Call it the Fight Club paradox: If we were really in 1984, we would not be allowed to talk about being in 1984.

If I get 400.000€ from the European Commission, I promise to come up with some even more creative, unbelievable, and outrageous crap than these jackasses.

Principles aimed at stopping terrorist content and activity online:
– Internet companies must allow only real, common names.
– Social media companies must allow only real pictures of users.
– At the European level a browser or operating system based reporting button must be developed.
– Governments will start drafting legislation that will make offering… a system [to monitor Internet activity] to Internet users obligatory for browser or operating systems…as a condition of selling their products in this country or the European Union.
– …

We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.

Give us convenient content at a reasonable price, and we’ll buy it. Sell the stuff without DRM, for a few dollars. Make it available to everyone, worldwide, at the same time. Then take the massive, unending pile of money, forever.

Or keep doing what you’re doing, and enjoy your ceaseless war of attrition, ever-rising tide of negative public opinion, and eventual forced irrelevance. And get fucked.

So to encourage people not to engage in piracy, they’re going to force everyone to watch yet another annoying, time-wasting, gratification-delaying warning screen that can only be avoided by engaging in piracy. They’re purposefully making the movie-playing experience worse for honest paying customers.

4-year old Beatrix discovers “real TV”:

“Did it break?”, she asks.
“No. It’s just a commercial.”
“What’s a commercial?”, she asks.

This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access.
– Tim Berners-Lee, August 20th, 1991

Next week Google will launch their new, unified privacy policy, which combines your search history with information collected through their other services. In case you want to prevent that, here’s how to clear your history.

A stand-up comedian sells his show online for $5, global distribution, no artificial restrictions. Breaks even in 12 hours, and after three days, has made a profit of $200,000. This is a real-world example of why the big media companies and rights organizations stubbornly focus their efforts on fighting piracy and not improving their business model. They are nothing but dispensable middlemen. They are scared. And they should be.

Important stuff.