It was such a busy Summer that I never got a chance to write about the Supreme Court’s June decision in the cyberstalking case Counterman v. Colorado. The story caught my attention when legal scholar and president of Cyber Civil Rights Initiative Mary Anne Franks tweeted, “the Supreme Court has just decreed that stalking is free speech protected by the ...
Well, it finally happened. After criticizing the worst effects of social media for over 10 years, I was finally hacked, locked out of my Facebook account, and (I assume) will be unable to restore any of the material or connections going back to 2007. I’m sharing the details in this post because what I now believe to be a phishing-style ...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that among the 2023 recipients of the EFF Award (formerly the Pioneer Award), it will honor Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan this September. The Russian-based Sci-Hub is an enterprise-scale pirate site specifically built to host scientific papers about which the EFF states: Through Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in ...
Many creators feel very strongly that “training” AI models with unlicensed, copyrighted works is unjust—not least because generative AIs built on their creativities will put some creators out of business while enriching more tech moguls. It is both insult and injury to see one’s work used, without consideration, to underwrite the mechanism of one’s own obsolescence. But regardless of how ...
We all know the mantra that says it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. According to Quote Investigator, the earliest published version of this sentiment appeared in 1846, but QI’s editors believe the notion is older than that and cannot be attributed to any one source. Whatever its derivation or contexts in which it has been used over many decades, ...
