Censorship on the March

Today, you can’t get to The Oatmeal, or Dinosaur Comics, or XKCD, or (less importantly) Wikipedia. The sites have gone dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, America’s attempt to censor the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. This is part of a remarkable, distributed, coordinated protest effort, both [...]

Six Things Wrong with SOPA

America is moving to censor the Internet. The PROTECT IP and Stop Online Piracy Acts have received considerable attention in the legal and tech world; SOPA’s markup in the House occurs tomorrow. I’m not opposed to blacklisting Internet sites on principle; however, I think that thoughtful procedural protections are vital to doing so in a [...]

Copyright and Your Face

The Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop on facial recognition technology, such as Facebook’s much-hated system, and its privacy implications. The FTC has promised to come down hard on companies who abuse these capabilities, but privacy advocates are seeking even stronger protections. One proposal raised was to provide people with copyright in their faceprints [...]

De-lousing E-PARASITE

The House of Representatives is considering the disturbingly-named E-PARASITE Act. The bill, which is intended to curb copyright infringment on-line, is similar to the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act, but much much worse. It’s as though George Lucas came out with the director’s cut of “The Phantom Menace,” but added in another half-hour of Jar Jar [...]

Yet Another Facebook Privacy Apology

[UPDATE: A slightly different version of this post appears on Capital New York.] Last week, I participated in a meeting at Facebook headquarters, where the Future of Privacy Forum’s Advisory Board discussed privacy with some of the company’s leaders (more on that below). Now, just days later, they have another privacy problem brewing, and boy, [...]

Cybersecurity in Santa Clara

I’m here at Eric Goldman and Dan Hunter‘s great Works-in-Progress in Internet Law conference at Santa Clara Law. My talk is about my cybersecurity paper, Conundrum, which I’ll be posting to SSRN after incorporating feedback from the confab. I’m looking forward to David Opderbeck‘s piece as well, and just learned a lot about data anonymization [...]

The Irony: WikiLeaks Panel Video Publicly Available

Thanks to Rachel Miller, you can watch the video of the panel on WikiLeaks, and learn quite a bit about the archiving and records management profession to boot!

Egypt Goes Off the Net

Last night, Egypt severed its connections with the wider Internet. (Coverage from the New York Times and Global Voices, for example, and see coverage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarks.) There are at least two worrisome implications of this move. First, Egyptian protesters are using the Net to coordinate, and to keep in touch [...]

WikiThreats

Saturday Night Live has a great skit on Julian Assange. Any bit that includes the phrase “good-natured birds” has to be awesome, and it is. (Hat tip: Jen Schwartz, who knows her cybersecurity.)

Bashing Bosses on Facebook

Our own Bill McGeveran discusses how labor law, and corporate culture, will be reshaped by the advent of social media in today’s New York Times “Room for Debate.” And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go delete some Facebook posts.

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