July 31st 2008
Recently, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sent out a letter to participants of the X Prize, a sponsored, private-sector contest to create a reusable space vehicle. The letter stated that if participants actively or passively sense the Earth’s surface, including the use of electromagnetic waves emitted, reflected or diffracted, then they need to […]
July 30th 2008
FCC Prepares to Punish Comcast A majority of members of the Federal Communications Commission have cast votes in favor of punishing Comcast Corp. for blocking subscribers’ Internet traffic, an agency official said Friday. ISP Ad Networking Scheme May Violate Wiretap Laws The Center for Democracy & Technology has advanced a legal theory that the practice […]
July 29th 2008
This week I participated in a the wrap-up panel discussion at Boston stop of the Online Marketing Summit. My co-panelists were Blake Coyle, a sales exec from Google, Paul Hyland, Executive Producer, edweek.org, and Theresa Regli, Principal, CMS Watch. As usual, I’m injecting personal observations along with what happened. If you were there too, please […]
July 26th 2008
Raising concerns about student privacy, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that legislation renewing the Higher Education Act contains language that may bring video surveillance or biometric testing into the homes of students participating in distance learning. The paragraph is actually about clamping down on cheating. It says that an institution that offers an online program […]
July 25th 2008
We’ve previously discussed Barak Obama’s comprehensive, and somewhat idealistic, technology plan for the federal government. He proposes establishing a CIO, and I discussed what we have learned from introducing this role at the state level. He’s idealistic, and perhaps naive. But John McCain’s still-emerging approach seems to be based on near-complete disregard. There, I’ve said […]
July 24th 2008
The Sanfrancisco Chronicle reports that after a secret visit by the mayor of San Francisco, the network administrator who locked the cities technology staff out of the network surrendered his password. See earlier coverage of this story. Terry Child’s defense attorney, Erin Crane, claimed that Mr. Childs was merely protecting the network from incompetent staff, […]
July 24th 2008
Slydial is a free voice message service that directly connects you to someone else’s mobile voicemail. Their phone never rings, and you get to leave a message without actually speaking with them. (Wait for the legal angle; it’s coming.) Their wonderfully written weasely website spells it right out. There are people you must phone: bosses, significant others, […]
July 23rd 2008
Do You Own What You Buy? Increasingly, it seems that we no longer own our own stuff. Is Your Website Yours? Are we getting used to governments seeking to regulate websites? If I own or rent a server, and pay to connect it to a private network so that other users can access my private […]
July 23rd 2008
James Boyd White is a distinguished professor of Law and English at the University of Michigan. In the spirit of Erazim Kohak, his recent talk on Law, Economics and Torture admonishes us against reducing life, democracy or law to mere economics, and to resist this trend when it is presented as inevitable. Long ago I […]
July 22nd 2008
Last week, the whistle-blower site Wikileaks published a confidential 2006 contract in which Venezuelan and Cuban firms agreed to lay an undersea fiberoptic cable connecting the countries. The cable is to be completed by 2010. Among the agreement’s stated objectives is to build a relationship of “strategic value,” which will permit Cuba and Venezuela to […]
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