Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The Computers Freedom & Privacy conference is consistently one of the most interesting and forward-looking privacy conferences. This year, it’s at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. June 1-4. I helped organize it this time, though by no means does the event skew libertarian. What it does is bring together people of all ideologies to [...]
NebuAd is dead. The company‘s plan to track users through their ISPs for the purpose of targeting advertising met with public and congressional concern that ultimately led to its demise. I believe that ISPs should stick to serving bits and not get into the business of serving or helping to serve ads, so I’m glad [...]
Google recently experienced failures of its core services — a phenomenon that quickly spawned the hashtag “googlefail” on the popular social networking platform Twitter. These failures show that a company once thought of as the odds-on favorite for dominating the global market in all things web — the monolith of Mountain View — is looking [...]
Here’s a very cool little app from Identity Analytics: My ID Score. You enter a bit of identifying information. It checks to see if you know stuff that only you are likely to know. (This is what I called “epistemetric” identification in my book.)And then it spits out an estimate of your risk of being [...]
According to respected Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, Guatemala’s government is infested with corruption. His message is carried very powerfully to fellow Guatemalans and the world in a video he taped before his murder last week. YouTube has a role as a powerful engine of dissent and government transparency. It’s a commercial, profit-making business, and it [...]
As part of our ongoing series that tracks the gradual transition of video content to the boob tube to online outlets, I want to draw everyone’s attention to two excellent articles in today’s Washington Post about this trend. One is by Paul Fahri (“Click, Change: The Traditional Tube Is Getting Squeezed Out of the Picture“) [...]
Google has announced that it will soon begin allowing U.S. advertisers to use trademarked keywords in limited circumstances in text ads, much as Yahoo! already does. Google currently allow advertisers to bid on trademarked terms as keywords that could cause an ad to appear, either next to Google search results or on a third-party publisher’s [...]
Howard Stern swore off free broadcast radio in 2004 in part because of federally mandated decency rules. The self-annointed “king of all media” may have stepped off the throne in doing so. Them’s the breaks in the competitive media marketplace, contorted as it is by government speech controls. Some would argue that a new king [...]
Facebook has been at the center of a controversy involving its moderation policies and The Pirate Bay, a popular Bittorrent tracker that was found guilty of copyright infringement by a Swedish court last month. Since early April, Facebook has enforced a “site-wide” ban on links to The Pirate Bay – including those in private messages. [...]
May 21, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Reply Comments in FCC’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” Notice of Inquiry
by Adam Thierer on May 20, 2009 · 10 comments
As I mentioned in a post last month, dozens of comments were filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as part of the agency’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” Notice of Inquiry. Again, this proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. [...]