The TLF crowd will converge upon the MCCXXIII Club at 1223 Connecticut Ave in Washington DC from 6-9:30 this Wednesday, June 25 for Alcohol Liberation Front 5.1. Why are we having an ALF event so soon after our last one? And why is only minor build (.1)?
Because we’re crashing blogger and celebrity geek Robert Scoble‘s mini-convention/happy hour for the DC tech community. We’ve been promised an open bar of some sort, though details are still sketchy. Of the turn-out at April’s “TECH Cocktail” is any indication, this could be very well-attended and fun event.
RSVP now on EventBrite (and check out the Facebook event page) and be sure to wear your best capitalist flair. We’ll hope to see you there as we spread the gospel of Technology Freedom to our fellow geeks.
The ACLU has joined forces with Ron Paul supporters in a “strange bedfellows” coalition to raise money that will be used in primary challenges against Democrats who vote in favor of the FISA capitulation. Personally, I don’t see anything strange about libertarians and liberals joining forces on civil liberties issues, but if the label helps them get more media coverage, more power to them. Another example of those “damned, so-called libertarians” getting involved in the FISA fight.
This is how political debates get lost:
While nobody is suggesting the bipartisan breakthrough on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is in trouble, it’s clear that many liberal Democrats will be disappointed in a measure that provides a modest level of lawsuit immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the Bush administration with warrantless wiretaps.
In fact, despite Steny Hoyer’s best efforts to obfuscate matters, it’s quite clear that telcos are virtually guaranteed to get immunity. All they have to do is get the attorney general to send the judge a letter saying that the White House had told them it was OK. Since we know the White House wants immunity for these companies, it’s a safe bet that the administration will produce the necessary “certification” and the telcos will get their get-out-of-jail-free card. There’s nothing “modest” about the level of immunity the legislation offers to telcos, and it’s disappointing to see journalists buying this plainly misleading spin.
On June 10 at the National Press Club, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy organized a forum on technology policy in the Presidential campaigns, featuring former FCC Chair Reed Hundt, tech advisor to Senator Barrack Obama and former FCC Chair Michael Powell, advisor to Senator John McCain. One sees in U.S. elections such a fascination with the personal qualities of the candidates that one would think that the President ran the executive branch single-handed. But, of course, he doesn’t, and the teams matter. A relatively inexerperienced candidate might make up for this by having a knack for identifying astute advisors–or find his platform hijacked by a careerist with his own agenda.
Reed Hundt opened with an attack on Sen. McCain, including such details as McCain’s vote against the e-rate, the provision of the 1996 Telecom Act that funded Internet service to schools and libraries. This sally might have given him greater leverage had the room not been filled with tech-savvy types aware of the program’s difficulties–and the failure of the computerized classroom to produce any educational miracles. Then he offered an outline of an Obama administration’s tech policy. Continue reading →
I agree with Jim that the media’s treatment of Judge Kozinski has been outrageous. While reading up on the controversy, I was interested to come across this interview with Reason magazine. Here are his very sensible thoughts on copyright:
Reason: Do you see any big threats to free speech out there today?
Kozinski: There are always threats to free speech. Government doesn’t like to be criticized. Owners of copyrights and other intellectual property rights are very grabby. They think they own everything, or they think they invented everything. And the big problem is drawing the line between what’s protected by copyright and what’s in the public domain.
Nobody writes anything from scratch. We all build on the past from a shared public domain of ideas. We use copyrighted ideas to communicate with each other. For instance, when you say someone has a Barbie personality, it describes something without having to go into a thousand details. But Mattel, the inventor of Barbie, hates it. People who own those trademarks and copyrights want to control the way people communicate, and they have the ear of Congress right now. Congress just extended copyright terms again [in 1998].
Reason: So have we tipped the balance too much on the side of inventors as opposed to society’s interest in accessing their ideas when it comes to intellectual property rights?
Kozinski: The problem is that some people think of copyrights as an extension of property rights. And that’s OK. But maintaining a public domain makes property more valuable. A lot of things that copyright owners complain about are things that are actually good for them. Movie studios were really worried about Betamax. It seems quaint now, but they almost killed the video store business. It’s now a big source of revenue for them.
As a friend points out, he’s not a perfect libertarian by any means, taking the wrong side on the Kelo decision, for example. But he’s certainly one of the most libertarian (and pro-free-speech) judges in the federal judiciary.
Cisco continues to do interesting work estimating the impact of video on Internet traffic. With the release of two new detailed reports, updating last year’s “Exabyte Era” paper, they’ve now created a “Visual Networking Index.” These reports follow my own series of articles and reports on the topic.
Cisco’s Internet traffic growth projections for the next several years continue to be somewhat lower than mine. But since their initial report last August, they have raised their projected compound annual growth rate from 43% to 46%. Cisco thus believes world IP traffic will approach half a zettabyte (or 500 exabytes) by 2012. My own projections yield a compound annual growth rate for U.S. IP traffic of around 58% through 2015. This slightly higher growth rate would produce a U.S. Internet twice as large in 2015 compared to Cisco’s projections. Last winter George Gilder and I estimated that world IP traffic will pass the zettabyte (1,000 exabytes) level in 2012 or 2013.
For just one example of the new applications that will drive IP traffic growth, look at yesterday’s announcement by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Partnering with my friend, the young graphics pioneer Jules Urbach, AMD previewed its Cinema 2.0 project, which combines the best of cutting edge technology and thinking from video games, movies, graphics processors, and computer generated imaging — with lots of artistic insight and inspiration — to create new kinds of interactive real-life real-time 3D virtual worlds, all powered not by supercomputers but simple video cards that you find in PCs and Macs, or from servers in the “cloud.”
A photorealistic 3D robot and city scene rendered in real time. (AMD; Business Wire)
The huge increases in bandwidth and robust traffic management needed to deliver these new high-end real-time services continue to show why net neutrality regulation and other artificial limitations on traffic management are complete non-starters from a technical perspective.
Alex Harris at OpenMarket.org has a good write-up suggesting that the ACLU has lost its way on the question whether there should be net neutrality regulation. He quotes Barry Steinhardt saying, “No longer is the government the greatest threat to free speech online. The threat is now the companies that run the pipes.”
Barry is a friend and one of the nicest people I know. His dips into hyperbole are quotable wonders to behold – at least when they’re in defense of real civil liberties.
Barry, and all my friends at the ACLU, know the power of my blog posts. They no doubt shudder at the thought that I would turn my acid keyboard their way. This time it’s only a gentle chiding, but I say, Fear it! – FEAR THE BLOG POST! – should I lose patience . . . .
Via Randy Barnett on Volokh: Larry Lessig has a passionate defense of 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, whose family’s file server had some edgy and ribald files on it, which files could be accessed over the Internet. A lawyer with a grudge against Kozinski is apparently seeking to discredit the judge for the appearance of these files on his server, and there has been some discussion of whether Judge Kozinski should recuse himself from trying an obscenity case. (Though he is a circuit judge, he is sitting by designation as a trial judge.) Eugene Volokh has a similar post.
Kudos to Professor Lessig for his defense of Judge Kozinski, with whom he likely has some ideological differences. He didn’t have to say anything, and it’s to his credit that he did. Volokh is good to his long-time professional colleague.
On the merits, I share the views of both – what I’ve seen of the files are risque and sometimes boorish or gross, but they’re well within the mainstream of naughty Web humor. Were he not a respected judge sitting at an obscenity trial, the presence of these files on a family server would mean less than nothing.
The pair of comments intrigues me, though, because both draw real-world analogies to illustrate the privacy issues at play. Here’s Lessig:
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
