Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Never forget. Is it any wonder that Vista took 8 years–and that there’s no firm market date for incremental update Windows 7–when even minor changes require updating thousands of pages of technical documentation for a team of state antitrust regulators? For the depressing details, read today’s “Joint Status Report” filed by 17 states, the District [...]
Yesterday, the Senate unanimously approved legislation to delay the transition to digital TV to June 13. The House is expected to follow suit as soon as this afternoon. Under current law, television stations would cease broadcasting analog signals on February 18, potentially inconveniencing dozens of Americans who rely on over-the-air signals and have yet to [...]
Only last week, President Barack Obama issued a new government-wide policy on FOIA requests mandating a “presumption in favor of disclosure” and directed his OMB to get to work fast on an “Open Government Directive,” with specific mandates for agencies, that achieves “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” That task is a tall order [...]
Forget net neutrality and the growing Googleplex. The real threat to Internet freedom comes from plain old criminal law. In three weeks time, Missouri housewife Lori Drew will face trial for entering false personal details when she signed up for a MySpace account. Her indictment alone, whether or not she is convicted, should frighten anyone [...]
From triumph to terror—that’s the likely emotional rollercoaster of the denizens of the “/b” message board on the 4chan website who hacked into Gov. Sarah Palin’s email account earlier this week. The toasts of the left-learning Internet on Tuesday, by this morning they knew themselves to be in the crosshairs of the FBI and Secret [...]
Tim’s thoughtful analysis of the slow adoption of the IPv6 protocol turned my mind to a long-standing topic of interest: the illusory value of elegance in technology. A corollary: In technology, as in life, revolutions are rightly rare and usually only visible in hindsight. The IPv6 transition is a good example of the difference between [...]
People will believe anything a GPS tells them: Bo Bai, a computer technician from Sunnyvale who said he was merely trusting his car’s global positioning system when he steered onto the tracks, was cited for obstructing a railroad crossing, officials said this afternoon. … “As the car is driving over the tracks, the GPS system [...]
Reading the tea leaves of delay, Reuters reports (via Drudge) that the DOJ may be gearing up to derail the planned merger, announced 10 months ago, between the nation’s two satellite radio providers: The delay may be due to the complexity of the issues raised by the merger of the only two U.S. satellite radio [...]
A Bear Stearns report examines at the economics of the Wall Street Journal knocking down its paid-subscription wall: WSJ.com revenue is currently pegged at $78 million annually, based on an estimated 989,000 subscribers paying $79/year. Including non-subscriber traffic, the company claims 122.4 million monthly page views. Based on an estimated CPM of $6 and a [...]
(This is in response to a thoughtful post by Adam, who beat me to the punch, and to a controversial recent article (“Long Live Closed-Source Software!“) by the free-thinking Jaron Lanier that Adam discusses.) No one needs to say “Long live open-source software,” because it is what it is and isn’t going anywhere. Think of [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
