Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I was frank about Google miscontruing privacy the other day. I’ll be frank about DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff likewise missing the mark in his recent Leadership Journal post, “Privacy and Security.” Like Google’s Peter Fleischer, Chertoff calls privacy a “right” – in this case, a “fundamental right.” (Two data points is a trend!: People call [...]
Minor abuses at the FCC, such as the one mentioned in my last post, warrant at least investigating how the FCC assesses fines, if not looking for ways to reform the FCC’s governance of broadcasting. But when we look at the incredible distortion created by the central planning of broadcast spectrum the case of dramatic [...]
Indirectly, anyway. They are members of the Information Technology Association of America, which continues to plead lamely for federal funding of the REAL ID Act, the United States’ moribund national ID law. I’d been considering writing about an opinion poll purporting to favor REAL ID that ITAA has been touting this week, but mostly thought [...]
Seems as though the FCC can’t get enough fining done within the bounds of its legal fining regime and is now fining arbitrary 3rd parties related to broadcasts. According to Yahoo! News: The Federal Communications Commission is proposing a $4,000 fine against Comcast Corp. for airing a pitch for a sleep aid without telling viewers [...]
A new survey shows that “OPEN SAUCE developers are staying away from the latest GPLv3 licence in droves.” Well, sort of. The survey says that six percent of developers are using the license now, which actually seems like a reasonable number given that the license was released less than three months ago. More ominously for [...]
Playspan dubs itself “The Game Industry’s First Publisher-Sponsored In-Game Commerce Network.” What does that mean? To put it more simply, welcome to Wall Street for World of War Craft. In the pre-web world, what I like to call “The Before Time,” people’s puny brains used to be limited to thinking of products as physical objects [...]
Online social networking sites are again in the news. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Monday his office is investigating Facebook for allegedly not keeping young users safe from sexual predators and not responding to user complaints. Cuomo joins fellow AGs Roy Cooper from North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut among activist AGs parading [...]
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Ben Charny has an article discussing why “Free Wi-Fi [is] Still an Elusive Goal.” He notes: The same forces slowing development of single-city wireless Internet networks are now overwhelming their supersize versions that cover thousands of square miles and scores of municipalities. A telling example of the malaise can be [...]
Here’s conservative Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on the REAL ID Act: . . . REAL ID, that’s a huge mistake. It’s putting a burden on a state that should not be the state’s function, which is to provide the frontline of national security defense at the hands of a DMV worker at a state [...]
May 16, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
