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: [...]
Check out national security reporter Shaun Waterman’s report on lapses in security using techniques that only recently became known as “social engineering.” Ms. Sage’s connections invited her to speak at a private-sector security conference in Miami, and to review an important technical paper by a NASA researcher. Several invited her to dinner. And there were [...]
[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 [...]
Interesting piece by Farhad Manjoo of Slate today entitled “So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It.” Manjoo notes that Google’s Gmail service went down briefly this week — for an hour and a half — and that led to a lot of people “freaking out” over the downtime. He asks” “Google’s e-mail service works 99.9 [...]
The latest edition (Version 4.0) of my PFF special report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now up. For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education and media literacy efforts, and various other tools, methods, and initiatives [...]
Great piece in Wired by Fred Vogelstein asking “Why Is Obama’s Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google?” It paints a pretty good picture of the coming antitrust ordeal that Google is likely to be subjected to by the Obama Administration. And, as usual, I couldn’t agree more with the skepticism that Eric Goldman of Santa [...]
Fred Vogelstein’s essay in Wired, “Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out” describes the intensifying clash between Google and Facebook—a clash that focuses on the ability to target advertising: Like typical trash-talking youngsters, Facebook sources argue that their competition is old and out of touch. [...]
I’m intrigued by this new bill that Rep. Peter King has introduced to prevent video voyeurism. H.R. 414, the “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act” finds that “children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.” To remedy this problem, King’s “Phone Predator [...]
Jack Shafer, editor at large of Slate, is my favorite media pundit. Everything he does is worth reading, and his column this week is no different. It’s entitled “The Digital Slay-Ride: What’s killing newspapers is the same thing that killed the slide rule,” and in it he notes how “Hardly a day goes by, it [...]
I just finished reading through The Economist’s new 14-page special report on cloud computing, “Let It Rise” in which Ludwig Siegele provides an outstanding overview of cloud computing and why it is so important: The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the [...]
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.
