Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Here’s an amazing graphic that appeared in today’s Washington Post depicting how digital information has grown exploded over the past two decades. It’s better viewed on a large monitor from this link on the Post website. And here’s the accompanying Post article. The underlying data come from a new study by Martin Hilbert and Priscila [...]
A headline in the USA Today earlier this week screamed, “Hello, Big Brother: Digital Sensors Are Watching Us.” It opens with an all too typical techno-panic tone, replete with tales of impending doom: Odds are you will be monitored today — many times over. Surveillance cameras at airports, subways, banks and other public venues are [...]
Have we technophiles utterly deluded ourselves? Worse, instead of enjoying an Age of Innovation, are we actually stuck in a technological Dark Age? One that explains our stagnating living standards and general economic “disarray”? This is the possibility economist Tyler Cowen (George Mason, Marginal Rev, Mercatus) raises in The Great Stagnation, a pithy and provocative [...]
Reading through the respective December 2010 privacy reports from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Commerce (DoC), one cannot help but be struck by the Obama Administration’s seeming desire to make America’s tech sector — and the regulatory regime that governs it — more closely resemble Europe’s. The push for an ambitious new [...]
In my essay yesterday, “How Federal Accounting & Securities Regs Screw Up Your Chance to Invest in Facebook,” I noted how America’s counter-productive accounting, disclosure, and governance regulations are increasingly thwarting the ability of average Americans to invest in some of the leading capitalist innovators of the Digital Age. In this case it’s Facebook, but [...]
As Henry Blodget explained in his excellent Business Insider column yesterday, “Goldman Sachs Clients Can Invest In Facebook’s IPO — But You Can’t,” America’s increasingly counter-productive accounting, disclosure, and governance regulations are increasingly thwarting the ability of average Americans to invest in the leading capitalist companies of the Digital Age: in an effort to protect [...]
As I continue to do research for what will become a chapter-length version of my old essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” I am reading or re-reading some old books that have touched upon these debates through the years. Earlier this week, after an event [...]
To hails of derision in some quarters—I’m looking at you, Adam—I have talked about how social media will occupy some of the space being ceded by traditional news reporting, which is struggling to find a business model. Perhaps with validation from an official, vetted, professional, dead-tree news source, it will seem less ridiculous to talk [...]
It sounds a little bit like the “pre-crime” unit featured in the 2002 film “Minority Report,” but news that Washington, D.C. will implement software to “predict” crime is not quite as worrisome as it might seem at first blush. Beginning several years ago, the researchers assembled a dataset of more than 60,000 various crimes, including [...]
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 [...]
May 23, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
