FANS of Coldplay who play the band’s latest CD in their cars could be breaking record-label rules designed to clamp down on internet piracy. Boingboing.net revealed that some copies of the album X&Y include an edict stating “this CD may not play in DVD players, car stereos, portable players, game players, all PCs and Macintosh PCs”. Figures released last month showed that album sales in the United States, the world’s largest market, last year slid to their lowest level since 1996 — even after digital downloads were included. However, pundits have been stumped by the car stereo ban. Boingboing suggested that record labels would be well advised to treat music lovers “like customers, not crooks”.
www.boingboing.net
www.coldplay.com
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Engine trouble
BMW received a rap on the knuckles from Google after using “the same kind of tactics used by porn sites to try and artificially inflate search engine rankings”, said the digital lifestyles website. A software engineer at Google found that the company had violated Google’s webmaster guidelines, specifically the principle of “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users”.
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Fisk of fury
“I have to be honest, I don’t use the internet. I’ve never seen a blog in my life. I don’t even use e-mail,” Robert Fisk, The Independent’s foreign correspondent, told the Toronto Star. That means he will not be aware of the term coined by bloggers in his honour. “Fisking” describes “the act of critiquing, often in minute detail, an article,” says Wikipedia.
“Fisking may . . . appear to those subject to it to be merely taking small parts out of context and putting the worst possible interpretation on them.”
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Valentine blues
Sick of spam promoting dating sites? Tate Online is to offer a timely dose of anti-romantic “net art” to redress the balance. The Dumpster, by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, is “an interactive information visualisation that plots the romantic break-ups of teenagers in 2005 — using data from millions of blogs”. It starts on February 14.
http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/bvs/
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Blogger jailed
Yahoo! was accused of providing evidence to the Chinese authorities that led to Li Zhi, a dissident blogger, being sent to prison for eight years, the second such case involving the company in the past year. Yahoo! defended its actions, telling Reuters: “We would not know whether a demand for information focused on murder, kidnapping or another crime.”
Reporters without Borders, the press freedom group, disagreed: “Now we know Yahoo! works regularly and efficiently with the Chinese police,” it said. “It’s not Yahoo!’s fault,” explained one commenter on the metafilter site. “An hour after you turn in one Chinese dissident, you feel like doing it again.”