Views Archive
A Pirate's Life For Me
In the current issue of Wired, Lawrence Lessig, the defender of Fair Use, calls the bluff of the current media industry, dragging their dark pasts into public view. He writes,”If piracy means using the creative property of others without their…
Steam-Powered Spacecraft
Steam engines seem like a distinctly 19th-century technology when compared to 21st-century spacecraft. Yet, designers are turning to steam engines of a sort for use on spacecraft. Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL), a British developer of microspacecraft, has successfully tested…
Found Poetry of the Broadcast Flag
Lois C. Ambash took my article Losing Control of Your TV and created a poem with it:LOSING CONTROLNot that I would ever do such a thing.Of course, that’s all history trying to putthe technological genieback in the bottle.It’s a messy…
Ring Tone Nation
Okay, I’ll fess up right here and admit that I paid $2 to download a ring tone of the Cheap Trick song, “I Want You to Want Me.” And I paid another couple bucks to get a Grateful Dead ring…
Who Blogs? And How Careful Are They?
Mostly men (63 percent) who are Caucasian (79 percent), between the ages of 21 and 40 (75 percent), have a college or advanced degree (85 percent), and have been blogging for a year or more (67 percent). That’s according to…
A Peer-to-peer Trojan Horse
A new “Trojan horse” program called Phatbot is spreading across Windows computers connected to the Internet, employing a range of nefarious tactics including some borrowed from the world of peer-to-peer file sharing systems such as Kazaa and the original Napster….
Girl Scouting, The eBay Way
Confession time. When I was in high school, I was an Eagle Scout. (The Scout inside me wants to correct this and say I am an Eagle Scout, since once you achieve the rank it sticks with you. yada yada)….
Melting Through Europa
Europa, the large icy moon of Jupiter, is one of the more interesting worlds in the solar system because scientists believe that an ocean of liquid water–which could harbor life–may exist beneath the moon’s icy crust. Reaching any ocean, though,…
FBI Wants to Tap Everything
In a story with far-reaching implications but that has seen surprsingly little attention in the mainstream media, Declan McCullagh reports in C|Net that the FBI is seeking to broadly expand its abilities to wiretap data networks, including DSL lines, cable…
EPIC Celebrates Freedom of Information Day
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has posted a gallery of FOIA responses detailing the results of the litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. Specific items of interest are:-Details of Northwest Airlines providing passenger data on millions of people to…