Tag: Media

Mike Godwin notes a serious error in the recent NYT future-of-TV article: A more important problem with the article is that it gives a false impression of the normal user experience of BitTorrent: Created by Bram Cohen, a 29-year-old programmer in Bellevue, Wash., BitTorrent breaks files hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a song…

The name TiVo was once synonymous with an entire product category, Digital Video Recorders. Now the vultures are starting to circle above TiVo, according to a New York Times story by Saul Hansell. What went wrong? The answer is obvious: TiVo chose to cozy up to the TV networks rather than to its customers. When…

TiVo has announced that it will overlay banner ads on viewers’ TV screens when they fast-forward while replaying recorded shows. Many commentators (such as Cory Doctorow) have criticized this move, though Kevin Werbach says it’s no big deal. As a TiVo user, I’m not sure what to think about this. I would be happier if…

The music industry likes to complain about sales lost to piracy, but figures that show huge sales declines only tell part of the story. Before we blame this trend on infringement, we have to make several assumptions, including that the demand for music (whether purchased or pirated) has remained steady. Figures available from the US…

Today I’ll wrap up Vice Week here at Freedom to Tinker with an entry on porn labeling. On Monday I agreed with the conventional wisdom that online porn regulation is a mess. On Tuesday I wrote about what my wife and I do in our home to control underage access to inappropriate material. Today, I’ll…

It’s day two of porn week here at Freedom to Tinker, and time to talk about the tools parents have to limit what their kids see. As a parent, I have not only an opinion, but also an actual household policy (set jointly with my wife, of course) on this topic. Like most parents, we…

Adam Thierer at Technology Liberation Front offers a long and interesting discussion of the online porn wars, in the form of a review of two articles by Jeffrey Rosen and Larry Lessig. I’ve been meaning to write about online porn regulation for a while, and Thierer’s post seems like a good excuse to address that…

Somebody over at the Bush-Cheney campaign had better figure out this Internet thingy pretty soon, or it’s going to be a long, unpleasant online campaign for them. The first evidence of the campaign’s Net-cluelessness was the Bush-Cheney poster generator that came to be called “The Sloganator”. This was a web tool, on the campaign’s site,…

The conventional wisdom these days is that Google is becoming less useful, because people are manipulating its rankings. The storyline goes like this: Once upon a time, back in the Golden Age, nobody knew about Google, so its rankings reflected Truth. But now that Google is famous and web authors think about the Google-implications of…

Smart radios are a sleeper technology. They’re being developed right now; they’ll have a huge impact; but they’re not getting anywhere near the attention they deserve. Smart radios rely on computer processing power, rather than simple analog circuits, to extract information from the electromagnetic spectrum. This simple idea has profound implications for wireless communication, implications…