Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Someone has figured out how to bypass the AACS copy protection scheme on the new HD-DVD format. HD-DVD players have been on the market since March, so this encryption scheme survived for approximately 8 months. The only thing that’s surprising about this is that it took so long. I believe that in theory, the HD-DVD [...]
It seems that AT&T has made a 2-year network neutrality promise in order to get its merger with Bell South approved. The Los Angeles Times approves: In order to win approval from the Federal Communications Commission for its $84.5-billion buyout of BellSouth, the reconstituted Ma Bell agreed Thursday to not offer for two years “any [...]
I don’t know about the legal merits, but as a policy matter, this seems like a terrible decision: A judge ruled Friday that congressional aspirant Christine Jennings has no right to examine the programming source code that runs the electronic voting machines at the center of a disputed Southwest Florida congressional race. Circuit Judge William [...]
Related to the previous post on online communities’ supposed narcissism, a reader emailed me the following: What’s particularly delicious is that just before I read this post I was browsing Penny Arcade, which seems like exactly the kind of shallow commercial endeavor Siva is decrying–it’s a webcomic about video games, after all. And what do [...]
Siva Vaidhyanathan has a puzzling article up at MSNBC complaining about–well, I’m not actually sure what he’s complaining about: Google, for instance, only makes money because it harvests, copies, aggregates, and ranks billions of Web contributions by millions of authors who unknowingly grant Google the right to capitalize, or “free ride,” on their work. Who [...]
PJ Doland, TLF’s webmaster and occasional contributor, has come up with what strikes me as a really clever idea: Almost two years ago, in an attempt to combat the rising problem of comment spam, Google unveiled a new HTML attribute: rel=”nofollow” By including that attribute in hyperlinks, website administrators direct search engines not to give [...]
There are all sorts of year-end / best-of / Top 10 lists being put together right now, but I haven’t seen anyone offer up a “Most Important Tech Policy Developments of 2006″ list. Geez, isn’t everyone else on the planet as interested in this nerdy stuff as we are?! Anyway, I’d don’t have a top [...]
I’ve linked to several Paul Graham essays in the past. His new article on inequality isn’t especially technology related, but it’s extremely good, so I’m going to quote it anyway: Because of the circumstances in which they encounter it, children tend to misunderstand wealth. They confuse it with money. They think that there is a [...]
In a few of my previous essays, I’ve been wondering about the future of virtual reality worlds and specifically how property rights might get defined within those worlds. Alan Sipress of the Washington Post penned an excellent story yesterday on this subject which I thought I’d bring to your attention. In his lengthy front-page story, [...]
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.
