Category: Uncategorized
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The Return of 3-D Movies
[Today’s guest post is by longtime reader and commenter Mitch Golden. Thanks, Mitch! If you’re a Freedom to Tinker reader and have a great idea for a guest post, please let me know. – Ed] Last Friday I was at a movie preview for a concert movie called U23D, which, as you will correctly surmise,…
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The "…and Technology" Debate
When an invitation to the facebook group came along, I was happy to sign up as an advocate of ScienceDebate 2008, a grassroots effort to get the Presidential candidates together for a group grilling on, as the web site puts it, “what may be the most important social issue of our time: Science and Technology.”…
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Computing in the Cloud, January 14-15 in Princeton
The agenda for our workshop on the social and policy implications of “Computing in the Cloud” is now available, along with information about how to register (for free). We have a great lineup of speakers, with panels on “Possession and ownership of data”, “Security and risk in the cloud”, “Civics in the cloud”, and “What’s…
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Joining Princeton's InfoTech Policy Center
The Center for InfoTech Policy at Princeton will have space next year to host visiting scholars. If you’re interested, see the announcement.
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Lessons from Facebook's Beacon Misstep
Facebook recently beat a humiliating retreat from Beacon, its new system for peer-based advertising, in the face of users’ outrage about the system’s privacy implications. (When you bought or browsed products on certain third-party sites, Beacon would show your Facebook friends what you had done.) Beacon was a clever use of technology and might have…
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Universal Didn't Ignore Digital, Just Did It Wrong
Techies have been chortling all week about comments made by Universal Music CEO Doug Morris to Wired’s Seth Mnookin. Morris, despite being in what is now a technology-based industry, professed extreme ignorance about the digital world. Here’s the money quote: Morris insists there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. “There’s…
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Workshop: Computing in the Cloud
I’m excited to announce that Princeton’s Center for InfoTech Policy is putting on a workshop on the policy and social implications of “Computing in the Cloud” – the trend where companies, rather than users, store and manage an increasing range of personal data. Examples include Hotmail and Gmail replacing desktop email, YouTube taking over as…
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Slysoft Commercializes Next-Gen DVD Circumvention
We’ve been following, off and on, the steady meltdown of AACS, the encryption scheme used in HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the next-generation DVD systems. By this point, Hollywood has released four generations of AACS-encoded discs, each encrypted with different secret keys; and the popular circumvention tools can still decrypt them all. The industry is stuck on…
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Further adventures in personal credit
In our last installment, I described how one of the mortgage vendors who I was considering for the loan for my new home failed to trigger the credit alerting mechanism (Debix) to which I was signed up. Since then, I’ve learned several interesting facts. First, the way that Debix operates is that they insert a…
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Radiohead's Low Price Might Mean Higher Profit
Radiohead’s name-your-own-price sale of its new In Rainbows album has generated lots of commentary, especially since comscore released data claiming that 62% of customers set their price at zero, with the remaining 38% setting an average price of $6, which comes to an average price of $2.28 per customer. (There are reasons to question these…