Interesting piece on the downside of Amazon’s new book-searching feature, launched last month, which allows customers to do a full-text search on more than 120,000 books. The Register reports that it has quietly disabled printing after researchers managed to print out 108 consecutive pages from a bestselling book. As a failed bookseller, I sympathise.… Read More »
Good piece by the BBC on how micropayments may not be taking off online, but are with handphones. “While many of us are happy to use a credit card online, spending tens, hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of pounds, parting with just 50p is less common.” Despite the lack of any common system for micropayments, the… Read More »
I live in Indonesia, which teaches you tons about credit cards and how easy they are to get fraudulent with. But at least here they don’t allow you to swan past security with riding lawn-mowers you haven’t paid for. From the Sacramento Bee, a cautionary tale about the self-checkout lane in supermarkets where you swipe… Read More »
If you want to know how spam really works — and how closely it’s tied to legitimate big business — read an excellent piece by Bob Sullivan at MSNBC. He describes pursuing a spam “from Alabama to Argentina, from a tiny Birmingham-based firm and someone named ?Erp? past a notorious spammer named Super-Zonda ? and… Read More »
Are we all outlaws, or what? A study by Pew Internet & American Life Project from surveys fielded during March – May of 2003 (i.e. before the RIAA started sending out subpoenas) shows that 67% of Internet users who download music say they do not care about whether the music they have downloaded is copyrighted, an… Read More »