Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
What a delightful chapter title in Adam Shostack’s and Andrew Stewart’s new book, The New School of Information Security. Adam is a guy I’ve known for a lot of years now – somehow. He always seems to pop up in the places I go – both physically (at conferences and such) – and intellectually. He [...]
Bruce Owen, America’s preeminent media economist–with apologies to Harold Vogel, who at least deserves an honorable mention–has written another splendid piece for Cato’s Regulation magazine, this one entitled, “The Temptation of Media Regulation.” This latest essay deals primarily with the many fallacies surrounding so-called “a la carte” regulation of the video marketplace, and I encourage [...]
The New York Times casts its spotlight on the “Censored 11,” 11 racially-charged cartoons from the middle of the last century that have been unavailable to the public for decades. But despite repeated attempts to take them down, they keep popping up online. You can see some of them here, and the most notorious is [...]
In less than 36 hours, one of the most anticipated—and most demonized—games in years will hit the shelves. Grand Theft Auto IV, the “true” successor to the groundbreaking Grant Theft Auto III, has been the focus of intense criticism ever since being announced. But while GTA IV will undoubtedly be filled with extreme violence, it [...]
Every once in a while, a Slashdot post wanders out of the realm of the science/IT areas where the editors have the most expertise, and the results are often underwhelming. For example: “The bill to ban genetic discrimination in employment or insurance coverage is moving forward. Is this the death knell of private insurance? I [...]
Megan McCardle suggests that the Patriot Act, while bad, is hardly a harbinger of a police state. She points out, correctly, that American history is full of violations of civil liberties, some of them—the suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese during World War II—probably worse than anything the Bush [...]
This is an absolutely devastating review of Ubuntu: In recent years Linux has suffered a major set-back following the shock revelations form SCO Group, whose software had been stolen wholesale and incorporated into illegal distributions of Linux. For the past five years, the overwhelming effort of Linux developers has gone into removing SCO’s intellectual property [...]
Last week a scad of stories from Reuters to News.com covered the growing push for a “Do Not Track” registry similar to the “Do Not Call” list that serves to protect US households from mid-dinner sales calls. While I understand the concerns expressed by folks like Marc Rotenberg of EPIC and Jeff Chester of the [...]
I’ve been noticing recently that wi-fi connections are flakier than they used to be. It seems to me that from about 2001 to 2005, it was almost unheard-of for my home wi-fi connection to suddenly drop out on me. In the last year or two, it has seemed like this is an increasingly common occurrence. [...]
Dingel points to a paper (non-paywalled draft here) exploring the historical connection between the free trade movement and the movement for worldwide copyright harmonization: Free traders failed repeatedly for sixty years after the end of the Civil War to reduce the average tariff to its immediate prewar level. They failed despite making a case that, [...]
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.
