Contributors A-Z | Top contributors | Edit profile

Christopher Lazley

Chris Lazley is interested in how technology affects the way people relate to one another across all kinds of contexts. He studied English and Law at the University of Cape Town, spent some time in Berlin, and then worked as a copyeditor and business journalist. Chris finds most of his inspiration for writing while road-running and drinking good coffee.

RECENT POSTS

• Privacy and competition: Interrogating Google

  Google’s been on the chopping block a lot lately with suggestions that it promotes anti-competitive behavior by serving its own self-interest and robbing consumers of alternative search and related services.It seems to be part of a broader move by many governments to ensure that massive digital conglomerates like Google, Apple and Facebook are held accountable for the data they collect each time we switch on a mobile phone or perform an internet search. Do we need specific legislation to ...

• Online behaviour tracking and the erosion of your privacy

  Marketing and media companies are always looking for innovative ways to gauge consumer behaviour and activity online. It affects how accurately they're able to market their products according to age, gender, cultural demographics, and geography. There's a fine line, however, between savvy market research and bypassing the principles of consumer privacy.Many technology companies make it their mission to develop new technologies that practically deauthorise user choice about what is tracked and, even more subversively, how it's tracked.A recent ...

• Myspace is in a pretty bad space at the moment

  We know now that the Myspace empire has gone bad. It hasn’t busted, but it’s come damn close. And if history teaches us any lessons about empires, it is that they are neither immutable nor invulnerable.In figures alone, Myspace acutely instantiates this truth: in 2007, it was valued as high as US$12-billion; today, it’s just been sold to Specific Media for US$35-million. Ouch.Back in 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp acquired Myspace for US$580-million. At the time, Myspace’s ascent ...

• Jailed for Facebook: Be careful who you befriend

  Joanne Frail, a 40-year-old mother from Manchester, UK, was recently given eight months jail time for contempt of court. Her crime: engaging in Facebook conversations with Jamie Stewart, a defendant in a large-scale drugs trial in which Frail was a juror.According to a report in The Independent, when the Lord Judge handed down the sentence, all Frail could muster was a painful exclamation of "eight months!" before laying her head on the table in front of her and crying. ...

• Google ranks best in industry salaries — They’re also hiring

  In the digital revolution, few companies carry as much clout as Google. Although its physical headquarters can be found in Mountain View, California, the Google ideation is more than anything an approach to life, a way of doing things, a signifier of innovation of technological initiative and, according to yet another survey released recently, a very nice place to work, too, despite the bad fudge brownies.The survey, conducted by Payscale, reports that Google employees earn on average about 23 ...

• You just got served … via Facebook

  Most of us think of Facebook as a positive, fairly innocuous, tool for social engagement and peer-to-peer networking. But courts and lawmakers are increasingly seeing the potential of this platform for issuing legal summons where no other avenue of communication is viable or even possible.“There are people who exist only online,” Joseph Demarco, co-chair of the American Bar Association’s criminal justice cyber crime committee, told Bloomberg.com. It is these kinds of online-only individuals – itinerant workers who move ...

• Media piracy: You’re not as anonymous as you might think

  Enforcing statutory penalties on intellectual property infringements in the media industry is moving up a notch. In the US, a federal judge recently agreed to allow the US Copyright Group to force internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over the identities of at least 23 000 users who had sourced bootlegged copies of The Expendables via BitTorrent clients and file sharing.There’s of course no reason to target illicit downloads of The Expendables specifically, so the case seems more ...

• Faster fingers are making us weaker

  For the emergent generation of adolescents and pre-adolescents, at least in developed economies, constant high-speed internet access and online networking have become the very air they breathe. A new study, however, has some cautionary advice.The study, published in Acta Paediatrica, has renewed concerns about how digital life has led children off the playground and into the computer room… permanently. The study concludes that the average 10-year-old today is far weaker physically than his counterpart just a decade ago. His ...

• Yahoo! Freshens its mail client

  Yahoo is not asleep at the email wheel – it’s no longer the first pick it once was, but still manages to bring out new features and better functionality in it’s every-few-years update cycle. This iteration is a winner, although the best features need a premium subscription.I like Yahoo Mail, and in theory there are some 284-millions users who agree with me, though many users will admit to creating numerous alternate accounts from different service providers as a trial or ...

• China bans time travel

  The Chinese government recently announced its latest contraband: time travel. Or at least time travel as it’s depicted in fictional enterprises such as films and television.The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) cautioned filmmakers and producers that movies with time-travel thematics tend to “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.”Although China has not issued an outright ban as yet, its firm censorship laws in ...

• Read more articles... »