Month: October 2007
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Eavesdropping as a Telecom Profit Center
In 1980 AT&T was a powerful institution with a lucrative monopoly on transporting long-distance voice communications, but forbidden by law from permitting the government to eavesdrop without a warrant. Then in 1981 Judge Greene took its voice monopoly away, and in the 1980s and 90s the Internet ate the rest of its lunch. By 1996,…
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AT&T Explains Guilt by Association
According to government documents studied by The New York Times, the FBI asked several phone companies to analyze phone-call patterns of Americans using a technology called “communities of interest”. Verizon refused, saying that it didn’t have any such technology. AT&T, famously, did not refuse. What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very…
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Comcast and Net Neutrality
The revelation that Comcast is degrading BitTorrent traffic has spawned many blog posts on how the Comcast incident bolsters the blogger’s position on net neutrality – whatever that position happens to be. Here is my contribution to the genre. Mine is different from all the others because … um … well … because my position…
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Comcast Blocks Some Traffic, Won't Explain Itself
Comcast’s apparent policy of blocking some BitTorrent traffic, which has been discussed on tech sites [example] for months, has now broken out into the mainstream press. Comcast is making things worse by refusing to talk plainly about what they are doing and why. (This is an improvement over Comcast’s previously reported denials, which now appear…
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The ease of applying for a home loan
I’m currently in the process of purchasing a new house. I called up a well-known national bank and said I wanted a mortgage. In the space of 30 minutes, I was pre-approved, had my rates locked in, and so forth. Pretty much the only identifying information I had to provide was the employer, salary, and…
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Radiohead Album Available for Free, But Fileshared Anyway
The band Radiohead is trying an interesting experiment, offering its new album In Rainbows for download and letting each customer decide how much to pay. You can name a price of zero and download the album for free, if you want, or you can pay whatever price you think is fair. Now Andy Greenberg at…
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Grokster Case Lumbers On; Judge To Issue Permanent Injunction
Remember the Grokster case? In which the Supreme Court found the filesharing companies Grokster and StreamCast liable for indirect copyright infringement, for “inducing” infringement by their users? You might have thought that case ended back in 2005. But it’s still going on, and the original judge just issued an interesting ruling. (Jason Schultz has a…
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Online Symposium: Future of Scholarly Communication
Today we’re kicking off an online symposium on The Future of Scholarly Communication, run by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. An “online symposium” is a kind of short-term group blog, focusing on a specific topic. Panelists (besides me) include Ira Fuchs, Paul DiMaggio, Peter Suber, Stan Katz, and David Robinson. (See the…
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attack of the context-sensitive blog spam?
I love spammers, really I do. Some of you may recall my earlier post here about freezing your credit report. In the past week, I’ve deleted two comments that were clearly spam and that made it through Freedom to Tinker’s Akismet filter. Both had generic, modestly complementary language and a link to some kind of…
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Infinite Storage for Music
Last week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever…