blog.sparetomato.com

As blogs gain promenance, spammers find an easy way to reach a wider audience: posting spam comments.

Just a note to anyone trying to spam this blog:

It’s powered by wordpress, meaning that I have to approve each comment before it’s seen. therefore I am unlikely to approve any comment offering viagra, porn, or anything else!

(I know that most spammers don’t actually read this blog and the comments are added by a spider, but I’m just getting a bit fed up of these spammers…)

Bill Thompson makes me laugh. As the BBC’s resident technology expert, he offers insightful and sometimes witty views on technology as part of the BBC’s Go Digital programme (although I get the impression that he also writes the script for the main presenter too, as they always seem to agree on a subject, or the presenter asks Bill for an answer that he clearly has previously scripted). However, his latest column on the BBC news website made me smile this morning:

My daughter is fifteen and cares about copyright. She knows that I rely on it in order to get paid for what I write. But she does not care for copy protection when it stands in her way, and will happily rid DVDs or strip DRM from downloaded music in order to use material flexibly - and fairly.

So he’s saying it’s OK for his daughter to ri(d)p CDs/DVDs and circumvent copyright simply because it stands in her way? I’m off to see if I can get a copy of his eBook PDF, but download it from a peer-to-peer network to get around the copy-protection he has placed on it by making me pay for it before downloading…

… In fairness, I don’t think that he has an eBook, but surely the same principle applies: DRM exists because the publishing industry also rely on copyright in order to get paid for what they do?

Wow! it looks like early 90’s stalwart MC Hammer has a blog!

I regularly defend the media and their actions, but their scaremongering has got to stop. Firstly there is the case of ‘Bird Flu’, where someone who works with chickens on a daily basis might have a very slim chance of contracting, but at the moment not be able to transmit it to another human being.

Now we are being told of the ‘Arctic Conditions’ that are covering much of England… If I was Ranulph Fiennes, and saw that the arctic was like this:

…I would be very disappointed!