Technically, I spent most of this week on holiday… but things never go that smoothly in the life of a freelancer.
Yes, that’s an actual roadsign; the Kidman Way was something I passed twice on my way to and from Adelaide this week. I’ve passed it in other locations, but never driven all of it. One day…
Anyway, the week kicked off with a heavily contested piece on Kim Dotcom’s plan to remove piracy over at The Drum:
Online piracy: Dotcom’s mini plan for a mega problem: “The subject of a particularly vicious anti-copyright extradition battle with the United States, Kim Dotcom reckons he can stop online piracy. His arguments sound good, but not everything can be fixed with a single tweet, writes Alex Kidman.”
There are certain immutable laws online, and one of them is that whenever you write about piracy, it’ll quickly degrade into an argument over “theft”, “property” and “greedy Hollywood studios” — seemingly no matter what you write. This was no different.
I was on leave for most of the week, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t writing — although mostly at night when other things had been finished for the day. Most of those won’t see light of day for a while, but the end of the week also saw me re-emerge at the ABC’s Technology+Games site:
Telstra’s cheap 4G tablet and phone: are they worth it? “You’ll always hear a lot about the latest and greatest in technology; the products that fly high (and sometimes crash fast), but that’s not the entirety of the technology market; there are plenty of mid-range and entry-level products out there as well.”