Check out this article that describes how the state of Victoria in Australia will be trying out GPS speed monitoring devices that are installed in cars. The GPS technology identifies speed limits on all roads and operates on three levels:
Drivers get an audible warning they are over the limit at level one.
At level two, the device cuts power to the engine to prevent the driver from speeding, but the system can be adjusted or overridden.
At level three, the system cannot be switched off or adjusted and all speeding is cut.
Not sure Americans would ever go for this! And it seems to me that there are sometimes legitimate reasons to go above the posted speed limit (maybe passing a car?), and all of a sudden having the throttle shut down could be dangerous.
Is Frontline Wireless having a Keyser Söze moment? After convincing the FCC to largely accept its plan for public safety spectrum in the 700 MHz band, the well-connected startup may be saying “poof,” and just like that, be gone. According to Jeffrey Silva in RCR Wireless:
The future of Frontline Wireless L.L.C., the Silicon Valley-backed and politically connected startup that spent months positioning itself to bid big in the upcoming 700 MHz auction, has suddenly become shrouded in mystery.
“Frontline is closed for business at this time. We have no further comment,” Frontline said in a statement.
Ars Technica has more as does MRT Magazine, but not much more since it’s all pretty mysterious. The most significant potential impact of the news, as MRT notes, is that “If no one bids on the D Block, the spectrum would be returned to the FCC, which could reauction the spectrum with different rules.” That could be a good or a bad thing depending on the new rules.
Anyone know anything else?
It seems this week that “change” is on everyone’s lips, with every presidential candidate from Barack Obama to Duncan Hunter claiming to embody the word. But change isn’t limited to the campaign trail — with some fanfare, the National Association of Broadcasters announced this week that it was jumping in the game with some changes of its own. 
Change certainly would be welcome a the NAB, which took some rather oddball positions last year, arguing for subsidies to ensure that “no TV set…gets disenfranchised” (“One TV Set, One Vote: Broadcasters Assert Rights for Televisions“), and asserting simutaneously that broadcasters do and do not compete with satellite radio (“National Association of Broadcasters v. National Association of Broadcasters“).
So now will NAB retract these silly positions, starting out the new year fresh, with better-grounded arguments on behalf of its members? Sadly, no. The change implemented at the NAB is a new logo. And a new tagline: “Advocacy. Education. Innovation.” NAB President David Rehr says this will embody the interest group’s “reinvigorated sense of advocacy.”
Right. Now if only it can work on reinvigorating a sense of good policies to advocate.
Declan reports that Silicon Valley hasn’t lost its libertarian streak:
Boyapati isn’t the only Googler who’s braving New Hampshire’s sub-zero winter to advance Paul’s message of lowering taxes and government spending, opposing the Real ID Act, and withdrawing from Iraq immediately. Paul is the only Republican candidate for president who opposes the Iraq war and occupation.
One other former employee and five current Google engineers, who work on projects including an Asian version of Google Answers and the design of data center hardware, are staying with him in a four-bedroom group house close to Hackett Hill Road near Manchester. Boyapati says he doesn’t know any Googlers who have come east to volunteer for other candidates…
In addition to having broad support online, Paul is by far the most popular Republican candidate among Google employees. He received $22,650 in contributions from them, according to Opensecrets.org, compared with a mere $2,300 that Googlers gave John McCain. They gave no contributions to Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney.
Google employees, in fact, represent the single top contributor to Ron Paul’s campaign. They narrowly beat out men and women in the U.S. Army and Navy, who are in second and third place, respectively.
It’s ironic. The more that new technology makes it possible for people to communicate, the more that free speech is threatened.
Internationally, the censorship trend is worrisome. First, there’s this Guardian article about how Russia wants to create an internationalized domain name for .ru that would allow Russian speakers to use Cyrillic characters for typing the country code. Sounds great, but there’s the fear that the government would create an Internet just for Russia, providing the government with greater control over what is accessed on the global Internet.
Then there’s Saudi Arabia. A New York Times article confirms that the government has detained a Saudi blogger “for purposes of interrogation” about his writings about political prisoners. Apparently writing about political prisoners will make you one.
