Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
According to Investor’s Business Daily, several major cable companies have launched an advertising start-up called Canoe Ventures that is developing the technology to record and analyze cable subscribers’ viewing metrics. As part of this plan, Comcast is reportedly building a “500 TB TV Warehouse” to store the aggregate habits of its 16.8 million digital cable [...]
Over at Ars, Matt Lasar has a piece about the need for better FCC indecency complaint statistics. He has been monitoring the wild fluctuations in indecency complaint tallies in recent years and wonders: whether the agency’s indecency/obscenity statistics reflect spontaneous viewer response to the level of erotic/linguistic friskiness on TV or solely on the power [...]
A regular communist—I mean, columnist—for the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper, asks in an op/ed: “Is a cellphone a basic human right?” Shockingly, her answer is… yes! She’s green with envy that, for once, the U.S. has out-socialism-ed Canada (the land of polite, democratic socialism) with SafeLink Wireless, “a program that provides eligible people with a free [...]
If you’re in the DC area (and not at Cato’s important counter-terrorism conference that starts this morning) I hope you’ll consider attending two DC-area events I’ll be participating in. First, tomorrow I’ll be tag-teaming with fellow TLFer Jerry Brito to give a Hill Briefing on network neutrality. The talk will be designed for Hill staffers, [...]
The NYT reports that Google has recently disclosed in an SEC filing that it had 1 million advertisers as of 2007. Some analysts suggest that Google’s growing scale will lead to higher ad prices: Ben Schachter, an analyst with UBS, said he expects the current number is likely to be between 1.3 million and 1.5 [...]
PFF’s President Ken Ferree wrote a great piece over on the PFF blog (reprinted below) calling for Obama to stay the course on the DTV transition. Always quick with the bon mot, Ken makes particularly apt use of a very funny anecdote from David Hackett Fischer’s excellent new biography of Samuel Champlain, the fascinating founder of Quebec. * [...]
Here’s an excerpt from my column at TNW today: Currently, 60 percent of Facebook’s teen users have implemented privacy controls, compared with only 25 percent to 30 percent of adult users. This is an interesting statistic, given the common assumption that members of the younger generation don’t care who sees their data. It is probably [...]
You’d have to get your picture taken at the DMV. “It’s stressful and degrading and my nose and chin look shiny,” says a one-time TLF blogger (not pictured here). The woman pictured here was arrested for driving without a license. Perhaps because she didn’t want to get her picture taken at the DMV. Say No [...]
Adam Thierer noted in mid-December that the FCC was considering allowing the experimental use of cellphone jammers in prison. The FCC just issued (PDF) a Special Temporary Authorization to allow the DC Department of Corrections to test a cell phone jamming technology. This technology sounds like an excellent solution to a serious problem: The illicit use [...]
Is $1,200,000,000,000.00. That’s the expected 2009 Federal budget deficit. Since the current Federal debt is estimated at a “mere” $10.6 trillion, this means that we’re expected to add nearly 9% in a single year to a debt accumulated over 233 years (since 1774). This number also amounts to more than 8% of the U.S. economy. [...]
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.
