has big ramifications’.

Call me Panglossian, but this is encouraging news. One looks forward to General Counsel Smith advising his employer that its 92 per cent control of the market for operating systems also has ‘big ramifications’…