All good geeks are familiar with Star Trek’s Borg, a species of cybernetic organisms who lack all sense of individuality, linked in a collective hive mind. While I think some of the various Trek novels have offered origin stories (not considered “canonical”), none of the TV shows or movies have offered an explanation of where […]

[Read more →]

Glenn Reynolds can’t grok how nouveau-Julian Dave Weigel, writing at Hit and Run, can escape the massive cognitive dissonance that, apparently, ought to be involved in believing both that it’s fine for The New York Times to name the town in which Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney vacation, and that it’s dirty pool for irate […]

[Read more →]

So I’m at this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference here in Washington, D.C. where I was chatting briefly with author Rob Hamadi and law prof Daniel Solove about how some businesses’ practices effectively train their customers to be ripped off. Here’s an example: A while back, I lost a credit card and needed it […]

[Read more →]

A recent thread over on Hit and Run drove home the point that a lot of people think complaints about DRM and policies like the broadcast flag come down to thin fig leaves for a desire to pirate music. (It also surprised me at how thoroughly some people have bought the industry line that file-sharing […]

[Read more →]

The advice I got in reply to my post below has allowed me to expand the functionality of Firefox so that I can now almost make it my only browser. The only thing I still can’t figure out is why my backend, running Movable Type 3.2, displays just fine in Firefox, while the Hit and […]

[Read more →]

So, ideally, I’d just be using one Web browser for everything. But I end up using both Firefox and Safari, because while I generally prefer the former, there are some significant gaps in what Firefox does that require me to switch to Safari for certain things. Here’s the breakdown: Firefox beats Safari The status-bar search […]

[Read more →]

So I just replaced my moribund cell phone with a snazzy new one, requiring the ritual Re-entry of the Address Book. Most of the folks in there, unsurprisingly, live in New York or D.C.—the two cities in which I’ve spent the last seven years. But I noticed that the area codes on folks’ phone numbers […]

[Read more →]

Roomie Tim Lee has a piece up at AFF’s Brainwash arguing that Grokster shouldn’t get a free pass under the Supreme Court’s Betamax decision for facilitating piracy by users of its p2p network. Here’s the nub of his argument: [I]n the Betamax decision, the court considered whether the “record” function of the VCR–not the VCR […]

[Read more →]