Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Facebook has been at the center of a controversy involving its moderation policies and The Pirate Bay, a popular Bittorrent tracker that was found guilty of copyright infringement by a Swedish court last month. Since early April, Facebook has enforced a “site-wide” ban on links to The Pirate Bay – including those in private messages. [...]
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 [...]
Online child safety — especially the fear of predators lurking on social networking sites (SNS) — continues to spur calls by state and federal lawmakers for regulation. At first, some federal lawmakers advocated outright bans on SNS in schools and libraries via the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). Meanwhile, state and local lawmakers — specifically [...]
I haven’t been blogging much lately because, along with my PFF colleagues Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus, I’m working on a lengthy paper about the importance of Section 230 to Internet freedom. Section 230 is the sometimes-forgotten portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that shielded Internet Service Providers (ISP) from liability for information [...]
I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years trying to debunk various myths about online child safety or at least put those risks into perspective. Too often, press reports and public policy initiatives are being driven by myths, irrational fears, or unjustified “moral panics.” Luckily, the New York Times reports that there’s another study [...]
See my take on the election and the prospects for capitalism in today’s Wall Street Journal: If Barack Obama ran for president by calling for a heavier hand of government, he also won by running one of the most entrepreneurial campaigns in history. Will he now grasp the lesson his campaign offers as he crafts [...]
John Markoff had an interesting article in the New York Times this weekend entitled “Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S..” In the piece, Markoff notes that “The era of the American Internet is ending” since “data is increasingly flowing around the United States,” instead of all flowing though our country, as it once did. [...]
A few days ago, I posted an essay about the recent history of “moral panics,” or “technopanics,” as Alice Marwick refers to them in her brilliant new article about the recent panic over MySpace and social networking sites in general. I got thinking about technopanics again today after reading the Washington Post’s front-page article, “When [...]
Sean Garrett of the 463 Blog posted an excellent essay this week about the great moral panic of 1995, when Time magazine ran its famous cover “Cyberporn” story that included this unforgettable image. Unfortunately for Time, the article also included a great deal of erroneous information about online pornography that was pulled from a bogus [...]
Via ParisLemon… Here’s a really outstanding (albeit somewhat vulgar) slide show about the increasing importance of social media and how social networking is profoundly changing the way we humans communicate. Some great stats in there. | View | Upload your own
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.
