shouting loudly

Following up the earlier story on the questionable legality of comedian Stephen Colbert’s presidential run, Comedy Central tells CNN the campaign is fully legal.

The first presidential candidate group on Facebook to gather one million members is 1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert. This makes Colbert’s group “the most popular political group on Facebook by far.” It’s twice as large as any other presidential groups on Facebook, including Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) (just under 400,000 members). [...]

The Register notes that while Manhunt 2 may have been effectively banned from distribution in UK stores by the British Board of Film Classification’s refusal to assign a rating (again), the game could still sell online, via direct download (link via Game Politics). Sound familiar? If you’re familiar with the regulatory history of the comic [...]

Comedian Stephen Colbert may soon need to get even less serious in his campaign for president. As ABC reports, Colbert’s ironic presidential bid may run afoul of campaign finance laws. He has already curtailed some activities–for instance, removing Doritos as a campaign sponsor–and the threat of enforcement may preclude him from attempting to get on [...]

On News.com, columnist Marguerite Reardon suggests <a href=”http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9802990-7.html”>wifi phones such as the iPhone may create demand for citywide wifi networks</a>, which send traffic at rapidly faster rates than even the fastest US mobile networks.

The Open Net Initiative has just produced a brief technical study of the Burmese government’s internet censorship, including a complete shutdown from September 29 through October 4. Allow me to spoil the report’s ending for you: While the [Burmese government] has exacerbated its legacy of massive human rights violations through this crackdown, many believe that [...]

Lawrence Lessig’s switch from copyfighting to fighting political corruption has made huge waves among copyright activists, many of whom were first driven to action by Lessig’s writings. I instantly agreed with his premises and thus supported his switch (ditto Ed Baker‘s quieter, impending switch from focusing on media policy to building theories of equality), but [...]

As mourned at the Citizen Media Law Project, the final House version of the bill (HR 2102) to protect reporters from revealing confidential sources was amended specifically to exclude unpaid journalists. Sadly, this amendment was proposed by the bill’s lead authors, Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Mike Pence (R-IN). Boucher is generally one of the few [...]

If you’ve ever tried to systematically study Google search results, you’ve probably grown frustrated with the lack of choices for customizing Google using the site’s preferences. I just discovered two tools that make these results eminently more usable. Both tools are scripts for Greasemonkey, a plugin that lets you deploy small Java scripts in Firefox. [...]

Here’s the other big copyright story of the day: Apple Cuts Price on DRM-Free Music to 99 Cents. This race to disarm is reminiscent of the 1980s, when the software industry flirted with command-and-control digital rights management technologies, only to realize they were punishing customers and therefore losing more business than they were protecting.