Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
A great piece by Dahlia Lithwick on the allegedly ticking terrorist time bomb: It’s true enough that FISA requires a sober update to account for technological changes since it was drafted in 1978, but the PAA wasn’t sober and it wasn’t justified. Now we must also contend with the added insult of the president’s demand [...]
When I’ve seen “Free Public Wi-Fi” ad-hoc networks, I always assumed that it was some kind of honey pot. But it turns out that Occam’s Razor applies: it’s just Windows being retarded: It appears to be a manifestation of a feature of Windows that I wrote about earlier this year. When Windows connects to a [...]
“How many old media companies would you need to stack on top of one another to equal the value of Google?” That question was put to me last year by a reporter who was interviewing me for a story he was doing about the future of traditional media operators. I was explaining to him how [...]
My Cato colleague (and sometime Center for Freedom and Prosperity doyenne) Dan Mitchell caught me coming off the elevator the other day and told me he didn’t believe my recent post about Bull’s Blood and Estonian singing. “What, you think I made up a trip to Eger, Hungary?” “No, I don’t believe you had a [...]
Obama snags the crucial xkcd endorsement. And for good reasons. I was rooting for Bill Richardson, but with him out of the race Obama’s probably the least-bad option on the Democratic side. And he’s got smart, tech-savvy lefties like Larry Lessig and Tim Wu on his side. It would be cool if they wound up [...]
You might have seen Roger Pilon’s recent op-ed defending the Bush administration’s stance in the FISA debate. As you might imagine, I have a somewhat different take on the issue, as I discuss at the Cato blog: The dispute is over what safeguards are appropriate to ensure that the intelligence community’s surveillance activities here in [...]
Tim’s thoughtful analysis of the slow adoption of the IPv6 protocol turned my mind to a long-standing topic of interest: the illusory value of elegance in technology. A corollary: In technology, as in life, revolutions are rightly rare and usually only visible in hindsight. The IPv6 transition is a good example of the difference between [...]
One of the recurring themes in libertarian discussions of patent and copyright law is the question of whether these institutions are better thought of as a form of property rights or as government monopolies. Personally I think that the property metaphor misleads more than it illuminates, and so I tend to avoid discussing the subject [...]
Here’s the FISA portion of the SOTU: One of the most important tools we can give them is the ability to monitor terrorist communications. To protect America, we need to know who the terrorists are talking to, what they are saying, and what they are planning. Last year, the Congress passed legislation to help us [...]
Good for them. Democrats in the Senate have rejected a Republican-backed cloture vote that would have forced an up-or-down vote on a Senate wiretapping bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom companies. Encouragingly, only 48 senators voted for cloture, suggesting that the vote on the final bill might be close. It remains to be seen [...]
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.
