I feel a little bit bad picking on Washington Post tech writer Caitlin Dewey as much as I have already, but it’s probably not as much as I would if I read her column with any purposeful frequency. Unfortunately, given the subjects I write about, people like to send me links to her articles. And I read them. And then ...
A few posts ago, I reported that the major lobbying muscle in the Internet industry backs a patent “reform” bill (HR 9) called the Innovation Act. I argued in that post that while this reform claims to eliminate nuisance “patent trolls” from clogging up the system with dubious claims, what it really does is eliminate competition from the market. Because, ...
A feature story for this week’s New York Times Magazine is titled The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t. In the article, writer Steven Johnson concludes that neither the economic nor the cultural losses in the creative industries, which were predicted to result from the digital revolution, have come to pass. Just as lesser pundits have previously declared in blogs and industry PR ...
At last count, the EFF has over 40 attorneys on staff* and lord only knows how many communications minions. So, if this organization is going to maintain its loose relationship with reality, they might at least take a meeting and invent some fresh exaggerations. But no. SOPA is just too provocative a buzzword to let go. And as part of ...
“We the consumers are outgunned and outmanned. We don’t have the tools needed to protect ourselves. While you are still better off having a 2013 anti-virus program, it won’t protect you against zero-day malware anymore than the polio vaccine will protect you from Ebola.” That quote is from the introduction of a new report published last week by the Digital ...
