Simon Willison’s Weblog

Rupert to Internet: It’s War! Fascinating essay on Rupert Murchoch’s plans to charge for access to his company’s websites, by his biographer Michael Wolff.

# 9:16 am / michaelwolff, paywalls, rupertmurdoch, vanity-fair

Royal Mail: closing job search over data dispute while sacking workers. The Royal Mail have cease-and-desisted ernestmarples.com, a free postcode geocoding API which powers a number of UK open democracy sites. One of the sites is Job Centre Pro Plus, creating a perfect opportunity for an ORG press release.

# 3:39 pm / ernestmaples, freeyourdata, geocoding, openrightsgroup, postcodes, royalmail

Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash. A brilliant feat of engineering: Adobe worked around Apple’s “no runtime allowed” rules by writing a compiler front end for LLVM that compiles ActionScript 3 to ARM assembly code, and apparently ported the regular Flash drawing APIs as well.

# 9:15 pm / actionscript, adobe, compilers, flash, hacking, iphone, llvm