August 2011
60 posts
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“We are continuing to collect information about BART’s actions and will be taking...”
– FCC probes San Francisco agency for disrupting cell service - The Hill’s Hillicon Valley.
This is a great story, because, while the constitutional issues at stake here are kind of murky, it’s easy to forget that the FCC is also supposed to be looking out for communications networks on a...
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“It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a...”
– Neil Gabler (via azspot).
This kind of anti-futurism crops up a lot, and I guess I just wanted to add that I don’t entirely believe that this is the truth. It’s important to remember that the enlightened, scientific and rational thinkers and movements that we hold in such high esteem...
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Springsteen and Others Soon Eligible to Recover... →
infoneer-pulse:
Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Kenny Rogers’s “Gambler” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” have generated tens of millions of dollars for record companies. But thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, those...
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Google alleges that Facebook posts containing a... →
cheatsheet:
Ironically, the only way to get to the bottom of this mystery if everyone tries posting Google+ links in their Facebook profile.
The problem is that people are using a ubiquitous social network to try to gather their friends towards the more sleek challenger. People treat Facebook like dumb pipes, like the telephone: content-unaware, conveying a message as delivered. But...
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fetishizing books and textualizing the digital →
Now if all you’re interested in is the text, the words on the page, then maybe the parchment might not matter. The Magna Carta matters beyond its material presence, that is certainly true. But no text exists outside of its material manifestation. And this is where the pro-digitization folks seem blind to me. So much of that rhetoric has focused on access: let’s digitize these...
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Pay TV industry loses record number of subscribers... →
The bottom line: the majority of paid television companies posted customer losses for the first time in the past few months. That’s an interesting fact no matter what the reason for it might be.
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UMG Watermarks Audiophile Files, Pisses Off Paying... →
Yeah, I think putting in an audio imperfection to watermark files sold to people paying a premium for audio LACKING imperfections, you’ve made a mistake. And the best remedy for that mistake is, unfortunately, piracy.
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“[L]ike Republicans and Democrats in Congress, now is the time when Marvel and DC...”
– Marvel Bribes Retailers to Destroy DC Comics | GeekDad | Wired.com.
The story is that Marvel is running a promotion that requires retailers to rip off and send a certain number of DC comic book covers (thereby destroying a portion of their DC sales stock) to get a special edition of some Marvel...
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“You currently operate under a business plan strongly reliant on lobbied...”
– SEC Told Pandora To Be More Explicit In Its IPO That Its Business Is Likely Unsustainable Due To Crazy Licensing Rates. The headline basically speaks for itself.
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“We unexpectedly find that, in certain situations, a lower piracy enforcement...”
– The Effect of Piracy on the Quality of Information Goods by Atanu Lahiri, Debabrata Dey :: SSRN.
This is just a really great, really concise statement of why piracy might lead to better quality products.
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“The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco concluded that...”
– Urging Obama’s Assassination Is Lawful Online Speech, Divided Appeals Court Says | Threat Level | Wired.com.
Note that they did not hold that this speech was constitutional and couldn’t be limited. They held that the law, as written, didn’t apply to what the defendant said. The decision...
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“Float, Scribd, Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, and Ongo.”
– Scribd Creates a Paid News Site - NYTimes.com.
These are the names of some companies all mentioned within two paragraphs of each other. The story itself is pretty interesting, sure, but these names are pretty goofy.
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Facebook Will Shut Down Prison Inmates' Accounts →
infoneer-pulse:
Now among the liberties stripped from convicted California felons: Access to Facebook.
Prison inmates have been using their Facebook accounts, often via contraband cellphones, to threaten their victims and harass others, says the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
In one instance, a child molester who had been in prison for seven years sketched pictures...
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“[P]eople quite reasonably use things like Google as their backup brain…”
– No, Google Is Not Rewiring How We Remember | Techdirt.
I love this quote, and not only because that’s how I think of the internet, but also because it should have (and seems to have had) far reaching effects on education. It’s better to learn how to classify and find information than to...
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Are Smart People Getting Smarter? →
The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence — such as performance on Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland — have been increasing for at least 100 years. What’s most peculiar is how scores have increased:
1)...
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Skeptical Scalpel: Statistical vs. Clinical... →
This great little article (via Boing Boing) demonstrates that, while statistics are very useful in seeing of something is actually happening, it’s also worth taking a step back to see if what is happening is useful.
There are a lot of situations in which this kind of thinking could reveal some surprising truths. Like, for instance, the music industry has taken a hit since the days of Virgin...
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“In the last 9 months 18 Million file-sharers were tracked, but due to limited...”
– France Tracks Down 18 Million File-Sharers | TorrentFreak.
It’s probably a flawed assumption to say that there were 18 million individuals that committed different acts of piracy. However, let’s say that there were one million people that committed 18 acts of piracy each that month,...
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DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop |... →
The prosecution is trying to make themselves look a little better by saying that they don’t actually demand the password, only that the accused type it in. By my reckoning, demanding that someone unencrypt their computer for you is certainly just as much self-incrimination as having them tell you their password. We’ll see how this case shakes down.
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Why Facebook and Google's Concept of 'Real Names'... →
I’ve changed my mind. **The kind of naming policy that Facebook and Google Plus have is actually a radical departure from the way identity and speech interact in the real world. **They attach identity more strongly to every act of online speech than almost any real world situation does.
I want to walk you through how I’ve come to this understanding. Because I’ve been obsessively listening to...
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Bootstrapped | Futility Closet →
This article (which is titled “Bootstrapped,” a title that I love) is about how a fake entry in a dictionary caught on and started getting some real traction, despite being nothing more than a copyright trap.
Some background: these kinds of fictitious entries are put into maps, dictionaries, mathematical tables, and anything else where someone could steal huge amounts of work from...
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“In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved...”
– (via Penny Red re: the London riots).
This is a pretty enlightening exchange. I don’t really have much to say that it doesn’t already say more eloquently.
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What LulzSec Actually Did (And Why It's Important... →
So. A lot of really interesting things have been going on. From day to day, it’s hard to tell which stories are going to actually be important in the long run, so I try to resist the…
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How Felicia Day is Making It Her Way. Copyfight:... →
I’d also like to point out that the series in question, “The Guild” is very funny and quite artful. So not only is the distribution model pretty innovative and effective, that model has also created a good platform for art. It’s kind of ideal!
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“I’m not supposed to say this, probably, but I’m trusting that the pirates out...”
– Bjork Hopes Pirates Crack Her New Music App, But Perhaps She Should Have Made It More Widely Available.
Bjork is releasing a new album, and she’s starting the release process using a bunch of iOS apps. This is her basically acknowledging that she kind of hopes that someone breaks these apps... 