Category Archives: Uncategorized

Elastic, a software start-up in Amsterdam, was rapidly building its business and had grown to 100 employees. Then Amazon came along. In October 2015, Amazon’s cloud computing arm announced it was copying Elastic’s free software tool, which people use to search and analyze data, and would sell it as a paid service. Amazon went aheadContinue reading “@daiwaka: Prime Leverage: How Amazon Wields Power in the Technology World”

ARW readers will remember the Google Shill List. The Shill List was part of a brilliant strategy deployed by Oracle in their copyright infringement case against Google (still going on, see my Hypebot post on the case that is now going to get review by the U.S. Supreme Court before Lessig buddy Justice Kagan). The […]Continue reading “Case Act Myths And Facts: EFF FUD Campaign — Artist Rights Watch”

A “Theodore Kaczynski” from Lincoln Montana signs a Google-funded astroturf petition over and over again. Google-funded and affiliated astroturfs have mounted a spambot campaign targeting Senators to vote against the CASE Act. The CASE Act (voluntary small claims copyright court) passed the house 410-6. Google and their allies are worried because independent artists and creators […]Continue reading “Make the Spambots the Issue: A Quick Demo of How to Hijack Google-Funded Spambots — The Trichordist”

Diogenes searched the world for an honest man, and Cloudflare is searching the world for a decider in chief to tell them what to do. But as we know from Cloudflare’s IPO, Cloudflare need only look within because the insiders have structured the company’s governance so there is clear responsibility–and it’s with Cloudflare employees. The […]Continue reading “@cloudflare CEO Calls for a Decider–When That Decider Is Cloudflare Employees — Music Technology Policy”

Criticising Big Tech can feel redundant at a time when many chief executives in Silicon Valley are doing such a good job of making the public sceptical about their business models and their executive competence all by themselves. Even so, Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University and his testimony on Capitol Hill last week areContinue reading “Must Read: @ranaforoohar: Fact-checking Facebook’s fantasies — Artist Rights Watch”

Cancelling political ads that tread on (or even trample…or even incinerate) someone’s truth are all the rage. Having skimmed the cream from political ad revenue, Twitter has announced it is banning political ads to great fanfare–after the cow escaped from the barn. (What this “ban” actually means in practice remains to be seen.) Twitter CEO […]Continue reading “Why Worry About Political Ad Pinocchios With @Jack Dorsey’s Twitter BotNet Apps? — Music Technology Policy”

[Must read takedown of the “long tail” (aka utter shite) by the erudite Terry Matthews] Unless you spent a lot of time listening to early ’00s techno-utopian babble, the Theory of the Long Tail probably means nothing to you. Yet if you live in the US or Europe and you run a digital music label, […]Continue reading “@terry5mag: Purged: How a failed economic theory still rules the digital music marketplace — Artist Rights Watch”

The tide has finally turned against Big Tech. Last week, Twitter banned political advertising; EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said she was considering much tougher monopoly standards; the city of Toronto pushed back on Google’s Sidewalk project; Australia sued the search giant over alleged misuse of location data; and US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren calledContinue reading “@ranaforoohar: Big Tech has moved from offering utopia to selling dystopia — Artist Rights Watch”

War, unfortunately, is as old as history. Usually violent, involving the use of force to compel or resist, in recent years the nature of warfare has begun to change. While physical force is still part of the military’s repertoire, today we are moving into an era of so-called “hybrid warfare” or “grey zone” strategies. There […]Continue reading “Content Piracy as Hybrid Warfare — Hugh Stephens Blog”

Is Ron Wyden an Idealistic Progressive or Just Another Sleazy Pol? Sen Ron Wyden D-OR is the last congressional true believer in a completely unregulated wild-west cyber-libertarian-internet. A “free internet” that works quite well for internet wolves, but not so much for the rest of us. He seems to be the only guy left in […]Continue reading “Wyden Rhymes With Biden: Senator’s Finances and Son’s Hedge Funds Deserve Scrutiny — The Trichordist”