Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I absolutely adore Lenore Skenazy. As I pointed out in my review of her brilliant new book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, she is rare voice of sanity in modern debates about parenting and child safety issues. If you are a hyper-concerned helicopter parent who constantly [...]
A terrific Radio Berkman podcast this week on “Adventures in Anonymity” featuring Sam Bayard, a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center and the Assistant Director of the Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project. Along with host Daniel Dennis Jones, Bayard discusses the intersection of anonymity, free speech, defamation law, privacy, and more. In addition to [...]
My colleague Jim Harper and I have been having a friendly internal argument about Internet privacy regulation that strikes me as having potential implications for other contexts, so I thought I might as well pick it up here in case it’s of interest to anyone else. Unsurprisingly, neither of us are particularly sanguine about elaborate [...]
Wow, I’m obsessed with tech policy books, so I’m really not sure how I missed these until now, but these are some absolutely terrific anthologies of the best technology writing for each of the past 4 years. I just picked up copies of all four of them but then found out the contents of the [...]
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just announced it will be hosting: a series of day-long public roundtable discussions to explore the privacy challenges posed by the vast array of 21st century technology and business practices that collect and use consumer data.” Such practices include social networking, cloud computing, online behavioral advertising, mobile marketing, and [...]
Over the past couple of years here, I have relentlessly hammered Harvard’s dynamic duo of digital doom, Jonathan Zittrain (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and Lawrence Lessig (see 1, 2, 3), for their extraordinarily gloomy predictions about the Internet creating a world of “perfect control.” In the hyper-pessimistic Lessig-Zittrain view of things, cyberspace [...]
“Schools in Beijing are quietly removing the Green Dam filter, which was required for all school computers in July, due to complaints over problems with the software,” notes this Reuters report. Even though China backed down on their earlier requirement to have the Green Dam filter installed on all computers, according to Reuters “schools were [...]
PFF Adjunct Fellow Mike Palage led this extraordinary discussion of ICANN’s origins, evolution and future with four of ICANN’s “Founding Fathers”: Milton Mueller (author of Ruling the Root), law professor David Johnson, ICANN’s first CEO Mike Roberts and then ICANN CEO Paul Twomey. In particular, the group discussed ICANN’s mission, governance structure, and accountability; the difficult issue of [...]
Thanks to Adam for the kind introduction; for folks to whom I’m unfamiliar, my Ars Technica archive has the bulk of my tech writing over the past year and change, though plenty of it is straight reporting now well past its expiration date. It’s been suggested that for openers, I crosspost last week’s Cato @ [...]
Cyberbullying constitutes one of the largest growth categories of recent cyberlaw legislative proposals, and many state legislatures have already enacted measures aimed at combating this problem using a variety of approaches. Those attempting to monitor ongoing developments in this field might find it useful to examine this National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) compendium of [...]
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.
