Tag: Online Communities
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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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The future of high school yearbooks
The Dallas Morning News recently ran a piece about how kids these days aren’t interested in buying physical, printed yearbooks. (Hat tip to my high school’s journalism teacher, who linked to it from our journalism alumni Facebook group.) Why spend $60 on a dead-trees yearbook when you can get everything you need on Facebook? My…
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Government Data and the Invisible Hand
David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and I have a new paper about how to use infotech to make government more transparent. We make specific suggestions, some of them counter-intuitive, about how to make this happen. The final version of our paper will appear in the Fall issue of the Yale Journal of Law and…
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Second Life Welcomes Bank Regulators
Linden Lab, the company that runs the popular virtual world Second Life, announced Tuesday that all in-world “banks” must now be registered with real-world banking regulators: As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such…
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Scoble/Facebook Incident: It's Not About Data Ownership
Last week Facebook canceled, and then reinstated, Robert Scoble’s account because he was using an automated script to export information about his Facebook friends to another service. The incident triggered a vigorous debate about who was in the right. Should Scoble be allowed to export this data from Facebook in the way he did? Should…
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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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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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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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Why the 09ers Are So Upset
The user revolt at Digg and elsewhere, over attempts to take down the now-famous “09 F9 …” number, is now all over the press. (Background: 1, 2) Many non-techies, including some reporters, wonder why users care so much about this. What is it about “09F9…” that makes people willing to defend it by making T-shirts,…
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Digg Users Revolt Over AACS Key
I wrote yesterday about efforts by AACS LA, the entity that controls the AACS copy protection system used in HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs, to stop people from republishing a sixteen-byte cryptographic key that can unlock most existing discs. Much of the action took place at Digg, a site that aggregates Web page recommendations from many…