No surprise that China is still an active censor, the latest news being that China will restrict where Internet videos can be broadcast. Only websites that have a permit can broadcast or allow users to upload video content. “The policy will ban providers from broadcasting video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography,” the AP reports. Though as Forbes reports, this may only be a scare tactic threat for self-policing by sites like YouTube, because China’s government lacks the ability to filter video like it does text. China also just announced that it is cracking down on sex in all video and audio products.
What is a surprise is Australia’s ambitious net censorship proposal. According this Australian news article, the federal government would host a blacklist of sites that ISPs would be required to block. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy wants filters in place to shield children from online porn and violence.
Even in the digital age, government is “here to help” – only just may not “hear” (or read or see) anything.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez issued this statement on Friday:
The TV Converter Coupon Program opened as scheduled on January 1, and is off to a great start. Americans have begun requesting coupons that will help them get the converter boxes needed for when our television signals change on February 17, 2009. With these coupons, the federal government will defray $40 of the cost of an eligible converter, which is expected to cost between $50 and $70.
The demand for coupons is strong. We’ve taken requests from every state for nearly 1.9 million coupons from more than one million households.
The demand is strong? Really? For something that’s free? You’re kidding.
Let’s see, 1.9 million coupons requested at $40 a pop is $76 million of taxpayer money out the door in just four days. As Secretary Gutierrez says, “off to a great start” indeed. At this “great” pace it’s good to know the coupon fund totals $1 billion.
What are you waiting for? Get your piece of the American dream here.
The case of Crawford v. Marion County Election Board is being argued in the Supreme Court tomorrow. In a TechKnowledge commentary out today, I argue that the voter ID debate is largely a tempest in a teapot. But teapots can boil over . . .
Another MSM smear of Ron Paul…
I, for one, don’t know any Ron Paul supporters like that.
Reader Timon has a comment that’s worth highlighting:
The other, and for me one of the foremost innovations from the freedom perspective is that Open Source is a real-world demonstration of how people can accomplish huge complex tasks without the involvement of any whip-cracking authority. That may or may not be conservative but it is definitely libertarian. Whether it is sufficiently technically ‘radical’ it is organizationally unprecedented in history, truly revolutionary in that sense.
During the 20th Century, policy debates often centered on power struggles between governments and corporations. The capital-intensive nature of a lot of industries meant that in many cases, policies that reduced government power often meant that corporations had a large influence over peoples’ lives. As libertarians, we pointed out the advantages of this arrangement: first and foremost, you have a choice about which businesses to patronize, but no choice about whether to deal with the government. It’s much better to allow the big companies that own papers liks the New York Times and the Washington Post compete for your readership than to put the government in charge of the newspaper industry. And of course, the government is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the largest corporations, so even if raw “bigness” is your only concern, concentrations of government power should concern you a lot more than concentrations of corporate power.
Continue reading →
If you get your technology advice from the Orlando Sentinel, I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t be deleting random files from your hard drive:
Photos, videos, music and unneeded applications — and the files that you download to install them — can also slow down and clutter up your computer.
Go to the place where you store these items on your computer, and choose the view them by “details.” or “list,” if you are on a Mac.
Then click on “Size” to sort your items by how big they are. Try to delete as many large files as you can. If you are unsure about deleting a file, looking at the “Date Modified” field to see the last time you used that file may help you decide.
The same thing goes for .exe files, which are the files you download to install a program. Once you have a program installed, there’s no need to hang on to the .exe file that you used to install it. The equivalents on a Mac are .dmg files.
Wow. That doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.
Update: The story seems to have been modified with some less-terrible advice:
An earlier version of this column may have given the wrong impression about deleting .exe files as a way to clean up your computer. This may have been misinterpreted as an instruction to delete ‘all’ .exe files which was not my intention. You should be very careful when deleting these files and only delete ones that you are sure were used to install a program. A good way to identify these files is if the filename contains the word ‘install’ or ‘installer.’ These installer .exe files are typically downloaded from the Internet, often saved to your desktop and should not be confused with the .exe files used to run programs on your computer. If you have any doubt as to whether an .exe file should be deleted or not, don’t delete it. Deleting the wrong .exe files can seriously harm your PC.
Better late than never, I suppose.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.