Archive for July, 2008
Ted.com is the website of the long-running Technology, Entertainment & Design conference which since 1984 has brought together many of the world’s leading thinkers and intellectuals, and challenged them to give the talk of their lives in just under 20 minutes…
For many years the conference was an invite only affair, and even then tickets cost around $6,000, meaning that the general public had very little benefit from this remarkable series of talks and presentations.
However in 2006 the website started featuring videos of some of the mini-lectures delivered at TED each year, and has continued to add both new and archive videos since then. The site now resembles a much smaller, Youtube-style, content database, containing nearly 300 20-minute videos of some of…
Continue Reading »
We have long been aware of the potentially Orwellian threats to individual privacy that come with new developments in technology. Often the trade off is inevitable: technology permits a modern soceity to meet the needs of its members, but in return heightens the level of technological dependence to which we are subject.
How many times have we heard someone speculate about a return to the world of fifteen years ago in which mobile phones were entirely unused and unnecessary? In only one decade such technology has become so deeply entrenched in modern life that such a return to a previous state seems about as possible as reversing the movement of tectonic plates or the erosion of mountains.
There is no doubt that…
Continue Reading »
I have just read a very interesting post on the Google vs Viacom lawsuit on Mashable.com (a leading social networking blog).
(N.B. If you are new to the topic check the previous post on this blog for background info).
The Mashable article is very condemning of Viacom in making their requests for logging history, and also critical of the US judge who ruled in their favour on the action, mainly out of anger that Youtube users might now be at risk from facing potential (and probably successful) copyright violation lawsuits from Viacom.
To draw a parallel with another similar high profile case - it is as if Metallica (the famous heavy metal band), who sued Napster over enabling illegal filesharing of their music a few…
Continue Reading »
EtonDigital’s experimental property portal bgnekretnine.net is currently performing extremely well in online searches - entering in the top 3 Google results for searches using ‘nekretnine’ (meaning ‘property’ in Serbian/Croatian). Considering the overwhelming number of competitors from other Serbian, Croatian and especially Montenegran property business, this represents a significant success in achieving prominent online exposure in a busy sector. Search Google to see for yourself…
Bgnekretnine.net is a free self-service property advertising portal, offering users the means to publish their own ads with contact details for interested buyers or sellers. The portal features an innovative method of automatic self-maintenance whereby ads are automatically removed after three months, minimising the portal’s running costs, and maximising the accuracy of the portal’s ad database.
The popularity of bgnekretnine.net…
Continue Reading »
So Viacom’s lengthy court case with Google over Youtube copyright infringement is finally coming to a head. A US court has ruled that Google will have to hand over the entire Youtube logging database, approximately 12 terabytes of files, after Viacom complained about roughly 160,000 Youtube clips of their shows (total views; over 1.5bn), posted in violation of copyright laws.
The log files contain details of all userIDs and IP addresses for every single video view on record to date, which understandably Google is not keen to share with Viacom…
Google has consequently cited users’ privacy as a primary concern for not wanting to hand over the details, accusing Viacom of making an ‘over-reaching demand for viewing history’. Their statements are making…
Continue Reading »
