Year: 2009
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Introducing RECAP: Turning PACER Around
With today’s technologies, government transparency means much more than the chance to read one document at a time. Citizens today expect to be able to download comprehensive government datasets that are machine-processable, open and free. Unfortunately, government is much slower than industry when it comes to adopting new technologies. In recent years, private efforts have…
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Anonymization FAIL! Privacy Law FAIL!
I have uploaded my latest draft article entitled, Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization to SSRN (look carefully for the download button, just above the title; it’s a little buried). According to my abstract: Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for…
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Open Government Data: Starting to Judge the Results
Like many others who read this blog, I’ve spent some time over the last year trying to get more civic data online. I’ve argued that government’s failure to put machine-readable data online is the key roadblock that separates us from a world in which exciting, Web 2.0 style technologies enrich nearly every aspect of civic…
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Twittering for the Marines
The Marines recently issued an order banning social network sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.). The Pentagon is reviewing this sort of thing across all services. This follows on the heels of a restrictive NFL policy along the same lines. Slashdot has a nice thread, where among other things, we learn that some military personnel will…
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AP's DRM Announcement: Much Ado About Nothing
Last week the Associated Press announced it would be developing some kind of online news registry to control use of news content. From AP’s press release: The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development…
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What Economic Forces Drive Cloud Computing?
You know a technology trend is all-pervasive when you see New York Times op-eds about it — and this week saw the first Times op-ed about cloud computing, by Jonathan Zittrain. I hope to address JZ’s argument another day. Today I want to talk about a more basic issue: why we’re moving toward the cloud.…
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Lessons from Amazon's 1984 Moment
Amazon got some well-deserved criticism for yanking copies of Orwell’s 1984 from customers’ Kindles last week. Let me spare you the copycat criticism of Amazon — and the obvious 1984-themed jokes — and jump right to the most interesting question: What does this incident teach us? Human error was clearly part of the problem. Somebody…
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A Freedom-of-Speech-based Approach To Limiting Filesharing – Part III: Smoke, smoke!
Over the past two days we have seen that filesharing is vulnerable to spamming, and that as a defense, the filesharers have used the IP block list to exclude the spammers from sharing files. Today I discuss how I think lawyers and laypeople should look at the legal issues. Since I am most decidedly not…
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A Freedom-of-Speech-based Approach To Limiting Filesharing – Part II: The Block List
On Wednesday we discussed the open structure of filesharing and its resulting vulnerability to spam. While there are some similarities between e-mail and gnutella spam, the spoof files have no analogue in e-mail. When MediaDefender puts up spoofs for Rihanna’s Disturbia, unless you are using gnutella to search for Disturbia – which you cannot legally…
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A Freedom-of-Speech Approach To Limiting Filesharing – Part I: Filesharing and Spam
[Today we kick off a series of three guest posts by Mitch Golden. Mitch was a professor of physics when, in 1995, he was bitten by the Internet bug and came to New York to become an entrepreneur and consultant. He has worked on a variety of Internet enterprises, including one in the filesharing space.…