Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Well, another four months have passed since I last asked this question, but let me pose it again: Where exactly is the FCC’s Video Competition Report and why is it taking so long to get it out the door? It wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain Chairman Ahab still trying to get his [...]
Susan Crawford worries about the implications of Comcast’s bandwidth cap: Comcast sees a future in which people use the internet to send a few emails or look at a few web pages. They don’t want people watching HD content from other sources online, because that doesn’t fit their business model. So rather than increase capacity, [...]
Read Recently: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. A remarkable and very non-technological story. Also: Most of John Dupre’s book Human Nature and the Limits of Science. This turns out to be a critique of two models of human nature, one derived from evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, and the other derived [...]
The Federal Communications Commission picks winners and losers, which is why we ought to get rid of it. During the chairmanship of Reed E. Hundt, the losers were incumbent phone companies, whom Hundt considered too Republican. Now it is a cable company, who some consider too Democratic. The FCC issued an order last week concluding that Comcast [...]
Stephen Schultze is an up-and-coming technology policy analyst who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He is also finishing up his Masters of Science in Comparative Media Studies up at MIT. He’s been kind enough to stop by here at the TLF on occasion and comment on [...]
Bruce Schneier has a very good op-ed on the Transportation Security Administration’s airport security programs in the Los Angeles Times today. The winner line: “That’s the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.” In fairness, security is hard. By their nature, federal agencies aren’t smart and nimble. I [...]
Over at Ars, Ben Kuchera has a review of Ask.com’s redesign of its web portal for kids, AskKids.com. It’s a great new addition to the growing list of safe seach tools and web portals geared toward younger surfers. I’m also a big fan of KidZui, the new browser for kids that provides access to over [...]
As I said in my last post, Lindberg uses a number of computer metaphors to explain legal concepts. Here’s one I thought was particularly clever: The shortcut in Figure 5-1 [a screenshot of the Firefox shortcut on a Windows desktop] is not the Firefox web browser itself. Rather, this icon is associated with a shortcut, [...]
In-flight Internet access is finally starting to be rolled out by some carriers, and as they do so the inevitable question of what to do about objectionable material is already being debated. Surprisingly, many airlines have decided to not filter in-flight Internet access but instead rely on “peer pressure and the presence of flight attendants,” [...]
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.
