Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it a crime to circumvent digital rights management technologies but allows the Librarian of Congress to exempt certain classes of works from this prohibition. The Copyright Office just released a new rulemaking on this issue in which it allows people to “unlock” their cell phones so they can be [...]
The fun folks at Cracked.com tried to imagine what the world would be like without the Internet. Think porn, piracy, and pranks . But beyond that, the remaining examples point out how ill-suited the offline world is for the types of interpersonal communications that take place online. Maybe that’s why, without the Internet, these Photoshop [...]
My colleague (and boss) Adam Thierer had a great post last week about how “fart apps” are a great example of the generative nature of the mobile phone application marketplace. But Fart apps are just one type of “soundboard” application. A typical soundboard app has a bunch of buttons, and each time you press a [...]
By Eric Beach and Adam Marcus In the previous entry in the Privacy Solutions Series, we described how privacy-sensitive users can use proxy servers to anonymize their web browsing experience, noting that one anonymizer stood out above all others: Tor, a sophisticated anonymizer system developed by the Tor Project, a 501(c)(3) U.S. non-profit venture supported [...]
By Eric Beach & Adam Marcus Among Internet users, there are a variety of concerns about privacy, security and the ability to access content. Some of these concerns are quite serious, while others may be more debatable. Regardless, the goal of this ongoing series is to detail the tools available to users to implement their [...]
The European Commission is now designing software. And that software is Microsoft Windows… Comments of Adam Marcus & Berin Szoka to the European Commission on the Matter of Microsoft’s Browser Ballot Proposal, COMP/C-3/39.530 — Microsoft (Tying)* Submitted Nov. 9, 2009 [PDF of filing] We applaud the Commission for not repeating its earlier approach to concerns about tie-ins [...]
PFF summer fellow Eric Beach and I have been working on what we hope is a comprehensive taxonomy of all the threats to online security and privacy. In our continuing Privacy Solutions Series, we have discussed and will continue to discuss specific threats in more detail and offer tools and methods you can use to [...]
My PFF colleagues Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer have written many times about the quid pro quo by which advertising supports free online content and services: somebody must pay for all the supposedly “free” content on the Internet. There is no free lunch! Here are two two recent examples I came across of the quid [...]
In the first entry of the Privacy Solution Series, Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer noted that the goal of the series is “to detail the many ‘technologies of evasion’ (i.e., empowerment or user ‘self-help’ tools) that allow web surfers to better protect their privacy online.” Before outlining a few more such tools, we wanted to step back and provide a brief overview of the need for, goals of, and future scope of this series.
As noted in the first installment of our “Privacy Solution Series,” we are outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online-and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes. These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that we believe offers [...]
May 22, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
