Month: October 2007

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

The military regime in Burma has controlled access to the internet for many years, but when information about the recent protests appeared all over the web, from YouTube videos to personal testimony on blogs, the generals showed that there were other options available to them and effectively cut the country off from the worldwide network.

This drastic action worked, up to a point, forcing those who wanted to communicate with the rest of the world to take significant risks by using satellite phones and other links and limiting the world’s awareness of the severity of the current clampdown.

Continue reading “The banality of censorship”

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

The restrictions placed on downloaded music files using one of the various digital rights managements (DRM) systems have always annoyed me, to the point where I’ll generally buy a CD and rip it as a high-quality AAC file rather than pay out for a song I can only play on selected devices or copy a few times.

Existing DRM-free services like eMusic, or those with some non-DRM inventory like MusicNet and of course Apple, are out there but don’t cover a lot of the artists I like and have nothing like the inventory you’d find in a decent record shop.

And I know that you can take the songs you buy from the iTunes Music Store and burn them to CD and then re-import them, but doing so further reduces the quality of the music you’re listening, especially when compared to a CD.  It also takes time.

Continue reading “Amazon and the record industry”