Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Ars has an in-depth write-up of the Broadcast Treaty now wending its way through WIPO. Their conclusion: The most consistent criticism of the treaty is much broader than any of these specific worries. It’s a simple question: “why do we need this treaty at all?” As the CDT puts it, “proponents of the treaty have [...]
Venerated deregulator Alfred Kahn weighs in on “‘net neutrality” – the proposal to have Congress and the Federal Communications Commission decide the terms on which ISPs could provide service, and whom they could charge for what. Net neutrality regulation is advanced primarily by the political left. Here’s Kahn on his bona fides: I consider myself [...]
The blogosphere is abuzz with last week’s news that Oracle has decided to re-package Red Hat’s version of Linux and sell support for it at prices substantially lower than Red Hat’s own pricing. Here’s open-source skeptic Nick Carr’s take: Yesterday, Ellison announced that his company, Oracle, fully intends to eat the fruits of the labor [...]
Yesterday Ed Felten linked to a Washington Post story about Diebold’s hush-hush recall of 4700 AccuVote-TS voting machines last year. Apparently they had motherboard defects that caused some of them to randomly crash. As Felten explains today, the machines tended to crash at the most inconvenient time possible. He quotes a report on Maryland’s 2004 [...]
As a single, childless adult I dimly realized some years ago that children’s entertainment had taken a disturbing turn a while back. It had come to incorporate a tremendous amount of “caring and sharing” and safety propaganda, communitarianism distilled into the purest saccharine. Helping and teamwork are well enough, but they are not the only [...]
We’ve spent a lot of time here on the TLF discussing our reservations about age verification and data retention mandates. We object on many grounds, but privacy and data security concerns are typically at the top of our list. Government officials or others supporting mandatory data collection / retention always assure us that our personal [...]
CNN is running a story finding that people think government does too much. The gut-level feeling is supported by mind-numbing statistics: Discretionary spending grew from $649 billion in fiscal year 2001 to $968 billion in fiscal year 2005, an increase of $319 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. With the election just a week [...]
New York Times media business reporter Richard Siklos penned an excellent column yesterday entitled “In a Blurry World, Ownership Is Yesterday’s News.” “It is hard to find any public policy question that feels less relevant by the minute than whether one person or company should be permitted to own television stations and newspapers in the [...]
I’m in DC and attended Julian’s annual halloween party. This year’s theme was the “The Party of Death,” but although Ramesh Ponuru was invited, he was, alas, not able to make it. You can see pictures here. I was Waldo. You can also see a snowflake baby and a dead stem cell, two Steve Irwins, [...]
I have examined the CAPPS program and the fake boarding pass generator in a longish post over on Cato@Liberty. At the tail end, I say “The fake boarding pass generator does not create a new security weakness. It reveals an existing one. Though some people may want to, it’s important not to kill the messenger [...]
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.
