Archive for July, 2006

Comcast: Incompetent, Malicious, and Censorious?

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

Comcast is, by most accounts, a middling broadband provider and a poor corporate citizen (see linkfest below). It also looks like they use their power to censor critical speech. Last month, a YouTube user posted this video of a Comcast tech sleeping on the job. In titling over the video, the ...

Learning by remixing

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

See this post by Henry Jenkins, discussing how remixing in the classroom can help teach students media literacy skills.

Responding to Felten (& Co.), squared

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

My response to Ed Felten’s policy recommendations (Felten suggests we wait and see before imposing network neutrality mandates), has garnered its own response. Tim Lee of TechLiberation has posted two responses (first) (second), the first of which becomes part of Felten’s sensible follow-up, and the second of which references this ...

Responding to Felten’s net neutrality paper

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

Ed Felten has just released a paper entitled “Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality” (pdf). It’s a reasonably solid introduction to the subject that should be read, especially for those who do not understand the technical issues. Prof. Felten is to be commended for his thoughtful input on this important ...

Telecom: Repeating failed promises

Monday, July 10th, 2006

In this interview from today, Brooklyn-based telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick insists that big telecom has systematically failed to deliver on its promises to the public and to policymakers. In the early and mid 1990's, telecommunications companies promised to build networks that could allow them to compete with cable. We were all ...

France passes “worst copyright law in Europe”

Monday, July 10th, 2006

This NewsForge article speaks for itself: "'Worst copyright law in Europe' passed in France". Link credit goes to New England Geek.

Remix vid mocks MPAA anti-piracy commercials

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Somebody has done a brilliant job mocking the MPAA anti-piracy commercials (.mov file). If you haven't seen the original, download it here (also a .mov, hosted on this MPAA propaganda website). I'm glad to see somebody do this, because the MPAA propaganda makes me angry. Perhaps worst of all, every time ...

PK’s Stevens MP3 hits blogosphere

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

Last Wednesday, June 28, during the network neutrality debate at the markup of Sen. Ted Stevens' massive telecom bill, many of us at Public Knowledge listened anxiously to the streaming audio from the Hill. I placed my digital voice recorder on Alex Curtis' PowerBook speaker so that we could get ...

MS draws legal, PR heat over anti-piracy tool

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

Microsoft, accused of tricking users into installing spyware on their Win XP boxes in the name of fighting piracy, is now defending itself against a sizable legal and PR offensive. The embattled program, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), logs on to the internet and connects to the Microsoft databases, without the user’s ...

Bill’s new static website

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

It's official: Bill Herman is back online at BillyHerman.com.