I played “Days of Ire” yesterday … I played on the side of Revolutionaries, we lost. Here’s a hint, you can’t kill enough tanks, you need a different route to victory.
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Racism in culture & politics
Two stories, one personal and one public showing the endemic racism in the UK in Thatcher’s ’80s and wondering how much things have changed. Originally posted as a storify, rescued and back dated to the original date.
The personal story related to watching an episode of Minder, “Poetic Justice, Innit!” and the endemic, unnecessary casual racism within it. This was cross referenced with yet another shock story of racists in the Tory cabinet.
The Minder episode was published a year after the Brixton riots, and the video copy on youtube, pointed to in the story is no longer available there. The story was made in 2017, posted here in 2020 and backdated to the date of its first publication. …
Watching Game of Thrones (again)
Yup, I am! Artistically, now I know what happens, I can concentrate on relevant harbingers since we know what they are. There’s quite a few, I was obviously concentrating on the wrong plot points the first time through. If I was really concerned, I could probably organise my life better; I deleted my older copies of the show from my skybox and so short of buying the box set, £32 for S1-3 I am stuck waiting for them to show repeats and so I took the opportunity over Xmas. Great show but the opportunity to whinge about Sky & HBO’s monetisation strategies is too great. …
monopoly in film
On the 27th Sept, Torrentfeak comments on an MPAA funded report on film distribution in the USA. It highlights the oddity that the most used service (Netflix) has the weakest catalogue. Later in the year, the researcher, KPMG LLP published a report on the UK market, which Torrentfreak commented on here…. The headline was that a film fan wanting the best catalogue would need to subscribe to 27 services, which seems a bit excessive. …
I need 27 suppliers? Watching film in the UK
A UK movies fan has to subscribe to 27 services to get a full catalog of current(ish) releases. On the 27th Sept, Torrentfeak comments on an MPAA funded report on film distribution in the USA. It highlights the oddity that the most used service (Netflix) has the weakest catalogue. Later in the year, the researcher, KPMG LLP published a report on the UK market, and locally hosted here … which Torrentfreak commented on here…. The headline was that a film fan wanting the best catalogue would need to subscribe to 27 services, which seems a bit excessive. See below/overleaf for critical quotes from the reports … …
Not so open, a Bioware take on open source
This article represents some thoughts on how copy-left and permissive licences create value. It uses the story of Bioware and it’s use of the D&D™ and Forgotten Realms™ games & mythos as an example. There are two recent news items that make this current: that the community repository for Neverwinter Nights has just shut, and that Wizards of the Coast have just released Dungeons & Dragons V5 rules as a free to use .pdf, a small but significant step to a freemium business model. The story shows how an initially traditional author-publisher business model, leveraged a pre-made community, grew it and latterly enabled it. The point of this story is the way in which community and value grew, becoming significant author contributors and the way in which Bioware responded and learnt although some might say not as quickly or as generously as they might. …
Can they really make Iron Man?
How awesome! The US Military having already made Batman’s surveillance machine, is now looking to recreate Iron Man. …
Google deleted five million index entries in a week
Earlier today, Torrent Freak published an article detailing the number of take down requests that Google receives and acts upon, in the previous week, they report
Google received DMCA notices from 5,407 copyright owners and reporting organizations requesting the removal of 5,310,080 URLs spanning a total of 37,413 domains.
Obviously, I have been exposed to the copyright maximalist’s constant propaganda at #lab13 and further with the press coverage of the Select Committee, so its great to see this reported. The Torrentfreak article ends, …
Is piracy really the most important issue facing the creative industries
Today, Parliament released the “Culture” select committee’s report “Supporting the Creative Industries”. The headline pursued by most media outlets is that Google’s efforts to limit copyright infringement by its ‘users’ is, to quote the committee chairman, John Whittingdale, “derisory”. This is reported by Computing, which extends Whittingdale’s quotes which demand further action from Google which is erroneously singled out as the single largest source of piracy and thus the single largest source of damage to Britain’s creative industries. Peter Bradwell of the ORG, and Paul Bernal of UEA cover the report and its impact, in Peter’s case on the ORG Blog, in an article called, Culture Committee copyright report one-sided and simplistic and in Paul’s case on his blog in an article called, Supporting the creative economy?. The ORG verbal evidence to the committee is available as a video here…, on Parliament TV. Enjoy the show and Peter’s persistant return to statistics and facts …
Privacy Liberty and security: How will Labour tackle terror?
This was chaired by Jamie Bartlett of Demos, with David Blunkett and Helen Goodman with Nick Pickles of Big Brotherwatch. Jamie Bartlett, who has an interesting publication record at Demos may have been the perfect chair for the meeting.
He opened by looking at Labour’s mixed record, on the positive side introducing the Human Rights Act and on the less positive side, introducing RIPA and extending detention. RIPA is not well understood; but it defines the powers and duties in the issue of search warrants as a result most police searches are now self-authorised. He made the point that once in existence, databases suffer from scope creep and that to some extent the Communications Data Bill is an attempt to legalise actions already taken. …