DISQUS

"Was the person who changed the Wikipedia page committing an act of journalism, or divulging privileged information?"

How about neither? As far as I can tell, this person was simply engaging in normal 21st century social interaction. Using terms like "publishing", "journalism" and "news" just obscures the simple reality of it.

Geez Duncan, just as I was impressed you were able to just make a joke of it without the vicious moralizing insinuations you used to add at Techcrunch, now you start your preaching in the comments.

Whenever sex or drugs come up, you start sounding like Tom Cruise.

So basically you're advocating the use of Smarty to compensate for complete and utter incompetence, plus a total refusal to learn, plus refusing to follow instructions. Don't you think your problems may be elsewhere?

Where I work we have pretty strict job-protection laws making it very hard to fire people, but there are limits.

I'm not surprised though: I've always interpreted companies that list knowledge of Smarty as a job requirement as a euphemism for "we have no idea what the fuck we are doing and employ retards".

Even on a very, very, simple job, not using an existing MVC set-up or framework and coding completely from scratch, setting up the basics for separating business logic from presentation logic should take any half-decent PHP-dev a just a few hours. Yeah, it won't freaking Symfony, but not having "a proper MVC" setup is no excuse for not separating concerns.

Even worse, using stuff like Smarty and limiting language constructs usually results in horrible code where essential presentation logic is mixed with business logic because even as bloated as it has become, Smarty can't handle the complexity of the presentation. Separating the layout part of the presentation logic is a good thing, but not it should not result in presentation logic being all over the place. And don't even get me started about using AJAX in this context...

Smarty can't compensate for incompetence. Nothing can.

That kind of "pointing" has been ruled illegal in several European courts as aiding and abetting copyright infringement, and I don't see why Sweden would be so very different. What's relevant here is "intent". And it's going to be hard for the PB guys to credibly deny their intent...

Then again, it's never been quite clear to my why they felt so safe in Sweden, and why it has taken so long for them to be prosecuted. There must be some kind of loophole in Swedish law.

Personally, I hope they win, but I find it hard to believe that under current copyright laws Pirate Bay can be legal in any western country.

What's more worrying, if PB goes down it might trigger the next fase in the P2P arms race, like with Napster and Kazaa before. The ultimate result will inevitably be an anonymized, end to end encrypted, zero point of failure. 'all the data is in the clound' p2p network, with implications for law enforcement (ie, making it damn near impossible) well beyond mere copyright infringement.

I think the main issue here is not whether Lane Hartwell is right legal issues, but the fact that the law basically enables here to get the video taken down without any form of due process.

There are no lives at stake here, we have all the time in the world to wait for the outcome of normal legal proceedings to decide who's right and who's wrong.

What's clearly wrong here is the chilling effect of the current copyright laws, and the abuse of that by rights holders such as miss Hartwell. Even if she is legally right, this kind of action is way more unethical and damaging then Richter Scales alleged copyright infringement.

I absolutely concur with Ivan. In fact, the success of the internet is based on that fundamentally open architecture. What you are talking about are the alternatives back then, the walled gardens of AOL and Compuserve.

Mobile phone makers and operators are still trying to pretend that piece of history never happened, or that they can reverse history. In that way, this is the same issue as Facebook versus Open Social. It's a battle that has been raging ever since the breakthrough of the internet, on various fronts.

And there are still some battles to be fought: the internet desperately needs an open alternative to rich media stuff like Flash and streaming video, and get this out of the clutches of Adobe and Microsoft. And again, this is also directly in the interest of Google.

Looking forward to Googles next announcement... ;-)

Having read most of the reviews, I can't escape the impression that Hulu is by far the most accomplished and impressive implementation.... of a dead end business model.

The fact that site-builders apparently knew what they were doing is itself is pretty unique for sites commissioned by major corporations, but that doesn't make the basic concept behind Hulu anymore viable.

I think you've just answered your own question by using DVD Jon as an example. In the latter case we are talking about a complete industry that tries to impose more and more limitations.

In the case of Apple, we are talking about a single company, trying to impose limitations on it's own products. Unique products that get unique attention (there is no massively publicized "Nokia/Samsung/Motorola-hacking", there aren't entire online groups dedicated to reverse engineering other phones).

Neither does Apple have a semi-monopoly on anything like Microsoft (and the kind of social and economic power that comes with it), not even in the online music business since the vast majority of iPod owners fill it with mp3's instead of iTunes music.

Apple does not get a free ride. All the Tech-blogs are full Apple's latest stunts. But the reality is, Apple is not "The Man". I can ditch my iPod, my yet-to-be-aquired-since-i-live-in-Europe iPhone and any Macs without any problems. In fact, ditching them would make live easier for me in a Microsoft dominated world.

The reality is, despite all of its success and publicity, Apple is still the opposition, the "other guy". The fact that the more power Apple gets, the more it starts to act like "The Man" is something to be extremely critical of, but compared to the impact of DVD-encryption or Microsoft OOXML manipulations these are minor issues.

Blowing every bad move Apple makes out of proportion will only fuel Apple apologists.