Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’m back from my every-few-years journey to Nelson, Canada, my hometown. Back to 1970′s levels of technology, too–not that the town isn’t wired, it is, and wirelessed, too, though coverage in the mountains is spotty; I understand there are now people from Vancouver settling there and telecommuting. But my mother’s house has neither computer, nor [...]
This is the most embarrassingly clueless critique of network neutrality regulations I’ve seen in months. Music lawyer Chris Castle explains that the real reason that copyleftists like Larry Lessig are pushing network neutrality regulations is to ensure that ISPs don’t discriminate against peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. In addition to being riddled with technical errors (A VPN [...]
Incidentally, Specter’s op-ed demonstrates a shocking level of deference to presidential authority that strikes me as wholly inconsistent with our constitutional tradition: The negotiations with administration officials and the president himself were fierce. The president understandably rejected a statutory mandate to submit his program to FISC, on the grounds that such a mandate could weaken [...]
The Washington Post has a good editorial on Sen. Specter’s proposal (which he defended here) that would effectively legalize the NSA spying program and others like it: Under the Supreme Court’s decades-old understanding, presidential power is at its lowest ebb when the president is acting contrary to the will of Congress, and at its zenith [...]
There are some interesting comments that you might have missed in response to James Gattuso’s post last week about VoIP quality and network neutrality. Mike Masnick takes him to task for reading more into the Brix report than is merited. Brix CTO Kaynam Hedayat notes that his company doesn’t take a position on neutrality regualtions, [...]
The European Commission has taken a break from trying to re-design Microsoft’s software just long enough to get excited about DVDs. According to this report, “European Commission antitrust officials are probing the licensing strategies of two rival new generation DVD developers, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.” Given that competition is fierce among rival DVD developers, [...]
There’s an interesting discussion going on at Freedom to Tinker about the interaction among the DMCA, DRM, and contract law. After David Robinson painted a stark dichotomy between legal restrictions on the freedom to tinker (such as the DMCA) or legally mandatory tinkering rights, I pointed out a middle ground: that the law should neither [...]
I suppose you could argue that a 37-year-old father of two shouldn’t still be playing video games, but I love ‘em and just can’t give them up. I’ll probably still be playing when I’m 80 inside a virtual holodeck down in some lame Florida retirement community. (God I hope my Golden Years are that exciting). [...]
Corey Doctorow has a good article on the DMCA on Information Week: The DMCA makes the kind of reverse-engineering that’s commonplace in most industries illegal in copyright works. For example, in the software industry, it’s legal to reverse-engineering a file-format in order to make a competing product. The reason: The government and the courts created [...]
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Friendster has been granted a patent on social networking software. (Not surprisingly, Techdirt beat the Journal by three weeks) The patent in question is # 7,069,308, [...]
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.
