Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Internet Privacy and What Happens When You Try to Opt OutJanet Vertesi tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet: The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, …Friday, April 25, 2014
Philadelphia School District releases budget dataPublic entities don’t often have the budget needed to attract top talent from the private sector. But exposing data to public manipulation and scrutiny, aside from fulfilling a duty of transparency too often ignored, allows anyone interested in …Sunday, April 20, 2014
Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne’s blogJoel Gascoigne is a co-founder and the CEO of Buffer, the most powerful tool for sharing and scheduling stuff across multiple social networks. It’s a great service and one I use almost daily. But more importantly, Joel’s thoughtful blog is a great way to read …Saturday, April 19, 2014
Gabriel García Márquez on life as literatureThe recently deceased García Márquez, in an interview published in the winter 1981 issue of The Paris Review: My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was …Thursday, April 17, 2014
Om Malik on digital advertising Is a page being auto-refreshed on an open tab in your browser really useful “attention?” I don’t think so. I saw this first-hand in a previous job. Here is a pro tip: You can be sure much of your traffic is open-and-forget (and therefore useless to advertisers) if …Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Plagiarism in Legal BriefsGerard Magliocca, writing at Concurring Opinions: If I cited [someone else’s] brief in an attempt to fairly attribute the source when I made the same point, then I’d look like an uncreative doofus. If I did not cite the brief, though, then that would (or could) be …Monday, April 14, 2014
You don’t have to tweet for Twitter to consider you an active userYoree Koh reporting at The Wall Street Journal: Twitter said it has 241 million monthly active users the last three months of 2013. Twitter defines a monthly active user as an account that logs in at least once a month. By …Sunday, April 13, 2014
Government agency NTIS charges for docs you can get online for free, loses money doing itGood thing a bipartisan bill aims to end that embarrassing situation. The things the National Technology Information Service does which don’t involve charging hundreds of dollars for free stuff and bleeding …Friday, April 11, 2014
The DATA Act and legislative definitionsAndrea Peterson reports1 at The Washington Post the Senate has passed a bill, the DATA Act, which would require federal financial data be published in a common format. It sounds like a great idea and something those nerdy data journalists are going to love. …Thursday, April 10, 2014
Margaret Sullivan takes her NYT colleagues to task like it’s her job, because it isMargaret Sullivan is Public Editor at the New York Times. She is tasked with taking the Times to task when it falls short, overreaches or otherwise misses the mark. And sometimes it does miss the mark, like when …Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Heartbleed: When no encryption is better than bad encryptionAlex Hern reports for The Guardian this disturbing fact about the recently disclosed OpenSSL bug, now two years old and pervasive: servers vulnerable to Heartbleed are less secure than they would be if they simply had no encryption at all. …Tuesday, April 8, 2014
“Notable toupee”I wanted to share this because it’s a funny phrase, and I think it’s important to keep an eye out for humor, intentional or otherwise, in civil litigation filings. Film studio Paramount Pictures, in its motion to dismiss a defamation suit by a plaintiff alleging the film The Wolf of …Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Aggregation is plagiarismAggregation is plagiarism: I couldn’t help but aggregate (though not plagiarize) this link Jim Dalrymple aggregated to a post by a Mr. Joe Wilcox about how aggregation is, well, plagiarism. It’s true, now that you’ve read this you don’t need to read the original to know what …Friday, March 28, 2014
Facebook buys virtual reality company OculusFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting virtual reality will follow mobile as the next major communication paradigm. While I’m not sure that’s true with VR tech alone, the massive user base and data stores of Facebook, used wisely despite a minefield of …Thursday, March 27, 2014
Listen: 99% InvisibleThis week’s featured podcast is 99% Invisible is “a tiny radio show about design,” by Roman Mars. If you think often about design, you’ll love every episode of this one. If you don’t think often about design, 99% Invisible will make you think often about design. Mars doesn’t …Sunday, March 2, 2014
Tim Cook and the same question When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he hammered them with questions until he was satisfied. “Why is that?” “What do you mean?” “I don’t understand. Why are you not making it clear?” He was known to ask the same exact question 10 times in a row. Once upon a time …Saturday, February 22, 2014
Disgraced Scientist Granted U.S. Patent for Work Found to be FraudulentIt’s hard to believe this patent should ever have been approved by a patent examiner acting in good faith, especially considering the criminal convictions standing in stark contradiction of the purported “inventor’s” affidavit of …Friday, February 21, 2014
Get off your assIt makes for funny headlines, like this one I came up with three years ago, but the science just keeps coming: sitting too much damages human health. The troubling part is much of the onus for a solution is on businesses employing us all, who may not have much incentive to contribute …Thursday, February 20, 2014
DHS wants to track license platesICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen, on the license plate tracking system recently proposed by the Department of Homeland Security: It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the …Monday, February 17, 2014
CrossFit sends trademark takedown demand The lesson here: the Digital Millennium COPYRIGHT Act contains no enforcement mechanism for TRADEMARK rights.Sunday, February 16, 2014
What is Intellectual Property Law?It’s not surprising that more scholarship self-identifying as IP-focused is about patents. After all, they drive much of commerce and innovation (and arguably the problems with the two) in the industrial and technology sectors. It’s worth noting though that, unlike …Saturday, February 15, 2014
Sens. Cruz and Lee Introduce State Marriage Defense ActAt this point the anti-Constitutionalists are trolling themselves. A choice bit from this piece of garbage: The bill will ensure the federal government gives the same deference to the 33 states that define marriage as the union between one man …Friday, February 14, 2014
Facebook Opens Up LGBTQ-Friendly Gender Identity And Pronoun OptionsFollowing up on my recent tirade, this made me happy. Facebook has massive amounts of influence, and is influenced by massive amounts of people, and changes like this are a positive step forward in how technology reconciles with …Friday, February 14, 2014
Kansas anti-gay segregation bill is an abomination.Mr. Stern’s headline sums it up very well. If you don’t believe it can really be that bad, read the PDF. It is that bad. Ignorance is one thing, but open hostility like this cannot stand and anyone who supports this bill commits the intellectual …Sunday, February 9, 2014
$12M CEO vs. $1M babyThe wife of an AOL employee, commenting on the company’s chief executive using her child’s premature birth as an example of why the company was cutting benefits: I take issue with how he reduced my daughter to a “distressed baby” who cost the company too much money. How he …Thursday, February 6, 2014
What is the maximum constitutional duration of a traffic stop?The answer is, perhaps unsuprisingly, not clear. But while too few people know you don’t have to allow a vehicle search, the power differential during a traffic stop probably overrides abstract constitutional notions. As the article says, …Saturday, January 25, 2014
Mac turns 30Steve Jobs, in 1985: We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people — as remarkable as the telephone. The remarkable thing is that, at least for people my age, ~30, as old as the Mac itself, the computer is far more remarkable than …Sunday, January 19, 2014
Who cares if I think this link leads to a silly blog post at Forbes.com?No one. Least of all I. I just wrote too many words about why I think the post I link to above isn’t worth the bandwidth it’s transmitted over, but I was being tired and petty and shitting on the good-natured opinion of someone …Saturday, January 18, 2014
500 Words A DayMG Siegler, general partner at Google Ventures, TechCrunch columnist, and tech writer: This year, my plan is to write roughly 500 words a day in the form of a short post here on this site. Good idea. Me too (although I’m a little late to punch so far).Friday, January 3, 2014
Developing the Law of Cyber WarfareGood article by lawyer, legal journalist and fellow Temple Law alum Amaris Elliott-Engel. The law, or lack of it, as it relates to cyber warfare is near the top of my list of legal interests.