The week in your words: Snooping, piracy and eBooks

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 Aug 2008 at 17:53

In a week that saw the Government decide to snoop on all our emails, a game developer wonder why people pirate his games, and an analyst reignite the great eBook debate, we take a look back to see what our readers have made of it all.

Government proposes email and internet tracking

This is not a good idea. In fact, in a long history of bad ideas that include chocolate pizzas and Gary McKinnon's choice of hobby, the Government's decision to store all our emails and browsing history in a massive database is possibly one of the worst ever.

Thankfully though, it'll only be accessible to local councils, health authorities, your best friend, employer, mum, sister and that slightly shifty bloke living at the end of the street who reads love poetry to his cat. Bizarrely, these strict security precautions weren't enough to earn the thumbs-up from sylme1.

"I am appalled, what can I do? What can we do? What can anyone do? There must be something we can do, isn't there?"

We recommend a cold shower and several Prozac. hjlupton was slightly more contemplative.

"The data storage costs will be astronomical, but how do they plan to analyse it all. Even with advanced keyword searching and tracking algorithms it will still need some serious power to chomp through that much data."

"Hang on, hang on," chimes in danielohare1. "There really is no need to worry! What we're talking about is a Government IT project. It will run billions over budget, and when it is finally delivered (seven years late) it won't actually work. Rest easy, my friends. Big Brother is blind."

Game developer reveals piracy survey results

PC Pro's recently invented and soon to be forgotten hero of the week award goes to Cliff Harris, an independent game developer who got so sick of people pirating his games that he asked them to email him and explain why they were doing it. And they did, by the dozens.

Apparently it has nothing to do with the ability to get things for free. Indeed not. No, it's the principal of the thing, you see. People would buy games except they cost actual money, and they have allergies to DVDs and capitalism.

"Whether he did this as a publicity stunt or as a genuine experiment to find out about piracy, I hope he sells loads of games and gets very rich," applauds jamesyld.

brumsta was equally impressed.

"I'm seriously tempted to buy one of his games just for him being so sensible about the whole thing. Anyone who removes DRM is alright in my book. I think I'll try the Democracy 2 demo first. If only all IP rights holders were like him."

But cheysuli didn't think acclaim, success and wealth was enough reward for writing a blog post.

"Now all we need is to make this man head of Electronic Arts. Wouldn't that be a revolution?"

Kindle "becoming iPod of the book world"

That's the opinion of a US analyst who got all giddy at the thought of a library in the palm of his hand and gleefully predicted that Amazon's Kindle eBook reader would sell in the hundreds of thousands, cheerfully ignoring the fact the Amazon has only made twelve.