Year: 2008
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Government Data and the Invisible Hand
David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and I have a new paper about how to use infotech to make government more transparent. We make specific suggestions, some of them counter-intuitive, about how to make this happen. The final version of our paper will appear in the Fall issue of the Yale Journal of Law and…
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The Microsoft Case: The Second Browser War
Today I’ll wrap up my series of posts looking back at the Microsoft Case, by looking at the Second Browser War that is now heating up. The First Browser War, of course, started in the mid-1990s with the rise of Netscape and its Navigator browser. Microsoft was slow to spot the importance the Web and…
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The Microsoft Case: The Government's Theory, in Hindsight
Continuing my series of posts on the tenth anniversary of the Microsoft antitrust case, I want to look today at the government’s theory of the case, and how it looks with ten years of hindsight. The source of Microsoft’s power in Windows was what the government dubbed the “applications barrier to entry”. Users chose their…
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The Microsoft Case: A Window Into the Software Industry
This week I’m publishing reflections on the Microsoft antitrust case, which was filed ten years ago. Today I want to consider how the case change the public view of the software industry. Microsoft’s internal emails were a key part of the government’s evidence. The emails painted a vivid picture of how the company made its…
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The Microsoft Case, Ten Years Later
Sunday was the tenth anniversary of the government filing its antitrust case against Microsoft. The date passed almost unnoticed, though echoes of the case continue to reverberate. This week I want to reflect on the case, with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight. I’ll write at least three posts: today, on the overall legacy of…
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Live Webcast: Future of News, May 14-15
We’re going to do a live webcast of our workshop on “The Future of News”, which will be held tomorrow and Thursday (May 14-15) in Princeton. Attending the workshop (free registration) gives you access to the speakers and other attendees over lunch and between sessions, but if that isn’t practical, the webcast is available. Here…
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Counterfeits, Trojan Horses, and shady distributors
Last Friday, the New York Times published an article about counterfeit Cisco products that have been sold as if they were genuine and are widely used throughout the U.S. government. The article also raised the concern that these counterfeits could well be engineered with malicious intent, but that this appears not to have been the…
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DRM Not Dead, Just Temporarily Indisposed, Says RIAA Tech Head
The RIAA’s head technology guy says that the move away from DRM (anti-copying) technology by record labels is just a phase, according to a Greg Sandoval story at News.com: “(Recently) I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM,” said David Hughes, who heads up the…
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Stupidest Infotech Policy Contest
James Fallows at the Atlantic recently ran a reader contest to nominate the worst public policy decision of the past fifty years. (<a href="http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/stupidest_policy_ever_contest_1.php"The winner? Ethanol subsidies.) I’d like to do the same for technology policy. Readers, please submit your suggestions for the stupidest infotech policy ever. An ideal submission is an infotech policy that…
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30th Anniversary of First Spam Email; No End in Sight
Today marks the 30th anniversary of (what is reputed to be) the first spam email. Here’s the body of the email: DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND…