Electionline.org has issued a preliminary report assessing the performance of voting technology and administration in the recent election, which election law expert Rick Hasen calls “required reading.” The upshot: we didn’t have the meltdown that I’d worried about. But the report describes how we need to prepare for new problems and not only for those [...]
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Filed under: Scholarship, Voting
There is a nice story in today’s Christian Science Monitor about online identity management (which quotes me, but is good anyway). The author, Christian Lupsa, surveys three services with very different areas of focus — underscoring in the process how malleable and undefined the notion of “identity management” remains: ClaimId allows users to tag online [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Digital Media, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Microsoft, Privacy, Search Engines, Security
In my former life, I spent ten years as a litigator, the bulk of it as a Supreme Court and appellate specialist. Experienced practitioners will generally warn you about reading too much into the statements that appellate judges make at oral argument as a basis for predicting how they’re going to rule in a case. [...]
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Filed under: Court Decisions, Media, Patents
Mary Dudziak, a law professor at USC specializing in legal history, has launched Legal History Blog. Seems like a great addition to the ever-growing ranks of law professor blogs.
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Filed under: Blogging, Law School, Scholarship
Move over, Duran Duran. Step aside, Mark Warner. The newest real-world individual to adopt an avatar and speak to the virtual world of Second Life will be none other than the Honorable Richard Posner, whom I describe to my civil procedure students as the most influential American judge not on the Supreme Court since Learned [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Court Decisions, Digital Media, Internet & Society, Law School, Scholarship, Virtual Worlds
Andy Ihnatko is none too impressed with Microsoft’s new Zune portable media player. His review essay in what the rest of us think of as Roger Ebert’s newspaper declares the Zune “just plain dreadful,” “absurd,” “immune to success,” and “about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.” And that is just in [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Digital Media, Media, Microsoft
Exciting and surprising good news from the world of copyright law: the Librarian of Congress has approved an exception to the anti-circumvention rules of the DMCA that prevented film and media studies professors from copying clips of DVDs for use in class. This legal obstacle to an educational use of digital content was one of [...]
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Filed under: Berkman, Copyright, Digital Media, Education & Copyright, Encryption, Intermediaries, Media, Security, Software
There has been tons of discussion, on this blog and more generally, about the great degree to which our private information is now available on the internet to anyone who cares to look (on our blog alone, see e.g. Tim’s thoughts here and here, mine here, and Derek’s here). As a result of this phenomenon, [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Blogging, Digital Media, international, Internet & Society, Privacy, Search Engines, Social Networking
Tomorrow, at 10:30AM (Eastern Standard Time), I’ll be chatting on-line about cyber-censorship at the U.S. Department of State’s Web site – you can find more details here. Hope to see you there!
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Filed under: Filtering, Internet & Society
I was catching up on the back issues of Wired scattered around my house and there in the September issue (the one with Beck on the cover) I found an article by Charles C. Mann that started out thoughtful but ended up maddening. The story dissected the threat posed by splogs (and link farms and [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Blogging, Digital Media, Filtering, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Privacy, Security, Spam