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Book review: The Copyright Enforcement Enigma

Go back ten or 15 years, and the word 'convergence' cropped up a lot with respect to the internet, telecommunications and media. What has converged in subsequent years has actually gone beyond what was envisaged then — at least in terms of technology. Relatively few then foresaw the extent to which all three would blend — not only with each other, but also with mobile and retail.

But, as Monica Horten... Read more

Book review: Digital Wars

In 1998, the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, author of Googled, asked Bill Gates which of his competitors he feared most. "I fear someone in a garage who is devising something completely new," Gates replied.

Microsoft's market capitalisation was then $344.6 billion, Apple's was $5.54 billion, and Google's was theoretically $10 million, based on a single venture capitalist's willingness to hand that "someone in a... Read more

Book review: The End of Money

"It's not a question of money, but of cash," a friend of mine explained to his parents years ago, when we were still university students and planning an evening out together before ATMs. He was, of course, reassuring his parents that he hadn't done anything dumb that would require them to find thousands of dollars to support him for months to come; he was merely lacking the physical representation of the numbers... Read more

Book review: Design for Hackers

For a book so packed with fascinating and informative details, Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty starts much too slowly. The author is so keen to tell you what he's going to tell you, what difference he hopes it will make to you and why design literacy matters that the first 40 pages are essentially an extended introduction (even if reminding people to sketch out ideas is always a good thing).

Skip... Read more

Book review: The Tangled Web

There's a simple rule that the more complex a system is the harder it is to secure. Once upon a time, the web was a simple system…

Today, anyone trying to advise a web site owner on security has to balance elements within the site owner's control — fonts, domain names, sources of content, validation of user input, for example — against extrinsic elements the site owner can't touch. The latter include user... Read more

Book review: Cyber Warfare

Cybercrime is now allegedly a bigger problem in the UK than street crime, but hackers may not be the biggest problem. The US government takes cybersecurity concerns so seriously that last year the Under-Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs made pointed comments to Chinese representatives at a joint government event about threats ranging from "the theft of money or information, or the disruption... Read more

Book review: Liars and Outliers

During the 2003 London march to protest the beginning of the Iraq war, we shuffled very, very slowly over a clogged Waterloo Bridge. Monitoring helicopters waggled overhead. I marvelled at living in a society where 2 million people could protest under the eye of police without fear — that the government went on to ignore those 2 million protesters is a different issue.

That is a demonstration of trust, the... Read more

Book reviews: Google books

If your industry hasn't been disrupted by Google yet, observed the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta in his 2010 book Googled, it will be soon. Two recent books look at the next stage of those disruptions — one academic, one popular.

The academic is Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, whose previous books have looked at the copyright wars and whose general theme... Read more

Book review: The Lean Start-Up

Whenever possible, learn from other people's failures — it's cheaper than learning from your own. Eric Ries didn't have this advantage when, as a Yale undergraduate, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. That company ran out of money in the dot-com bust.

"We were doomed from day one," he writes in The Lean Start-Up: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses, "because we did not know the... Read more

Book review: Republic, Lost

"Love makes the odds irrelevant," writes Lawrence Lessig at the end of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It. "It is a commitment to doing whatever can be done — sometimes destructively so — to beat the odds and save the soul who taught you that love."

This, he goes on to say, is why Americans should pick a strategy (if not one of the ones he proposes, then one of their own)... Read more

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Essential reading for technophiles

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