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Drew WilsonDrew Wilson didn't necessarily choose to be a journalist, journalism pretty much chose him. His career started on another website when the head writer decided to take a vacation. He was amongst a small handful of carefully selected users to fill in the roll as a temporary writer. Given his educational experience in the art of writing, the journalism style was easy to get in to. His first article appeared September 2nd, 2005. After the temporary position was over, his writing skills were valued enough for the head writer to have him on as a permanent writer. His writing career on that site would turn in to a position of just over two years. With his newly discovered journalism skills, Drew Wilson took his skills in to the offline world just days after becoming a permanent writer. He appeared in various columns in different newspapers under different pen names. At one point, he broke the record for longest running columnist in one newspaper. Many readers and staff members alike praised him for writing provocative and insightful pieces on issues like copyright, the internet and free speech - issues that would otherwise be considered boring by the average person. Success pretty much grew over his first few months and by the time his career was one year old, his articles made semi-regular appearances on social news sites like Digg and Slashdot. He earned exclusive interviews with several entities such as the CPCC, CIPPIC, the TV Underground and several others. The page views counters kept climbing and climbing, but his career was only beginning. By January of 2007, Drew Wilson made a major step forward in his career by joining ZeroPaid. From there, his success only kept growing. He was able to get interviews with ThePirateBay, Open Rights Group, Russel McOrmond, and the Pirate Party of Canada. His previous records of 50,000 page views quickly became part of his more distant past with new records climbing all the way up to 300,000 page views on a single article. Drew Wilson's insights into different issues has allowed him to see many things others miss. While many thought OiNK was invulnerable, Wilson spotted a breach in its security. When others were only focusing on US stories, Wilson was able to forecast issues occurring on the international stage (i.e. ACTA). His ability to look at different issues objectively as well as find big news happening in areas barely being on the radar by other p2p journalists, have earned him the position of being one of the most well known journalists of all time in spite of his disadvantage of being a writer since 2005 (many writers wrote prior to 2000) His insights were honed particularly when he delved into his more creative side and produced electronic music. With close to one third of a million downloads to his "Frozen IceCube" name, Drew Wilson would become one of the only P2P news writers who is also a music producer. "Sometimes, it's one thing to talk about the process of music as it relates to file-sharing," Drew Wilson said, "but it's quite another to actually have first hand experience in the creative process - to really know what it's all about. That has had an impact on my writing skills on an intellectual level and allowed me to understand what it's like to be an artist personally." His artist background made him stand out amid other p2p writers because he can legitimately view issues from an artistic standpoint and not just a consumer standpoint. Drew Wilson commented, "It's sometimes amusing when people read my stuff and say, 'you have no idea what it's like to be an artist scraping by' because I can simply respond by saying, 'as a matter of fact, I am an artist myself, and yes, I know what it's like.'" Drew Wilson also has a style that allows him to listen to anyone including those whom he personally disagrees with. He believes that even if there are personal issues with arguments being made by someone, there should always be time on the floor for opposing views in the interest out of fairness. With roughly five years of experience in the field of p2p and technology news and a refreshing insight into the issues, Drew Wilson's success seems to keep trending upwards. He's made an invaluable contribution to ZeroPaid and is quite content to helping ZeroPaid keep on a successful path. Among his most recent successes was the hugely successful articles on ASCAPs war on free culture which earned him three appearances on Slashdot in the span of a week. Remnants from his series of interviews reverberated on other sites big and small for months after. Wilson added, "News writing is just something I enjoy doing and it's something that has been going on for so long, that it's hard to see if I'd ever leave this scene." |
Have you been getting those calls from people working in a call center from what sounds like India? You know, those people who claim to be from either the “Computer Maintenance Department” or the “Windows Technical Team” who then instruct you to go to your computer? Tell the select minority of people who would fall [...]
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While over one hundred thousand websites and millions of people were taking a stand against a potential American censorship by copyright regime thanks to SOPA and PIPA, ZeroPaid’s very own Drew Wilson, for the first time, has officially become a victim of censorship by copyright. The BBC is reporting that one-click hoster MegaUpload was shut [...]
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It all started with a question over a simple game accessory. Now, the story has propelled one PR firm into a spotlight so fast, it has been extremely hard to keep track of all the updates. It should be a PR firms dream come true, but it has become exactly the opposite. Public Relations (PR) [...]
