Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Congressmen working on national intelligence and homeland security either don’t know how to secure their own home Wi-Fi networks (it’s easy!) or don’t understand why they should bother. If you live outside the Beltway, you might think the response to this problem would be to redouble efforts to educate everyone about the importance of personal [...]
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about Google’s recent acquisitions of Teracent (ad-personalization) and AdMob (mobile ads), as well as Apple’s response, buying AdMob’s rival Quattro Wireless. Jeff Chester, true To form, quickly fired off an angry letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, ranting about how the Google/AdMob deal would harm consumer privacy with [...]
Google today unveiled the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers in Chicago dedicated to ensuring that Google build “liberated products”—ones that have “built in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you’d like to take it elsewhere.” We’ve spent a lot of time [...]
Interesting piece from Jeff Jarvis about “Google Bigotry,” or his belief that “media people are going after Google’s success for no good reason other than their own jealousy.” Jarvis argues that reporters penning hard-nosed stories about Google are, in reality, just a bunch of envious cry-babies: newspaper people will use their last drops of ink [...]
The Google juggernaut’s revenue growth has slowed steadily in the last five years, causing the Wall Street Journal to caution investors about buying Google stock. While much of the slow-down in Google’s revenue may be attributed to the recession, the WSJ cautions that: Microsoft is offering stiffer competition in search, which will only intensify once [...]
We’ve just published an op-ed over at Forbes.com about today’s big Yahoo!-Microsoft deal. Searching For Success: Web 1.0 Titans Struggle to Reinvent Themselves by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer Yahoo! and Microsoft on Wednesday announced a partnership in which Microsoft’s Bing search engine technology will power search for both companies, but Yahoo! will manage advertising sales and content [...]
Cory Doctorow has called for a Wikipedia-style effort to build an open source, non-profit search engine. From his column in The Guardian: What’s more, the way that search engines determine the ranking and relevance of any given website has become more critical than the editorial berth at the New York Times combined with the chief spots [...]
It seems Microsoft is facing much the same problem Pepsi faced in the 70s, when it created the Pepsi challenge (a blind taste test between Coke and Pepsi): A stark sign of the challenge Yusuf Mehdi faces as a point man for Microsoft in the company’s battle with Google comes from the company’s own research [...]
Leave it to the English—famous for their superior fluency in the language that bears their name—to reach unparalleled heights of hysteria in the war of words being waged against Google. The Guardian’s Henry Porter claims that “Google is just an amoral menace: The ever-growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything.” Porter declares [...]
Monday’s USA TODAY ran a long article discussing the tracking capabilities of the T-Mobile G1 smartphone, which is currently the only mobile device available that ships with Google’s Android operating system. I have a different take on the G1 phone, as I explain in a letter to the editor that appeared in today’s USA TODAY: [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
