Tag archive: George Orwell

Is Britain turning into a government surveillance state? That would seem to be the implication in annual report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner, which states that in 2008 authorities made over half a million requests to intercept communications, up 44% on two years before. That’s 1,400 e-mail and phone calls accessed every day, or the correspondence of one in 78 British adults. The report was made public by the… Read More

In a move that may not be so much surprising as it is straightforward, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has flat-out apologized for deleting illegally sold copies of George Orwell's 1984 and other novels from user's Kindles without permission. “Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles,” Bezos wrote in a Kindle support forum posting.|”It is wholly… Read More

Writer George Orwell wrote about the overweening power of Big Brother in his prophetic novel, 1984, probably never dreaming how close to the truth he’d come. Bur Amazon has brought the reality of 1984 one step closer. They’ve deleted two Orwell titles, 1984 and Animal Farm, from Kindles – even from the units of those who’d bought the books, at the request of the publisher. Unsurprisingly, customers aren’t… Read More

iriver has revved up its T10 portable media player: the diminutive units now sport a 2 GB memory capacity, and now offer direct support for spoken word content from Audible.com—and also ship with and offer for a free selected Audible.com book download. The iriver T10 is a PlaysForSure-compatible flash-based digital media player offering up to 45 hours of music playback time on a single AA battery. The T10 supports music subscription… Read More