utm
National Broadband Plan arrives, quoting Shakespeare
When the federal government spends more than a year developing a 300+ page report on national broadband policy, perhaps the last thing one expects to find in it is a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry IV . As two rebels plot their assault on the English king, the Welsh leader Owen Glendower brags that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep.” The English Hotspur retorts, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” Anyone can talk a good game about conjuring broadband policy from the vasty deep of the FCC—but can those people actually implement their visions? The National Broadband Plan , released today, drops this bit of Shakespeare on readers at the bottom of page 11 to make a simple point: this Plan is about the art of the possible.
Continue reading »Purging the Queen’s English of "tweet," "app," and "sexting"
Using an app to tweet about sexting? One university wants you to watch your language. Lake Superior State University, though no doubt a fine institution of higher learning, doesn’t have big name recognition.
Continue reading »The ACTA Internet provisions: DMCA goes worldwide
That warm flood of outrage through the veins is addicting—but it also runs the danger of being addictive, and of being too easy. As the news broke this week about the “Internet provisions” in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), it didn’t take long for the outrage to emerge. For instance, the popular blog Boing Boing (we love you, Cory!) announced that, under the proposed ACTA provisions being drafted by the US, “ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material.
Continue reading »Reservella: The shadowy company behind The Pirate Bay
When lawyer Ernst-Jan Louwers showed up in a Dutch court this week to defend the three Pirate Bay administrators, he swore that none of the three men in fact owned the site, having got rid of it in a shady 2006 transaction. How shady? Louwers told the judge that he could produce literally no piece of evidence that the site had even been sold at all—no contract, no bank transfer, no nothing.
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