shouting loudly

At yesterday’s FCC hearing into Comcast’s practice of blocking BitTorrent traffic in Cambridge, Comcast hired several dozen seat warmers to reduce the number of critics who could get into the hearing.
The hearing was held at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. When Catherine Bracy, the Center’s administrative manager, opened the door to the hearing [...]

ROFLMAO. In case you didn’t know about xkcd, prepare to waste a lot of time and go there now.
(Non-hotlink here; credit to Lok)

Earlier this week, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously to adopt an opt-out open-access policy; unless professors file to opt out, their scholarship will be included in an online institutional repository.
Here is one Harvard librarian’s open-access glee over the new policy. Open-source evangelist Peter Suber also has a fistful of Harvard OA links [...]

Danah boyd has a great post examining the dangers of losing our online identities at the whims of corporate decisionmakers.
If we get our GMail/FaceBook/Yahoo! account hijacked, what can we do when the company deletes it and all our related data? If we’re connected, that’s one thing, but what about those who are not so fortunate?
There’s [...]

In a filing with the FCC (pdf), Comcast claims that, thanks to market competition and blogging watchdogs, there is no need for regulatory intervention to protect net neutrality.
The company’s recent discrimination against peer-to-peer traffic is the cause of the hearing. Last August, Comcast denied the charges (which were first documented on… drumroll please… a blog), [...]

Bad news, as the Senate overwhelmingly voted to legalize President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and also decided not to amend a bill that would prevent telecom companies from getting immunity for giving the government access to phone records of millions of people.A quote from an article from Wired that talks about this reads:
“The bill, which [...]

Today, Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced HR 5353, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (pdf).
For more, see SaveTheInternet.com or CNet.

The TSA blog, Evolution of Security, is an honest-to-goodness attempt to communicate with the public and (here’s the shocker) listen to feedback.
The bloggers are employees who are free to write in a casual blogging style. One made a joke about heavy drinking in New Orleans on Fat Tuesday. Responses range from sardonic or hostile to [...]

In Comcast’s new Terms of Service, the company explicitly admits that it degrades peer-to-peer traffic as a means of reducing their network load.
The company also admits that they will kick off end users who use (what they determine to be) too much bandwidth:
The Service is for personal and non-commercial residential use only. Therefore, Comcast reserves [...]

Danah boyd has an excellent call to arms: Help kill the closed-access journal model.
This makes a lot of sense. Academics do almost all of the work for free. Surely, copy editing and webhosting can’t cost enough to justify the prices our libraries are paying.
We’ve all been far too complicit in a system in which publishers [...]