Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Slashdot user “flyingsquid” suggests why Blizzard has had such a winning streak in federal copyright cases: You, know, this could just be a coincidence, but a couple of weeks ago I was in Northrend and I ran into an orc named “JudgeCampbell”. He had some pretty sweet weapons and armor he was showing off, including [...]
Russ Roberts’s excellent EconTalk podcast had an especially good episode last week as he had Eric Raymond of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” fame on his show. ESR does a great job of explaining the economics of free software. And he offers a take on the network neutrality debate that is more reflexively hostile to [...]
Julian Sanchez at ArsTechnica delivers some unsettling news about the state of free speech in America’s education system: A federal court has rejected a former student’s First Amendment suit against school officials who punished her for calling them “douchebags” in a LiveJournal post. Right now, the scope of student rights to online speech is anything [...]
The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is delaying the Bush Administration plan to require federal contractors to use the E-Verify worker background check system. Criticizing the move, Lamar Smith (R-TX), ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee says, “It is ironic that at the same time President Obama was pushing for passage [...]
In at least two recent stories, the mainstream press are highlighting Obama administration slow-walking on transparency. Bloomberg recently filed suit against the Fed under the Freedom of Information Act to force disclosure of securities the central bank is taking as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans to banks. “The American taxpayer is entitled to know [...]
In the summer of 2000, while I was in college, I moved into a big house with 6 other guys. DSL was just coming on the market, and we were big nerds, so we decided to splurge on fast Internet access. Back then, “fast Internet access” meant a blazing fast (Update: 512k) DSL connection. We [...]
< p>Reminder: Next Wednesday, February 4th, the Cato Institute will host a book forum on David Post’s new book, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. Comments will come from Clive Crook, Chief Washington Commentator of the Financial Times and Senior Editor of The Atlantic Monthly; and Jeffrey Rosen, Professor of [...]
On the first full day of the new Obama administration, I wrote here, and later followed up, expressing regret that the Obama White House hadn’t ported the “Seat at the Table” program over from the transition. Change.gov published documents submitted to the transition on its Web site for public review and comment. Whitehouse.gov does not. [...]
The next several days feature a variety of upcoming events, both on broadband stimulus legislation, and on some of the broader issues associated with the Internet and its architecture. On Friday, January 30, the Technology Policy Institute features a debate, “Broadband, Economic Growth, and the Financial Crisis: Informing the Stimulus Package,” from 12 noon – [...]
Google has—as I noted it would last June—finally released (PCWorld, Google’s policy blog) its eagerly-awaited suite of tools available for free (of course) at MeasurementLab.net that allow users to monitor how their ISP might be tweaking (degrading, deprioritizing, etc.) their traffic—among other handy features. Huzzah! So, now that we have visibility into traffic management practices on a large [...]
January 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
