Joseph Menn, a Financial Times technology reporter and the author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down The Internet, discusses cyber crime. Menn says that one of the main challenges of cybersecurity is that the internet was never intended for many of the things it’s used for today, like e-commerce or critical infrastructure management. He talks about the implications of the internet still being in beta form and comments on the recent Sony data breach and other similar cyber attacks. Menn also discusses his book, telling a few anecdotes about the people who go beyond computer screens in pursuit of internet crime lords.
Here’s a quick excerpt from an interesting press release sent out over PR Newswire last week—it sounds like someone is angling for a fat government contract: EMC® announced the 2011 Data Hero Awards winners and finalists First annual Data Hero Visionary award goes to Vivek Kundra, the first Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the United States [...]
Just a final reminder that it isn’t too late to still register for this Wednesday’s Mercatus Center event on “The State of Wireless Competition” featuring Thomas W. Hazlett, Professor of Law & Economics, George Mason University School of Law; Joshua D. Wright, Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law; Robert M. Frieden, [...]
I’ve written two articles on the Protect IP Act of 2011, introduced last week by Sen. Leahy (D-Vt.). For CNET, I look at some of the key differences, better and worse, between Protect IP and its predecessor last year, known as COICA. On Forbes this morning, I have a long meditation on what Protect IP [...]
As a rule of thumb, when I have to spend a given amount of time straightening out a company’s poor service or unscrupulous practices, I’ll spend an equivalent amount of time giving that company some payback. Today’s victim: T-Mobile. Fear the blog post. A letter from Asurion Warranty Services arrived in my mail today thanking [...]
My latest Forbes column is a celebration of 47 U.S.C. §230, otherwise known as “Section 230.” Sec. 230 turns 15 years old this year and I argue that this important law has “helped foster the abundance of informational riches that lies at our fingertips today” and has served as “the foundation of our Internet freedoms.” [...]
Last November, I penned an essay on these pages about the COICA legislation that had recently been approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. While I praised Congress’s efforts to tackle the problem of “rogue websites” — sites dedicated to trafficking in counterfeit goods and/or distributing copyright infringing content — I warned that the [...]
Sometimes free-marketeers are branded “free market fundamentalists” or something similar by their ideological opponents. The implication is that our preference for a society in which free people interact voluntarily to organize society’s resources is an irrational desire or a religion. I’m sure there’s a similar epithet we give to nanny staters—oh, there’s one, “nanny staters”—who [...]
In a post at Techland yesterday I noted that the FCC and FEMA’s new “PLAN” text-based emergency alert system might do little good since new media seems to always beat government to get out critical information: If history is any guide, however, you may not get any messages from 1600 Pennsylvania. Since the Emergency Alert [...]
San Francisco, often the breeding ground for “interesting” public policy proposals, decided recently to back off its mandate the would have required retailers of cell phones to label them with radiation levels and pass out material explaining the level of SAR in each device (SAR= Specific Absorption Rate). This has not been done anywhere else [...]
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.