Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Here’s the first of two essays I’ve recently penned making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom. In these essays, I identify two schools of Internet pessimism: [...]
Andrew Keen recently asked me to sit down and chat with him as part of a new series of video interviews he is conducting for Arts + Labs called “Keen on Media.” You can find the discussions with me here (or on Vimeo here). Keen asked me to talk about a wide variety of issues, [...]
Tim Lee points to “The Toyota Recall and the Case for Open, Auditable Source Code.” Knowing how the technology in our cars work is not just a safety issue, but a privacy issue—and maybe even a tax issue.
[I’ve been working on an outline for a book I hope to write surveying technological skepticism throughout history. I first started thinking about this topic two years when I noticed that a great number of recent books about Internet policy could generally be grouped into one of two camps: Internet optimists vs. Internet pessimists. I [...]
It may be possible to wring consistency from the “open” manifesto Google SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg published earlier this week, but I can’t. He correctly extols the virtues of openness in technology and data for its pro-competitive effects. Closed systems may be profitable in the short run, but they are weak innovation engines: [...]
There was some buzz earlier this year when the White House used the free, open-source Drupal content management platform for Recovery.gov. Now the administration’s marquee Web site Whitehouse.gov will be using it. The AP story linked just above does a good job of recounting the benefits of open source in this application: chiefly, low cost [...]
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski suggested at an FCC field hearing this week that the federal government might create its own “version of iTunes.” Multichannel News reports: The chairman asked panelists to think about the value of a clearinghouse where best practices could be shared. He suggested that might be a way to spur the spin-off [...]
Over at Ars, Ryan Paul has an appropriately sharp-tongued response to the Mozilla Foundation’s troubling move to become a cheerleader for the European Commission’s ongoing antitrust efforts against Microsoft. Apparently Mozilla will assist the EC’s investigation “by offering expertise about the browser market.” Paul focuses on what’s wrong with this in both a micro and [...]
Microsoft’s share of the browser market across all versions of Internet Explorer has dropped, by one estimate, dropped from 78.58% in December 2007 to 68.15% in December 2008 (or by just under 8% in another estimate). [IE's] share dropped from 69.77% in November to 68.15% in December. [During the same period,] Firefox gained more than half a point and [...]
“Damn their lies and trust your eyes. Dig every kind of fox!” I here sing one for the freedom to mix it up as you and your honey alone see fit: “Hapa” means “mixed race” in Hawaiian. Skin-tone mash ups have profoundly enriched my life, first with the Honolulu Hapa herself and then with our [...]
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.
