2008
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Nothing happening here. Move along.
So the Wall Street Journal runs Google Wants Its Own Fast Track on the Web, by Vinesh Kumar and Christopher Rhoads. It’s dated today, but hit the Web yesterday. Among other things it says, Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane… Continue reading
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Need help with Mac Mail
While repairing Searls.com (which should be back up soon), I had my sister, who has a searls.com email address, delete her old account and create a new one. She did this in Apple’s Mac Mail program, which I don’t know or use. All her sent and received emails are now gone. Or invisible. I don’t… Continue reading
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Under reconstruction
Searls.com is down, and has been for a number of days. There was a RAID failure, and things got worse from there. We had to take the whole thing down and rebuild it. I’m hoping it will be up again in a few hours. Meanwhile, all mail to searls.com addresses is giong nowhere. Just letting… Continue reading
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Utilities in deed
Change.gov is the main place where the President-in-Waiting takes advice from the public. One item there is MPAA’s Key International Trade Issues, detailed in this .pdf. You can’t search or copy the content of that file because it’s a graphic. I guess the MPAA decided it would rather not post the text somewhere. Alas, Change.gov… Continue reading
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A world of producers
There’s a good chance that the best picture you can put on your HD screen doesn’t come from your cable or satellite TV company, but from your new HD camcorder. As time and markets march on, that chance will only get larger. That’s because the there is a trade-off between the number of channels carried… Continue reading
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Quotes du jour
“Do we settle with the scumbag or make lawyers rich?” – a friend who has been probing this question. And “If it has to go through legal, it isn’t a conversation.” From Justine at BrainsOnFire. Via John Moore, via Valdis Krebs. Continue reading
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Yo!Yo!
Lessig returns to Harvard. Local souces confirm. Heres the tweet. Watch the blog for more. (Here it is.) Overheard among the locals: Aslan is on the move. Continue reading
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Toward accountable conference connectivity
I don’t envy providers of wi-fi at conferences. Nor do I envy anybody else in a risky business, even when they charge a good buck for it. But I do appreciate them. I forget the name of the outfit that provided wi-fi at PC Forum in days of yore, but they delivered the goods. Wi-fi… Continue reading
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For what the Zell tolls
The predicable catastrophe of Sam Zell buying the Tribune Company was perhaps best forecast (or at least remarked upon) by Hal Crowther. My response at the time was (and still is) here. Bonus link. Another. Continue reading
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A portrait of the Swiss Alps
On departure from Zürich to Paris yesterday the ground was shrowded in gloom and haze, but above it the sky was clear and crystalline. I sat purposely on the left side of the plane to get a view, even though I knew I’d be photographing the scene against the sun, which would be low in… Continue reading
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Rethinking out loud about infrastructure
One of the most common expressions in geology is “not well understood”. Which is understandable, because most rocks were formed millions to billions of years ago, often under conditions, and in locations, that can only be guessed at. One of the reasons I love geology is that the detective work is of a very high… Continue reading
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Coming to our senseless
The New Hacker is a nice segment in On The Media featuring wisdom from Chris Soghoian, a fellow Berkman Center fellow. Chris’s main point: by the lights of the Lori Drew decision, you’re a hacker if you violate any terms of service, because that’s essentially what the jury decided. TOS (terms of service) are silly… Continue reading
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Stolen goods farming with GPSes
Back in the 80s junkies were stealing radios from cars. Now it’s GPS units. At Logan Airport, bright signs greet you in the parking lot: REMOVE YOUR GPS UNITS, or words to that effect. I forget exactly. But the point is, they’re bait for thieves. We have had two stolen in the last two months,… Continue reading
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Liberating the Net from the FCC
In The Office of Connectivity Advocacy, Bob Frankston argues for something we’ve needed a long time: prying the Net from the regulatory grips of telecom and cablecom, both of which are inside the FCC and part of a regulatory mess that traces back past the 1996 and 1934 telecoms acts, all the way to the… Continue reading
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Quote du jour
David Pryce on Live Government: For the first time in modern industrial society, governments have the chance to realise the potential embodied in Bill Joy’s observation that there will always be more smart people outside government than within it… Continue reading
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Principles before politics
Phil Windley, in The Conservative View on Guantanamo: “…a position consistent with basic conservative philosophy would argue for human rights and due process — not against it.” It’s good that thoughtful conservatives like Phil are examining what went wrong with an administration that turned out to be conservative in label and loyalty, but not in… Continue reading
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Tweet on
I’m at the WBUR open house “tweetup”, where I just learned about Tweetworks from Mike Langford. Thus the lego-like greater Twitter add-on zone grows. Continue reading
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Long Tail vs. Wrong Tale
After Murad Ahmed wrote Citizen journalists told to stop using Twitter to update on Bombay attacks in TimesOnline, and David Stephenson blogged a similar concern, Bruce Schneier responded with Communications During Terrorist Attacks are Not Bad. Specifically, This fear is exactly backwards. During a terrorist attack — during any crisis situation, actually — the… Continue reading