Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Advocates of regulation will credit regulators for the fact that major browser providers Microsoft and Mozilla are going after online “tracking.” In forthcoming versions of their browsers, they will provide controls that protect against unwanted monitoring even better than the controls that now exist. When consumer advocates cluster in Washington, D.C., asking federal agencies to [...]
NY venture capitalist Fred Wilson notes eight advantages of using the iPhone’s Safari browser over iPhone apps to access content. Fred’s arguments seem pretty sound to me and help to illustrate the point I was trying to make a few months ago in a heated exchange over Adam’s post on Apple’s App Store, Porn & “Censorship”: [...]
Third on the headlines today on TechMeme (perhaps the leading tech news aggregator) is this headline: “An Apology To Our Readers,” a heart-felt piece from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington disclosing that a TechCrunch intern had, on at least two occasions, demanded computers from start-ups as compensation for writing favorable blog posts about them on the [...]
The disabled have much to give thanks for this year—but contrary to common assumptions, it’s not for paternalistic government accessibility mandates, regulations or subsidies (see, for example, the FCC’s November 6 Broadband Accessibility workshop), but for the good ol’ fashioned private sector ingenuity that has made America great. Five broad categories of examples suggest how [...]
Really, what would we do without European antitrust regulators protecting us from the evils of browser innovation? If Microsoft was allowed to actually bundle its Internet Explorer browser alongside its operating system we might actually do something really crazy… like perhaps try it! After all, the latest browser stats make it pretty clear most of [...]
In episode #44 of “Tech Policy Weekly,” Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer engage in a debate with Internet security expert Chris Soghoian, who is a student fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is also a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University’s School of Informatics. Chris is an up-and-coming star [...]
According to Ina Fried of CNet News, Microsoft plans to remove its Internet Explorer web browser from the new versions of Windows 7 when it ships it in Europe later this year. [Additional coverage at ZDNet.] MS is apparently doing so to assuage the concerns of EU antitrust officials, who have been obsessed with the [...]
Ted Dziuba has penned a humorous and sharp-tongued piece for The Register about last week’s Adblock vs. NoScript fiasco. For those of you who aren’t Firefox junkies, a nasty public spat broke out between the makers of these two very popular Firefox Browser extensions (they are the #1 and #3 most popular downloads respectively). To [...]
What a victory for privacy and personal responsibility is Chris Soghoian’s Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (or “TACO” – documented and downloadable here). It signals to the 27 ad networks with well-configured opt-out cookies that you don’t want them to track you. It’s a technical solution that empowers (and places responsibility with) the user to exercise [...]
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 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
