Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
My latest Forbes column is entitled “Why Doesn’t Society Just Fall Apart?” and it’s a short review of Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. It’s an interesting exploration of the societal pressures that combine to ensure that (most!) societies don’t go off the rails and end [...]
It’s time again to look back at the major cyberlaw and information tech policy books of the year. I’ve decided to drop the top 10 list approach I’ve used in past years (see 2008, 2009, 2010) and just use a more thematic listing of major titles released in 2011. This thematic approach gets me out [...]
It might be tempting to laugh at France’s ban on words like “Facebook” and Twitter” in the media. France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel recently ruled that specific references to these sites (in stories not about them) would violate a 1992 law banning “secret” advertising. The council was created in 1989 to ensure fairness in French [...]
Washington Times reporter Shaun Waterman has a characteristically excellent article out today about U.S. cybersecurity authorities failing to secure their own systems. According to a new report by government auditors, systems at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), part of the Department of Homeland Security, were not maintained with updates and security patches in [...]
While on vacation last week, I finished up a few new cyber-policy books and one of them was Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake. The two men certainly possess the right qualifications for a review of the subject. Clarke [...]
WordPress has experienced a major security vulnerability, with a worm making its way around the ‘Net, attacking earlier versions of WordPress. Fortunately, because of the hard work of the WordPress open source community, the current (2.8.4) and most recent (2.8.3) versions are immune. Yet as with any piece of program, some users haven’t upgraded. In the case [...]
by Eric Beach & Adam Thierer In our ongoing “Privacy Solutions Series” we have been outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online. These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that we believe offers a more effective alternative to government-mandated regulation [...]
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 [...]
Internet policy Shame Artist extraordinaire Chris Soghoian has struck again! Chris recently shamed the online advertising industry into improving their privacy practices with his Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO) plug-in for Firefox. Now Chris has set his sight on the security practices of cloud service providers. A letter released this morning, signed by 37 leading [...]
I was reading this Sun Magazine interview with the always-interesting Nick Carr and I liked what he had to say here about the public’s inconsistent views on privacy: If you ask people whether they’re concerned about the ability of the government or corporations to gather information about them online, they’ll say yes. But if you [...]
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.
