Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee is slated to take up the misleadingly named Stop Online Piracy Act, an Internet censorship bill that will do little to actually stop piracy. In response to an outpouring of opposition from cybersecurity professionals, First Amendment scholars, technology entrepreneurs, and ordinary Internet users, the bill’s sponsors have cooked up [...]
A few days ago, Ars Technica asked me to comment on a class action lawsuit against Paxfire, a company that partners with Internet Service Providers for the purpose of “monetizing Address Bar Search and DNS Error traffic.” The second half of that basically means fixing URL typos, so when you accidentally tell your ISP you [...]
While I harbor plenty of doubts about the wisdom or practicability of Do Not Track legislation, I have to cop to sharing one element of Nick Carr’s unease with the type of argument we often see Adam and Berin make with respect to behavioral tracking here. As a practical matter, someone who is reasonably informed [...]
Jim Harper and I have been having one of our periodic tussles over the Lower Merion school laptop spying case. Jim thinks the search in this case may pass Fouth Amendment muster; I disagree. This is especially tricky because the facts are still very much unclear, but I’m going to follow Orin Kerr in assuming [...]
Since some of my cobloggers have taken to using the phrase “Privacy Paternalists” to describe some advocates of privacy regulation, I want to suggest a distinction growing out of the discussion on Berin’s Google Buzz post below. I think that it’s clear there is such a thing as a “privacy paternalist”—and there are not a [...]
With China’s Internet filtering back in the spotlight, this is as good a time as any to rewatch Clay Shirky’s excellent TED talk on the political implications of the ongoing media revolution—with a fascinating case study of a recent episode in the People’s Republic. Two points that probably deserve emphasis. The first is that the [...]
Yesterday’s bombshell announcement that Google is prepared to pull out of China rather than continuing to cooperate with government Web censorship was precipitated by a series of attacks on Google servers seeking information about the accounts of Chinese dissidents. One thing that leaped out at me from the announcement was the claim that the breach [...]
At Berin’s suggesting, cross-posting from Cato@Liberty: I’ve just gotten around to reading Orin Kerr’s fine paper “Applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet: A General Approach.” Like most everything he writes on the topic of technology and privacy, it is thoughtful and worth reading. Here, from the abstract, are the main conclusions: First, the traditional [...]
Ok, I didn’t say anything last month when Jerry—albeit with some caveats—cited that FCC stat about how 88 percent of zip codes have four or more broadband providers. But now I see my friend Peter Suderman relying on the same figure over at Reason. And friends don’t let friends use FCC broadband data. First, since [...]
Rose Afriyie from Feministing wants to know why, amid all the enthusiastic talk of “Gov 2.0″ under Obama, we’re not hearing about the “digital divide,” about which there used to be so much tearing of hair and rending of garments: I, for one, am a little concerned that in all this technology talk, particularly with [...]
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.
