Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Here’s the second and final in my series of World Cup technology stories. On the way back from Germany, we had an extended layover in Reykjavik, due to “technical reasons.” Oh, thank goodness. Wouldn’t want a delay due to sociological reasons. The time for the Round of 16 game between Portugal and Holland was drawing [...]
Those wacky Chinese officials are at it again. Apparently they’ve grown tired of just pestering those curious critters who type “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong” into their search engines. So, they’re upping the ante and going after anyone who reports on natural disasters, industrial accidents, or health and security hazards without prior state permission. Yes, [...]
[This essay builds on Friday's blog entry on "Social Networking and Child Protection."] At last week’s National Center for Missing and Exploited Children conference entitled “A Dialog on Social Networking Web Sites,” several law enforcement officials argued that expanded data retention mandates were needed to adequately police online networks and websites for potentially criminal activity. [...]
Ed Felten wraps up his excellent series on high-tech wiretapping by considering the risks of abuse created by the existence of pervasive wiretapping infrastructure: The best argument against content-triggered wiretaps is the risk of abuse. By “abuse” I mean the use of wiretaps, or information gleaned from wiretaps, illegally or for the wrong reasons. Any [...]
As Congress draws closer to passing significant telecommunications reforms, it’s clear that a larger issue serves as a backdrop to the hot topics of net neutrality, cable franchise reform, and municipal WiFi. That is, will the Internet be treated like telecommunications, or the other way around? New technologies have caused a convergence in the communications [...]
Yesterday I spoke at a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children conference entitled “A Dialog on Social Networking Web Sites.” It featured dozens of industry, technology, law enforcement and government experts discussing how to protect children on social networking sites. I spoke on the final panel of the day on “The Public Policy Challenges [...]
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week’s software patent was highlighted by last week’s ruling that Microsoft had to pay its holder $6.1 million. This is the relevant patent. None of the news stories I could find said [...]
Reading Jim Gattuso’s post about Google and network neutrality, it occurred to me that Eric Schmidt’s argument here only makes sense if we assume that the broadband companies are run by morons: Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody–no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional–has equal access. But the phone [...]
IPI has a new article up arguing that the DMCA shouldn’t be repealed because it would violate our treaty obligations. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly persuasive argument, given the amount of weight the United States carries in the international arena, and given that the anti-circumvention provisions of WIPO were inserted largely at the [...]
Could Google execs go to jail for bit discrimination? Theoretically, yes, according to a proposal by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Submitted as an amendment to the telecom bill now being marked up by the Senate Commerce Commitee, DeMint’s proposal would make it unlawful to “prioritize or give preferential or discriminatory treatment in the methodology used [...]
May 25, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
