A Close Look at SOPA Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Alicia Solow-Niederman This document is a guide to the Stop Online Piracy Act as proposed in the United States House of Representatives. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261, 112th Cong. (2011). It represents our notes as we sought to understand exactly what it does and [...] Read more »
The PC is dead. Why no angry nerds?
From Technology Review: The Personal Computer Is Dead Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors. By Jonathan Zittrain The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users [...] Read more »
The Sandbox and the Playground: Changing Rules for Software and Developers
Update on 2/23/2011: Apple has pushed back its deadline for OSX sandboxing to June 1st, 2012. The deadline was originally November, 2011, but was pushed to March 1st in early November. Although Apple claimed that this change was to give developers time to integrate new permissions from an update, it does follow the announcement of [...] Read more »
An interview with John Batelle on The Future of the Internet
John Battelle asked me a few Qs about my thinking on the themes in The Future of the Internet in the three years since the book came out (four since it was drafted!). John’s review is available on his blog, and I’ve reproduce the core of it here: JBAT: - You wrote the Future of [...] Read more »
FOI Topics and Links of the Week
IR-transmitted metadata. Last week, Apple filed for a patent on an iOS camera that can detect infrared in addition to visible light. If a user aims the camera at an object that is sending out additional information about that object in the IR band, the camera transmits that information to the device, and potentially also [...] Read more »
FOI Topics and Links of the Week
Smartphone tracking data. Two researchers reported last month that Apple has been storing time-stamped location information on users’ iOS devices since June. An unencrypted file with these data is saved onto a user’s computer each time she syncs her device with it, as well. Apple appears to have good reasons for collecting the location information, [...] Read more »
Why buy a PC when you can rent an un-PC?
Rumor — and that’s all it is — is that Google will announce a $10/month Chrome OS laptop rental. That such a rumor could be credible, whether or not it actually bears out, is a testament to how much our IT ecosystem has evolved in just the past few years. I’ve long been concerned about [...] Read more »
FOI Topics and Links of the Week
Amazon strong-arms a third-party Kindle service. Amazon shut down Lendle, a popular Kindle service that allows users to lend their books to strangers, last week because it didn’t “serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.” Two days later, after customers tweeted their displeasure, Amazon informed Lendle of [...] Read more »
