Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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, I consider Patent #6,988,138, “Internet-based education support system and methods,” issued in January to Blackboard Inc. According to CNet, the Software Freedom Law Center is challenging the patent’s validity. And it’s [...]
Joe at Techdirt makes an excellent point about government and monopolies: Here’s a story that hits on some of today’s themes of monopolistic behavior and keeping stuff off the internet. The Department of Justice has been given the go ahead to proceed with a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors, alleging that the group [...]
Yesterday, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Progress & Freedom Foundation filed joint comments in both the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Third Circuit Court of Appeals calling upon the courts to halt the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) recent over-zealous indecency enforcement activities. The cases are Fox Television Stations v. FCC (the [...]
This is odd. Apparently, the CIA has recently decided that access to its entire website will henceforth be encrypted using SSL–the encryption standard used by websites accepting your credit card number. They say this ensures that no one is able to impersonate the CIA website, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I [...]
CNET reports that Google has been contacted by cell phone carriers who don’t want their customers accessing Google Maps from their cell phones. One Google executive claims: “we’ve been getting notes from some of the telco carriers who are saying ‘look, you need to stop our customers from downloading this thing’.” If the report is [...]
Mike Masnick notes that Venezuela is ahead of the United States when it comes to adopting voter-verified paper trails for their electronic voting machines. Several commenters objected that given the level of corruption in Venezuela’s government, this doesn’t really mean anything: corrupt government officials can mis-count paper voting records as easily as electronic ones. I [...]
Last week, the EPA reversed course and said it will begin to regulate nanotechnology, specifically nanoparticles of silver used in washing machines. Now comes word that “Berkeley is proposing what a city official says would be the world’s first local regulation of nanomaterials,” according to the SF Chronicle. I love the rationale offered by the [...]
This week I appeared on C-SPAN’s weekly program “The Communicators” and discussed a wide variety of communications and media policy issues including: the outlook for telecom & media legislation in the new Democratic Congress, the First Amendment treatment of new media technologies, Net neutrality regulation and the need for universal service and spectrum policy reform. [...]
When are state and local lawmakers going to stop wasting taxpayer dollars with unnecessary regulatory enactments and fruitless lawsuits aimed at censoring video games? I ask because this week the video game industry added yet another slam dunk victory to its growing string of impressive First Amendment wins. For those of you keeping track at [...]
According to Congress Daily, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff “said today his department will ensure that the highest-risk urban areas have interoperable [public safety] communications equipment by the end of next year, and that all states have it by the end of 2008.” DHS has been under pressure from the incoming Democratic majority to do something [...]
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.
