If you were watching TV and a show came on called How to Hack Computers and Commit Credit Card Fraud with a lead commercial from Bank of America, you might think there’s something amiss.  Like, where does the network get off airing a show specifically teaching people how to commit crimes?  And did BofA really mean to be the sponsor?  ...

It is a chronically repeated theme—and therefore a widely held misconception—that the DMCA is solely a mechanism for rights holders to unilaterally and unequivocally remove content from the Web “without due process.” In fact, this belief is so deeply ingrained that just citing the acronym by some journalists and bloggers is sufficient to denote censorship for many readers. We encounter ...

“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 ...

I have to direct readers’ attention to this blog post by composer and cellist Zoë Keating.  It is the clearest articulation I have yet read about the rock-and-hard-place terms demanded of artists who are considering participation in YouTube’s paid streaming service Music Key.  Keating outlines some of the non-negotiable terms she doesn’t like, for instance that her entire catalog becomes fair game ...

First of all, name if you can the serious competitors of any of the following: Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Google. Go back ten years, name the biggest sites on the web, and you might notice that some of those names are either gone or really quite small compared to the dominant sites today. It isn’t even necessarily sinister, but it is a fact that the ...

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