Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I almost choked on my morning coffee when I saw the headline last week that Novell and Microsoft announced a deal to make their software work together. As someone who once employed VMware to use Word on a machine running Linux OS, I have to say that I was both surprised and thrilled. And, as [...]
Techdirt points out an especially serious example of e-voting gone wrong: In one of the stories we spotted yesterday about e-voting glitches, it was amusing to see (at the very, very bottom) the idea that “no major problems” were reported for e-voting in Florida. Florida and Ohio, of course, are the two places where e-voting [...]
With this afternoon’s concessions of defeat by Senator George Allen and Conrad Burns, the GOP’s loss of the Senate is official. Tech policy played little role in this political earthquake, despite much early rhetoric by neutrality regulation supporters that it would be a big part of the debate. Yet, ironically, the final two dominoes to [...]
I’m getting a lot of calls from reporters this week asking about what the Democratic takeover means for technology policy issues and First Amendment matters. My answer on both counts: Not much. On the free speech front, the results of this election will probably have very little effect. Democrats and Republicans are now birds of [...]
Jim Harper persists in posting hist best stuff over at that other blog instead of here. Yesterday, he noted that one of the big losers in New Hampshire’s state legislative races was the REAL ID Act: Jeb Bradley was one of “several Washington officials . . . urging state senators to support Real ID” when [...]
The once and future chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, John Dingell, recently supported strong net neutrality regulation (to prevent “private taxation of the Internet”) and opposed cable franchise reform. Now he has warned the FCC that it ought to postpone consideration of the AT&T-BellSouth merger until next year. These positions suggest Dingell [...]
Via Luis, here’s a good analysis of the ominous aspect of the Microsoft-Novell deal: This is not a religious argument about open source, it’s a matter of respect for a community that works together, and the wishes of creators. If I write something and put it under the GPL, then I want it under the [...]
Reader Steve R. points out David Pogue’s scathing review of the Zune: PlaysForSure bombed. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex–something of a drawback when the system is called PlaysForSure. “Yahoo might change the address of its D.R.M. server, and [...]
PJ, our webmaster, has installed the Akismet comment spam filter, which appears to have largely solved our spam problem. Which is a good thing, because we got about 1000 spam comments in the last 24 hours. Before, a couple hundred per day were getting through. So far today, it’s been catching all of them. The [...]
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.
