Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
September 8 — this Tuesday — is the deadline for filing objections against the Google Book Settlement. A number of trade associations, corporations, authors, and advocacy groups have weighed in, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union. They argue that approving the Google Book Settlement in its current form, without explicitly [...]
I’ve noted that Google and Microsoft both face what Clayton Christensen famously called the ”Innovator’s Dilemma” in trying to handle disruptive innovation in search technology. But noting Microsoft’s innovations in bringing social functionality to search with its “Ping” tools in Bing, I pointed out a few days ago that, ”Microsoft, with less to lose and without a [...]
I’m pleased to welcome Brooke Oberwetter back to the TLF after 2.5 year stint working for The Man. Make no mistake about it, she’s a hard-core TechLiberationista, having worked as a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and research assistant at the Cato Institute. She’s now a freelance writer in Washington, DC. (In fact, she [...]
One of the more puzzling changes in Apple’s newly released Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system is that it now reports file sizes and storage capacity in base 10 units instead of base 2 units. Until now, operating systems have always displayed file sizes in base 2 units. When measured this way, a gigabyte [...]
Polish designer Jacek Utko acknowledged that, in the long-run, nothing can save the newspaper as a print medium, but makes a pretty good case newspapers’ ability to stay afloat while figuring out how to make the transition to digital media depends heavily on shaking up the graphic design and layout of papers. < p style=”text-align: [...]
The Wall Street Journal reports today that student loan borrowing for college “in the 2008-09 academic year grew about 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion,” with the average student borrowing $13,172 to pay for college. So it should come as an enormous relief that one Internet start-up, StraighterLine, has essentially made the university [...]
Interesting piece by Farhad Manjoo of Slate today entitled “So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It.” Manjoo notes that Google’s Gmail service went down briefly this week — for an hour and a half — and that led to a lot of people “freaking out” over the downtime. He asks” “Google’s e-mail service works 99.9 [...]
Gotta love The Onion… [Make sure to keep a close eye on the messages on the Twitter pages. And I like the "E-Mom's" advice to "Just make sure you spell everything wrong and swear a lot" to fool your kids. Great stuff.] Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids
Microsoft is making a major push to integrate social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter into its Bing search engine: users will soon be able to “Ping” search results they like to their friends directly from Bing. Back in January, in “Google, the Innovator’s Dilemma and the Future of Search & Web Ads,” I talked about [...]
I noted yesterday that a coalition of self-styled “privacy advocates” chose Monday, September 1, to launch an all-out attack on online advertising—which happened to be 70 years to the day after the start of World War II. Since the term “Privacy War” has been used since the late 90s as a catch-all for the battle [...]
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.
