Last week’s squib on net neutrality provoked replies from Ezra and my two favorite Caucasian Lees: Tom and Tim (no relation). First, I want to concur strongly with Tim’s general point: As Robert Frost reminded us, all metaphor breaks down somewhere. (Otherwise, one supposes, we’d call it “literal description.”) Certainly the history of common carrier […]

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Today’s strangely hypnotic timewasting widget: AIMFight. It’s stupidly simple. You type in two AOL Instant Messenger buddy names. The site then checks the population of users currently signed in to see who has been buddy-listed by the most people, out to three degrees, so you get more juice out of being listed by people who […]

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When Howard Beale vowed to kill himself during his evening news broadcast, it was a scandal, a ratings bonanza, an outlandish skewering of an amoral and sensationalist medium. But reality, to say nothing of reality TV, long ago matched the most fantastic satirical excesses Paddy Chayefsky’s imagination could conjure and, barely pausing to savor the […]

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Via Ann at Feministing comes this article on Canadian research on the (apparently growing?) phenomenon of young women being pressured to share racy images of themselves online. Presumably these are intended for private viewing, but often end up circulating on the Internet. Obviously, this is incredibly sleazy behavior and a criminal breach of trust. But […]

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By way of Boing Boing’s report on indie rockers jumping on the Net Neutrality bandwagon, I find this analogy from Craig “Craigslist” Newmark on the coming dark days of non-neutral nets: Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, […]

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It wouldn’t normally be noteworthy to learn that another tech expert thinks the Digital Millennium Copyright Act sucks… except perhaps when it’s the law’s principal architect.

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I don’t know whether we should be celebrating that a flagrantly unconstitutional law has been struck down or just dismayed that anyone had thought it might pass muster in the first place, but the Child Online Protection Act is, happily, no more. (As Kerry Howley predicted.)

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According to The Economist, Apple poobah Steve Jobs doesn’t like the noxious way iTunes cripples the songs it sells any more than the rest of us. Rather, he claims, the record companies made him do it. This seems fairly shortsighted on their part: Once you’ve released one CD of an album, convertible to unprotected MP3, […]

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Andrew Wiseman at DCist makes a plea for better listener-supported D.C. radio, along the lines of New York’s excellent WFMU noting: Demand clearly isn’t an issue, and as Marc Fisher points out, 3/4 of all Americans still listen to the radio, even with iPods, internet and satellite radio, and repetitive dreck from terrestrial stations. And […]

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Techdirt explains.

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