Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
ACT will host an event on open government tomorrow morning that will feature TLF’s own Jerry Brito and Andrew Plemmons Pratt of the Center for American Progress. I’ll moderate and tee-up the discussion. We’ll focus on how governments can move from merely posting information online (e-government) to a more participatory process (we-government). We’ll discuss core [...]
This morning, Cato put out a TechKnowledge of mine called “The Promise that Keeps on Breaking.” It deals with the policy issues surrounding President Obama’s yet unfulfilled promise to post bills sent to him by Congress online for five days before he signs them. A Cato@Liberty post last week went through the President’s progress so [...]
I wrote a piece about PACER last week, which Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason was kind enough to link to from Hit and Run. In the comments to her post, a reader asked a reasonable question about the fees you pay to access PACER: “Are you buying the data or paying the court’s bandwidth costs?” Now [...]
I’m taking a course here at Princeton on IT Policy, taught by my advisor, Ed Felten. It’s been an interesting experience. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve spent more time thinking about the topics than the median member of the class, and the class has been an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with how [...]
It seems Microsoft is facing much the same problem Pepsi faced in the 70s, when it created the Pepsi challenge (a blind taste test between Coke and Pepsi): A stark sign of the challenge Yusuf Mehdi faces as a point man for Microsoft in the company’s battle with Google comes from the company’s own research [...]
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the issuance of the first RFC, or “request for comments,” an important milestone in the development of the Internet. This piece by Stephen Crocker is an enjoyable look back. The title of the piece is “How the Internet Got its Rules,” which strikes me as poorly chosen. (Titles are [...]
The Library of Congress now has a YouTube channel. Among the gems you can find there, the first moving image ever made. It’s a man named Fred Ott, sneezing:
Ever wonder about this? In researching COPPA, I noticed the following definition of “Internet” collectively the myriad of computer and telecommunications facilities, including equipment and operating software, which comprise the interconnected world-wide network of networks that employ the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or any predecessor or successor protocols to such protocol, to communicate information of [...]
On the problems with the newspaper industry, Michael Kinsley writes in the Washington Post: You may love the morning ritual of the paper and coffee, as I do, but do you seriously think that this deserves a subsidy? Sorry, but people who have grown up around computers find reading the news on paper just as [...]
January 29, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Anonymity, Reader Comments & Section 230
by Adam Thierer on April 9, 2009 · 13 comments
Doug Feaver, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, has published a very interesting editorial today entitled “Listening to the Dot-Commenters.” In the piece, Feaver discusses his personal change of heart about “the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at [...]