Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Via Patri Friedman, here’s a fascinating article on the people who write Wikipedia: I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version. Instead of counting edits, as [...]
I wish I could buy this guy a beer: A Wisconsin man who wrote “Kip Hawley is an Idiot” on a plastic bag containing toiletries said he was detained at an airport security checkpoint for about 25 minutes before authorities concluded the statement was not a threat. Ryan Bird, 31, said he wrote the comment [...]
I’ve written before that Chris Castle is a technically clueless lawyer whose blog specializes in juvenile and mean-spirited insults of his ideological opponents. He and I clearly don’t see eye to eye on a lot of copyright-related subjects. Yet it seems that even a stopped clock is right once in a while: I believe there [...]
This week, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen announced that his mouse brain-mapping project has finally been completed. This major undertaking arrives in tandem with other advances in medical technologies that will soon force political leaders to face difficult policy questions. Mapping a mouse’s brain is significant not only because mice share 90 percent of their genes [...]
I’ve finished The Long Tail. Here’s a final point from the book that I liked. He reminds us that in the early 80s, Hollywood priced the first generation of videotapes at about $75. The theory, he writes, was that this was what a typical family of five would spend on three or four visits to [...]
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 we return to the VoIP industry, which is rapidly becoming choked with patent litigation. One of the leading VoIP firms, Vonage, was sued by at least two companies this summer for [...]
Ars covers an FCC filing by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association concerning the uptake of CableCARDs. The CableCARD has not proven a hit with consumers, to put it charitably. So far, 200,000 have been deployed, out of 73 million households with cable TV service. That’s about a quarter of one percent. This is not [...]
Remember the digital TV converter box subsidy? Last July, the Department of Commerce released for comment some fairly sensible rules for administering the program, given the constraints set out by Congress. The deadline for public comments was this Monday, and–to no one’s surprise–quite a few commenters wanted more money. The broadcasters and TV manufacturers, for [...]
I hope the guys at Techdirt don’t mind me ripping off entire posts, because they’re too good, and too short, to excerpt: Sometimes on the internet, things break. With so many pieces of network gear between a user, their ISP and a content provider’s servers, it’s not unreasonable that something goes down, gets misconfigured, or [...]
As I write this, Ed Felten is testifying before the House Administration Committee on e-voting. He recommends better physical security features, a voter-verified paper audit trail, and greater involvement of computer security experts. These are all good recommendations. One recommendation he doesn’t make, unfortunately, is that we consider scrapping e-voting altogether. If there’s one message [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
