Following on from the last post about the Neuros MPEG4 recorder, looking on the Neuros website reveals something pretty unusual for a company involved in consumer product design – a clear statement of design philosophy, ‘What do we stand for?’ that’s heavy on content and […]
All posts filed under “Technology policy”
Embedding control in society: the end of freedom
Henry Porter’s chilling Blair Laid Bare – which I implore you to read if you have the slightest interest in your future – contains an equally worrying quote from the LSE’s Simon Davies noting the encroachment of architectures of control in society itself: “The second […]
EFF: Another Endangered Gizmo – the Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2
Image adapted from Neuros website Via EFF DeepLinks, details of the Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2, a product specifically designed to allow users to break through the arbitrary architectures of control imposed by other video devices and formats, and hence make the most of the content […]
Oh yeah, that Windows Kill Switch
I know the furore surrounding Microsoft’s ‘Windows Genuine Advantage’ is a few days old, and perhaps I should have blogged about it at the time, specifically the rumoured ‘Kill Switch’ which would remotely deactivate any PCs apparently running ‘non-genuine’ copies of XP. That’s certainly a […]
Policing Crowds: Privatizing Security
The Policing Crowds conference is taking place 24-25 June 2006 in Berlin, examining many aspects of controlling the public and increasing business involvement in this field – ‘crime control as industry’. Technologies designed specifically to permit control and monitoring of the public, such as CCTV […]
Spiked: ‘Enlightening the future’
The always interesting Spiked (which describes itself as an “independent online phenomenon”) has a survey, Enlightening the Future, in which selected “experts, opinion formers and interesting thinkers” are asked about “key questions facing the next generation – those born this year, who will reach the […]
Friend or foe: Battery-authentication ICs?
Via MAKE, an article from Electrical Design News looking at lithium battery authentication chips in products such as phones and laptops, designed to prevent users fitting ‘non-genuine’ batteries. Now, the immediate response of most of us is probably “razor blade model!” or even “stifling democratic […]
Review: Everyware by Adam Greenfield
This is the first book review I’ve done on this blog, though it won’t be the last. In a sense, this is less of a conventional review than an attempt to discuss some of the ideas in the book, and synthesise them with points that […]
Nice attitude
Someone from the UK just found this site by searching for “device to stop young people congregating” using a mobile phone provider’s search engine. Now, I know, I know, there may be an important backstory behind that person’s search. Some people apparently really do have […]
Feature deletion for environmental reasons
From the Sunday Times, ‘Standby buttons face axe to curb energy waste’: “Ministers want to do away with the standby buttons that allow [users] to flick their TVs and other electronic gadgets on and off while moving barely a muscle…
Freedom to Tinker – The Freedom to Tinker with Freedom?
At Freedom to Tinker, David Robinson asks whether, in a world where DRM is presented to so many customers as a benefit (e.g. Microsoft’s Zune service), the public as a whole will be quite happy to trade away its freedom to tinker, whether the law […]
BoingBoing podcast – direct link
Here’s the direct link for that new BoingBoing podcast – www.archive.org/download/…/boingboingboing_1_64kb.mp3 . BB were almost the last people I’d expect to wrap up their audio in a Flash interface! Still, ‘View Source’ is a lot easier than having to use a Flash decompiler to extract […]