They're free in the sense that you don't have to pay (at the point of service) for your child to go to them. Not free as in they can choose what to teach whatever they want.

From TFA:

This isn't true. All these sites do a 301 redirect (well bit.ly certainly does) so you won't lose the referrer or the context. Really this doesn't do a lot for the analytics of a site, apart from it is going to help Twitter work out how many people have clicked on which type of link (and if you're logged, who you are). It's giving them some more ammunition for contextual advertising.

Really this is the problem with the whole privacy thing that has caused so much issue in the past. The problem isn't that the company collects the data, it is that they then sell it to third parties to make a profit.

Similarly if you look at the in depth report that the WSJ published then the real issue isn't the use of cookies or even the collection of the behavioural data - it is that they have then sold out to third parties by either selling the data or allowing them to collect it in the first place (which they can then do whatever they want with).

To be fair, I think he is more ranting about the fact that he noticed that Chocomize was trending (for whatever reason) and he had to plough through hundreds of spam sites before finding the real reason that it was trending (the CNN article). Why are the spam sites there? Because the CNN article caused people to search for the term, pushed it up on Google trends, automated tools caused some sites to create new pages that Google then index higher. Google could fix this by improving their news algorithm.

Is it Chocomise in the UK, just out of interest?

From TFA on The Times (that you may not have been able to see - or may be taken down in the near future because of the paywalls):

Hopefully you are right and there won't be anything that The Times can break that can't be reproduced on the BBC. I can't believe people are going to sign up and pay for The Times just for their commentaries - they're not that good. They'll have to come up with something else.

Well, apart from the fact that my post was a bit of a dig at the fact that we seem to upmod only large websites, you are right. James Murdoch has been very ouspoken about the BBC, so you might start finding in the future that stories broken in the mass media aren't immediately published on the BBC (if he gets his way).

The BBC Perspective
The Times perspective (for as long as it remains up on the site), just for both sides of the argument.

Not that I don't agree with the article, but it is worth pointing out for full disclosure that the New York Post is owned by News Corporation as is The Times and The Sunday Times.

It'll make it interesting when Slashdot has to start putting up stories from niche websites instead of mainstream if they all go behind paywalls.

A “copyright infringement report” is a report that— (a) states that there appears to have been an infringement of the owner’s copyright; (b) includes a description of the apparent infringement; (c) includes evidence of the apparent infringement that shows the subscriber’s IP address and the time at which the evidence was gathered; and (d) complies with any other requirement of the initial obligations code.

I think the section that says they need to provide evidence of the infringement will mean that your average ISP will throw out any report. Remember that the ISPs are commercial organisations who make money based on subscribers to their service, not from downloads and the last thing want to be doing is cutting off half their customer base because some infringement lawyer is bombarding them with notices.

If you want to think about it in another way, if someone thought you'd stolen a car, the police would laugh in their face if they pitched up and accused 400 people of being in the vicinity at the time. Even if they could pin point you specifically unless they could prove with evidence that it was you, the police would never make an arrest.

(Un)fortunately I suspect the people they will catch will be the ones who are doing the equivalent of standing over the dead body, bloody knife in their hand, 13 witnesses and shouting "I'm glad I killed the bastard."

Essentially, from what I read (correct me if something changed in the final bill), a copyright holder can accuse you of pirating anything without evidence, and your provider must throttle/disconnect you. If you want to counter, you have to take me to court, at your cost, with real evidence that you didn't.

I'm not convinced this is true. My understanding of it was that they would have to catch you actually doing it (although I'm sure you could claim entrapment on that) and give you a warning through your ISP. Then they would be able to tell your ISP to cut your internet connection off if they caught you doing it again.

Not that I want to get into a debate about whether it should or shouldn't be illegal or not. Given that it is, this seems to be a fairly sensible way of policing it. It may appear that they are being heavy handed with the threats (to satisfy those who think it is a problem), they can also get away with minimal policing and catching the biggest offenders.

Citation: Section 124A, section 3c of the bill

Facebook's privacy policy says:

“Everyone” Privacy Setting. Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.

I'd also like to point out in their terms:

When you publish content or information using the "everyone" setting, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, will have access to that information and we may not have control over what they do with it.

Objectively, you could look at this a different way. If the BBC stops publishing re-engineered press releases and left that to the newspapers and focused solely on making sure that they produced insightful, detailed analysis pieces then this will bring them nothing but benefit. They will be providing the service that we (in the UK) pay for, instead of providing free advertising to a company that wants to tell the world that they've released a new product. Plus the repackaged press releases and Associated News/Reuters content tends to not get many people looking at it after day 2. Big spike in people looking at it when it is new, little long tail. The detailed analysis pieces will be worthwhile for a long time yet.

Plus this still has to be approved by the BBC Trust. They can reject it if they don't see it as a useful way of spending the tax payers money. It's the equivalent of me putting a business plan into my boss on how to make better use of my time.

The large Government UK website that I work on still has 12%+ on IE6 (plus another 24% on IE7), so it is impossible to say that we're not going to support IE6 any more. However being business facing, we are probably seeing a slightly larger percentage of those. Interestingly IE8 has about 35% share - so users are moving over to the new browsers, albeit slowly.

The bigger issue might be caused by corporations holding on to IE6 (as someone above has mentioned). In house we still have IE6 as the standard because our CMS/finance systems won't work in IE7 or IE8 and the cost of upgrading it to work in those browsers is larger than the negative impact of forcing everyone to use IE6 in the company. The downside is that we have lots of other systems that are faltering because they don't work in IE6 and I have to go against company policy of telling everyone to use Firefox or Chrome. Then again, the wider company policy is not to use IE6, so they're already breaking their own rules.

Just out of interest the company's 2% rule (although I reckon it should be a 1% rule, but that's an argument for another time) says that we have to support these browsers: IE 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0; Firefox 3.0, 3.5 and 3.6; Chrome 3.0 and 4.0; Safari 4.

I know you jest slightly, but I'm presuming the music company take an artist/band they think will make money and attempt to make them even more money whilst making themselves a bit on top. If you could do it all independentally then the bands would. Think of the equivalent of you filling in your tax return/paying an acccountant to do it for you.

However it has never been easier for musicians to go independent. It's cheaper than ever to get good recording technology. It's easier to distribute to masses through the internet. You can get your song on itunes. You can promote yourself in pubs/clubs. There have got to be far more people doing it now than there ever were, thus eroding some of what record label do.

However if you do go for the record label route, where you take half the hard work that you have to put in out of it (making the videos, setting up the recording studios, promoting the songs, albums, videos, tours, etc) then you can't complain when the record label tell you what they are going to do with them and tells you that you aren't going to make as much money as you would have before.

Plus you could probably replace the words 'musician' and 'record label' with the word 'journalist' and 'newspaper' in the paragraphs above then it wouldn't be any less true.