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SOPA is getting one step closer towards final passage. This has many users nervous. Now, it seems, a very predictable development is occurring, users are generating IP address lists to bi-pass DNS censorship. DNS censorship could soon be a reality in the US. If a company or government entity choose to make a website disappear, [...]
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SOPA heads for a vote tomorrow. There’s no question what kind of damage it could do to internet companies, users of the internet, jobs and the economy within the United States. Drew Wilson offers a perspective on what SOPA means as a citizen of a country outside the United States. BoingBoing is noting that today [...]
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A few months ago, there was some fanfare about an alternative to the OpenSource personal productivity suite OpenOffice.org. This split project is known as LibreOffice. ZeroPaid decided to take a look at this software and gather some first impressions. Personal office suites are pretty much a staple of the personal computer. If you want to [...]
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We’ve discussed the PROTECT-IP Act at length here at ZeroPaid. While we have plenty of ways of examining the PROTECT-IP Act, we’ve decided to talk to Andrew Lewman, the Executive Director of Tor Project, about Tor, and the PROTECT-IP Act. There’s been plenty of discussion about the PROTECT-IP Act. One way we’ve examined it is [...]
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We’ve been testing, prodding and, well, having a perfectly good excuse to play some video games for the last two weeks. If you wondered how to play some of those oldschool video games on a computer, you’ve come to the right article. We’ve compiled a list of 6 emulators that can allow you to play [...]
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One of the criticisms of copyright laws has, for some time, been that the punishment is far too severe for the crime being committed. This debate is nothing new and it seems to be heating up in Europe right now. One French news site decided to compare the penalties of file-sharing to the penalties of [...]
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Privacy while surfing can be serious business for a number of web surfers. Some use a number of tools like NoScript to block unwanted scripts on websites they visit. This can help stop websites from tracking who that user is that visit that webpage, thus enhancing their privacy. This guide will show you how to [...]
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A man from the Netherlands is being sued by RealNetworks for linking to a freeware application. The application, RealAlternative, is considered by some to be a competitive product to software from RealNetworks. RealNetworks alleges that the software in question is infringing on its trademarks and is demanding the accused hand over all computer equipment in [...]
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It almost sounds silly that someone could possibly salvage the PROTECT IP Act at this point in time. Still, that doesn’t stop some people from trying to pass off the PROTECT IP act as something that would actually do anything at all to stop piracy. We’d like to respond to this opinion with some counter-arguments [...]
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We’ve been covering the technological side of the UK riots for some time now. After all that has happened to date, it seems a new study has surfaced in France that might serve against Prime Minister David Cameron should he try to go through and censor social media. Last week, UK Prime Minister David Cameron [...]
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A report has surfaced that has received a fair bit of attention. The report suggests that Canada is facing a piece of internet surveillance legislation that would pretty much eliminate all due process. Naturally, this is of concern to us because we are concerned about privacy related stories, so we took a look at the [...]
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When it comes to internet connection speeds, ISPs often advertise some blazing fast speeds – sometimes at a fairly cheap rate. Unfortunately, a lot of these deals come with a very big string attached to it – bandwidth caps. In response, we here at ZeroPaid have decided to offer some helpful tables that should show [...]
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He’s one of thousands in the lawsuit campaign against file-sharers, but he seems to be an unlikely candidate. He’s legally blind and too busy with his personal life to secure his WiFi connection. Unfortunately for him, he’s also unable to afford to fight the case and might be forced to settle anyway. For years, we [...]
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The UK riots these days is marked by several high profile arrests. Now, the UK justice system is no doubt jam packed with riot cases in the midst of thousands of arrests taking place across the county. Now, some sentences are emerging. One man was sentenced to four years in prison for setting up a [...]
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HTML (HyperText Markup Language) has played a key roll in web development over the years. In this guide, we will show you how to start with nothing and code some very basic HTML pages using nothing more than notepad which comes pre-installed in Windows. While HTML is very old in internet years, it is still [...]
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What started as a group of people wanting to protest has become an all out war over censorship. After earlier threats were made by Anonymous, it appears as though Anonymous did make good on their threat to target BART. We’ve been following the story about BART and censorship. It was sparked by the death of [...]
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You know your internet censorship plans are too strict when China praises you for it. I’ll say this right off the bat, if someone told me one month ago that I would end up writing a headline like that, I would have told them they were insane. I am simply stunned that it has come [...]
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