Catshanghai

Here's the scenario. You want to view a downloaded Youtube video, but the media software on your computer cannot show it properly. What do you do? There is a free program called VideoLan Client (VLC)  that is often described as a Swiss army knife for media files. It will play just about any music or [...]

This is a perfect video for living in Shanghai. It’s a full episode of Fawlty Towers. It captures the communication problems, the sense of chaos, the flexible attitudes to copyright in terms of vintage BBC tv shows and web service design. America does Youtube. China does Youku Enjoy. Tell me if it plays in the [...]

BBC’s Iplayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer lets you stream TV and radio content as long as you are based in the UK. Windows users can also download shows using a download manager with DRM that automatically deletes the files withn a month or 7 days once you start watching. Computer users in China cannot access this content, [...]

Yesterday we were celebrating the virtues of Twitter as a news flash tool for natural disasters. The subsequent revelation that tens of thousands of people have died is making some of us uneasy that our self congratulatory tweets and blog posts were somewhat inappropriate. Kaiser Kuo of Digital Watch wrote a very thoughtful, but ambivalent [...]

Reports are emerging on international news sites that the death toll from yesterday’s Sichuan earthquake is 10 000 and rising. Al Jazeera’s English site reported that there was extensive damage in the epicentre of Wenchuan County and surrounding areas. The toll is expected to rise sharply as authorities and rescue teams make contact with the [...]

John C Dvorak’s recent ranting and raving about China is highly entertaining, but his analysis has more holes in it than a lump of Swiss cheese. To those who are unfamiliar, John C Dvorak is a well known tech writer, blogger (http://www.dvorak.org/blog), podcaster and curmudgeon who hosts Cranky Geeks and NoAgenda. No Agenda is an [...]

There is a new story spreading around the Internet that video sharing sites are about to become inaccessible from China. Here is an extract from The Guardian: It was the internet story of 2007, the website that brought you sneezing pandas, laughing babies, an epic battle on the African savannah and a guest appearance by [...]

I spend many hours every week listening to and watching various technology podcasts from Twit, ZD, Revision 3 and CNET. They are all written and presented by former TechTV employees so it little wonder that they are almost exclusively focused on Silicon Valley and North American issues? Occasionally, Europe will get a brief mention and [...]

have written about my loathing of digital rights management (DRM) on several occasions, because honest consumers are forced to pay for media such as music and films that works less well than something they could steal for free. I made the mistake of paying for a few really good albums by Joanna Newsome, Nina Nastasia [...]

I’ve just been perusing the IBO’s (International Baccalaureate Organisation) forums for news about the IT ethics course I teach. I am a little concerned that this academic community is so dismissive of Wikipedia as a source of information. Therefore, I wrote this post in defense of Wikipedia that I have quoted below: I am writing [...]