faulker031

Sex sells. And sex really sells in the media business. With their profitability in free-fall, newspaper businesses especially are always on the look out for a salacious front page story to help them grab some precious market share. Unfaithful soccer stars "playing away from home", celebrity match-ups and break-ups, trysts with prostitutes, or accusations of sexual assault are all highly newsworthy, especially at the tabloid end of the market. But recent events in the UK and elsewhere have led many to question whether the sex lives of celebrities can be afforded some degree of privacy protection from an intrusive media, or whether in the interests of press freedom, and the growing uncontrollability on online social media "reporting", they are simply fair game. In the last few weeks the Ryan Giggs super-injunction affair in the UK has brought these issues to a head. Why all the excitement? Well until a few days ago, Giggs, one of the UK's best known soccer players...

For those of our readers who don’t live in North America one of the news lines on major media outlets including CNN or The New York Times last weekend will sound rather quaint. Last Saturday (21 May), based on the predictions of the American Radio Broadcaster Harold Camping thousands of people on this side of the Atlantic were expecting the ‘rapture’, i.e. the disappearance of all ‘true’ Christians to heaven and the judgement day for all the rest of us. The absurdity of what sounds like a weird hallucination of a 89-year old zealot however did not stop a remarkable number of followers to take his, allegedly, biblical calculations dead seriously. People dropped their university education and their jobs in the face of the world’s imminent end, or invested all their retirement savings into alerting the world to this event. As we know by now, it was of course all a big hoax. Now we refer to this not so much as to dissect the insanity or validity of religious beliefs (though that’s a d...

The debut this week of   Google's new web-only Chromebook laptop , coming hot on the heels of Sony's massive data security breach just a few weeks ago suggests that data security is becoming increasingly critical for the success of technology companies. Google, no stranger to accusations over infringements of privacy, is upping the ante with the release of a computer that, rather than running software and storing files on its own hard drive, will instead rely predominantly on cloud computing. Yes, that means everything that you'd usually keep stored on your laptop will actually be held somewhere in a vast data center run by Google ... and of course, everything that you do can be tracked and recorded because you're signed-in and doing it online. Although the Chromebook itself may not become quite the challenger to Microsoft and their Windows operating system that Google hopes it will be, the shift to cloud computing (which anyone using Picasa, Google Docs, Dropbox or num...

What a couple days we had! First a Royal Wedding watched by half of the Globe. Then Obama’s capture of Osama. And finally, for us here in Canada, an election with a scary winner. Welcome to the world of ambiguity. Wills & Kate look like a nice couple and less fake than most of what has been on display by the British Royals in the last decades. But all this pomp, glitter and archaic ceremony? It’s 2011,folks, wake up! But we still preferred the ecstatic crowds Friday a week ago in London to those in Washington last week Sunday night. A middle-ages inquisition ceremony could not have been jollier - or should we say - barbaric. Osama bin Laden? Certainly a person that has some things to answer for. But do we buy Obama’s ‘brought to justice’ rhetoric? After all, according to many Bin Laden and his movement was largely an American creation in the first place. And then the Canadian election: the Bonsai-George-Double-U Stephen Harper has now a solid majority. He will ‘ Americanize’ the c...