June 2011
88 posts
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Some Links About Sharing And Anonymity
Above: Anonymous dialogue in Rome: “In 1501, the statue was found during road construction and set up in the piazza; soon after small poems or epigrams critical of religious and civil authorities began to be posted on it.”
Rhode Island is considering a law that would allow police to uncover the personal information of anonymous internet users suspected of posting harassing content...
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WatchPreconceived Notions. A great little example of how what we believe obvious is the opposite of reality when circumstances change only slightly. Also a good example of how culture informs architecture and assumptions inform business models.
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FBI / DHS Seizures and LulzSec
First, the FBI seized a bunch of servers in Reston, VA, in an attempt to investigate and shut down LulzSec. Then, that seizure brought down a bunch of reputable companies that hosted their content on those same servers.
These companies work to get back online and running, in a cloud of speculation about the legality of the seizures.
Meanwhile, legal challenges sprout up over domain seizures...
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US v. Jones, the GPS Tracking Case, Picked Up by... →
Just as we all expected.
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“Under the first sale doctrine, once a copyright owner sells or gives you a copy...”
– EFF Asks Supreme Court to Protect “First Sale” Rights. That paragraph is a brief description of what the “first sale doctrine” protects. And this case is an example of how “licenses” (for software, for iTunes music files, etc.) hurt the sale and exchange of media...
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How to survive the age of distraction →
In the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: “The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over...
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Networks are not always revolutionary | Technology... →
Sharing one of Dotorow’s columns for The Guardian is kind of low hanging fruit for this blog: obviously, I agree with and find interesting almost everything he writes about there.
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Google Confirms F.T.C. Antitrust Inquiry →
YOOPS!
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Help Identify Vancouver's Hardened Thugs Like This... →
Hudi said it basically exactly how I would: “I’m fascinated by this “Crowdsourcing justice” idea. People in large groups can easily lose their identity and become rioters because of the energy and the anonymity that a crowd provides. Will this recent ability to clearly identify every member after the fact make riots less likely in the future?”
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New York Court of Appeals Adopts Broad View of... →
This is all very reasonable and shouldn’t be surprising or interesting.
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“Murphy claimed that simply removing the credit line on the photo is an entirely...”
– Is Using A Photo Without Credit A Separate Violation Of The DMCA?
That quote is so great. And this case is so interesting.
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“Security reporter Joe Menn has a piece up today at the Financial Times exploring...”
– Where @LulzSec came from, who’s running it, and why #antisec is a big deal - Boing Boing. “site registration required” = read the comments on the article to see how to get around this. It’s a story about how tech-savvy upstarts are thwarting the old models for protecting...
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“In short, Tennessee’s ban on posting distressing images is...”
– Tennessee’s Ban on Publishing Distressing Images: Let Us Count the Ways It’s Unconstitutional | Electronic Frontier Foundation. A good overview of what the law does and why it doesn’t stand much of a chance in the long run.
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“Sonically speaking, the public domain is a wasteland.”
– Sound recordings: The sound of silence | The Economist. THIS IS SUCH A GOOD ARTICLE.
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“So that’s the landscape: Google’s hacking the existing telephone system,...”
– iMessage, Skype, Google Voice, and the death of the phone number. Absolutely correct. And also generalizable to things like television, cable, gaming, etc.
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“Politico ran a piece last week examining progressive non-profits that received...”
– GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios resigns amid AT&T scandal. YOOPS!
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“Free is indeed very expensive. But, what the prolonged and knee-jerk debate...”
– Why Free is Very Expensive - Forbes.com. The managing editor of the Washington Post writes one of the most well-thought-out responses to the whole newspaper paywall discussion. He’s right: locking the newspaper’s content behind a paywall cuts off an important part of your readership and...
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“But perhaps similar to the way that Stephanie Lenz got a court to declare that...”
– Songwriter Wins Round in Legal Battle with Summit Over ‘Twilight’ Song. The thrust of this one is that the people who made “Twilight” issued a takedown against a songwriter who made a video for his “Twilight”-esque song. The suit itself is about how that song...
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People Who Share Music Are 5x More Likely To Buy... →
This is obvious: people who share music legally are much more likely to buy music legally. Also worth noting that similar studies have demonstrated something that seems equally obvious but way more dangerous to music sellers: studies also demonstrate that people who ILLEGALLY share music are ALSO much more likely to buy music.
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Apple tries to put the kibosh on iPad and iPhone... →
The news that Apple is trying to stop people from giving away iPads in contests squares perfectly with their way of doing business. Apple makes their products cool by creating artificial scarcity: they ship small numbers of products, they charge a little too much, etc. If you could just win them in contests, they’re just like toasters, aren’t they? And toasters aren’t cool…
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“This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data
from Senate.gov -...”
– http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/senate.gov.txt.
I wrote a post not too long ago about what WikiLeaks meant, what the organization’s goals are, and why I have some problems with how they are achieving them. All of that applies to LulzSec. Still very ambivalent!
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End of 'Ulysses' copyright may breathe new life... →
And, in general, the entry of MANY works into the public domain will likely rejuvenate them.
An example: not long ago, a friend of mine who is associated with film production asked me if I knew of any public domain stories that they could develop into films so that they wouldn’t have to pay large licensing fees and clear a bunch of complex copyrights.
When cool things enter the public...
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“Do you think every hacker announces everything they’ve hacked? We...”
– LulzSec - 1000th tweet statement.
Again, in the long run, they are doing this in a way that probably shouldn’t be admired, but they do make a really valuable point. It’s time to think a little harder about what exactly we are handing over to infrastructures that we don’t really...
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“What aspects of any reality show are subject to legal protection? In a genre...”
– Is ABC’s ‘Wipeout’ a Rip-Off? (Analysis) - Hollywood Reporter.
The quoted paragraph offers a really interesting question. At what point do these formulas cease being “creative” or “expression” and just become the facts of a certain type of show?
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factoftheday:
A Boeing 747 stuffed with 3TB hard drives flying from LA to NY would have a bandwidth of 93 Terabits per second.
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Apple to 'ban iPhone gig filming' →
theadamglass:
The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.
A patent application filed by Apple revealed how the technology would work.
If an iPhone were held up and used to film during a concert infra-red sensors would detect it.
These sensors would then contact the iPhone and automatically...
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Internet users now have more and closer friends... →
Have a computer, Internet connection, and no Facebook profile? Now you’re the weirdo outcast. In a new study done by the Pew Research Center, collections of data from thousands of participants showed that people who use social networking services are now not only likely to have larger networks than those who don’t, but also have more close friends. The authors of the study don’t cite technology...
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Iceland Is Crowdsourcing Its New Constitution →
I am very interested in this experiment. I am especially interested in how projects like this balance real contribution against trolls and distractors.
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Wyden, Chaffetz Introduce Geolocation Privacy and... →
There are links to some info about the bill and the guys who introduced it. I’m interested to see how the possible upcoming Supreme Court case would impact the bill’s progress. I also don’t know how federal warrant laws work in the context of constitutional law.
For instance, if the Supreme Court says that collecting GPS data without a warrant is constitutional, it seems like...
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