Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Yesterday, the Senate unanimously approved legislation to delay the transition to digital TV to June 13. The House is expected to follow suit as soon as this afternoon. Under current law, television stations would cease broadcasting analog signals on February 18, potentially inconveniencing dozens of Americans who rely on over-the-air signals and have yet to [...]
Adam raises some important questions below about the legislation introduced in Congress to ban silent cell phone cameras. Like many things Congress does, I wonder if the proposed solution might end up being worse than the perceived problem. Is cell phone camera voyeurism actually a serious problem in the U.S.? Or is this just another problem being [...]
Only last week, President Barack Obama issued a new government-wide policy on FOIA requests mandating a “presumption in favor of disclosure” and directed his OMB to get to work fast on an “Open Government Directive,” with specific mandates for agencies, that achieves “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” That task is a tall order [...]
I’m intrigued by this new bill that Rep. Peter King has introduced to prevent video voyeurism. H.R. 414, the “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act” finds that “children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.” To remedy this problem, King’s “Phone Predator [...]
This article focuses on cookies–not the cookies you eat, but the cookies associated with browsing the World Wide Web. There has been public concern over the privacy implications of cookies since they were first developed. But to understand them , you must know a bit of history.
Don Marti has some choice words for Braden’s post on Scott McNealy and government open source contracting: Let’s say that one of those Rent-to-Own stores that sells electronics under a confusing, one-sided contract got a big idea. Hey, we’re going to get a piece of the government market for LCD monitors! Wait a minute, though. [...]
The Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) is a group that does some good things to mobilize gamers to fight misguided regulation of video games. I greatly appreciate their tireless efforts to fight stereotypes and myths about games and gamers, and to specifically counter the hysteria about video games that we sometimes see in the press, and [...]
(HT The 463) Forget the sex offenders on MySpace, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (and C|Net reporter Elinor Mills) should be investigating reincarnation on Facebook!! Terrorism too! Seriously, they appear to have been completely taken in by a joke MySpace page.
The Isle of Man may soon implement a “blanket license” whereby Manx broadband users could download as much music as they like in exchange for paying a “fee” (also known as a “tax,” since this would be non-optional) to their ISP that would supposedly be as low as $1.38/month. The Manx proposal sounds a lot like how SoundExchange administers [...]
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.
