Loose E-mail, Fast E-mail

(With apologies to Melville) The Wall Street Journal notes a career-enhancing moment by an executive at Carat International, who sent an e-mail with confidential information about restructuring (= large-scale firings) to the entire firm, rather than the (more limited) intended recipients. Fortunately, Carat’s IT department managed to “pull back” the message (known to geeks as [...]

Free Wi-Fi and Forbidden Pants

For 10 more days, I’m a resident of Oakland County, Michigan, which has just pulled the plug on its experiment with free municipal wi-fi. The problem? Cost (duh). The county didn’t want to sink taxpayer money into the project, and the bandwidth provider, MichTel, seems to have miscalculated its likely profit margins: it’s losing $100K [...]

The Next Domino: Qwest filters the Web

I wrote posts discussing the agreement between ISPs and the State of New York to cordon off Usenet to reduce access to child porn (at the cost of serious overblocking), and noting that states such as California were launching copycat efforts. Now, the latest domino to fall: Qwest has agreed to block access to known [...]

California Also Comes Out Against Child Porn

Recently, after New York Attorney General Cuomo browbeat 3 major ISPs into dropping large chunks of Usenet in the name of reducing access to child porn, I predicted that other states would rapidly hop on the bandwagon. California - always envious of New York’s position as a trendsetter - has jumped on. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger [...]

Round 2: Time Warner Gets It Wrong, and the French Follow the Model

Update: I should have read more carefully: Time Warner and Verizon confirmed they’re not going to block any Web sites. I’ve changed text below to reflect that.
Yesterday, I posted a quick analysis of the new policy (using the methodology I propose in a new draft paper) undertaken by Sprint, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable at [...]

Filtering, American-Style: Verizon, Sprint, Time Warner Cable to Block Child Porn

Filtering: it’s not just for China anymore. (Or Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea…) Internet censorship via technological means is a growing trend, and now it’s surfaced in the U.S. Three major ISPs have agreed, under pressure from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, to block access to Usenet groups and Web [...]

N.J. Constitution Requires Subpoena for ISP Data

The New Jersey Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision on Monday ruling that the state’s constitution goes further than the United States Constitution by requiring a warrant before the government can obtain subscriber information from an information service provider (such as linking a name to an IP address). Under controlling Fourth Amendment precedent, individuals [...]

Companies Enabling Censorship

Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing writes a great op-ed in the New York Times on the use of American technology, from companies such as Secure Computing and Websense, in helping authoritarian countries censor the Internet. (Presumably space was too short for her to mention Cisco in China, or Fortinet, which both helps Burma and misled ONI [...]

AT&T: Safe, But Mocked

Works in more places… I suppose the fake place name would be NSFrancisPying. (Hat tip to an anonymous friend!)
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the Sixth Circuit’s ruling that the plaintiffs in the NSA suit here in Michigan lacked standing. The hard part, of course, is it’s extremely difficult to prove standing [...]

More Thoughts on Facebook’s “Social Ads”

My post from yesterday on Facebook’s Social Ads program got picked up by bloggers at the New York Times and CNet, so I’ve heard some more feedback than usual. Here’s a few more thoughts on the issue in response to themes emerging from the conversation:

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