Friday, March 22, 2002
Hollings Goes for Tech's Throat, and Your Rights
Dan GillmorTo protect the entertainment industry in changing times, Hollywood water-carriers like U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings are happy to stifle free speech and curb fair use in addition to whacking technological innovation (other than innovation the entertainment crowd finds acceptable).
Church v Google, round 2
John HilerI've noticed a lot of people celebrating over this
defeatof the Church of Scientology. As much as Google's reaction is a good thing, it's actually just a superficial development. The core issue hasn't changed one bit.
Submit Comments Opposing Technology Mandates
Imagine a world where all digital media technology is either mandatory or forbidden — Senator Fritz Hollings and a cabal of Hollywood entertainment interests are cooking up a set of laws aimed at conjuring this apocalyptic world into existence.
Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders
Declan McCullaghAmerica's programmers, engineers and sundry bit-heads have not yet figured out how much a new copyright bill will affect their livelihood. When they do, watch for an angry Million Geek March to storm Capitol Hill.
Discussion at Slashdot.
What Hollings' Bill Would Do
Declan McCullaghA bill introduced by Senate Commerce Chairman Fritz Hollings would prohibit the sale or distribution of nearly any technology — unless it features copy-protection standards to be set by the federal government.
The Oscars get Napsterised
The lesson from the music business is that, however hard they try, the studios will not be able to stop copies of movies from being downloaded from the Internet. What Hollywood has to do is find a reasonable balance between protecting revenues and keeping consumers happy. Striking that balance will not be easy.
Fighting for Your Copy Rights
Lisa M. Bowman
Helping lead the charge is Joe Kraus, founder and former executive of Excite.com. Kraus has launched a new group, DigitalConsumer.org, designed to fight what critics depict as Hollywood's attempt to erode consumer rights in the name of fighting piracy.
Top-100 Links from Weblogs
Dave Winer
A new page on Weblogs.Com, rebuilt every hour, records all the links and ranks the top 100.
Google Restores Church Links
Reuters
Google restored a website critical of the Church of Scientology on its search engine Thursday while free-speech advocates slammed the company for removing the site in the first place.
How to Download and Swap Themes
Russ Lipton
While you can write your own templates, Userland supplies a group of themes when you purchase Radio. You can also download themes that other members of the community have packaged and swap from your current theme to that new theme. This topic explains how to download and swap such themes.
Nice! Except that this link is 403 Forbidden...
Saving Breeds That Are Historic, Tasty and Also Kind of Cute
James Gorman
Modern farming and meat production rely on just a few varieties and breeds, and the old ones are fading away.
The quote that I pulled out is not really the main point of the article, but it reminded me of one of the axioms that I use to evaluate systems of almost any kind; i.e., that monocultures lead to a single point of failure.
Where Old Macs Go Off to Thrive
Leander KahneyIn the middle of the shop floor is a Mac SE 30, a computer so old it doesn't even have a hard drive. But thanks to a lot of money and the guts of a modern iMac, the SE 30 has been converted to run Mac OS X, which normally runs on hardware less than a couple of years old.
Ack! Nobody's getting their hands on my old SE (although at one point I considered swapping the motherboard with one from an SE30, but then I got distracted...)
Scientology and Google
Dave Winer
We're getting the first real demo of a nightmarish scenario, a constitutional one, set up by the DMCA. And it looks like it's going to get much worse before it gets better.
Church v. Google
John Hiler
How the Church of Scientology is forcing Google to censor its critics
An outstanding summary of Google versus Scientology. Makes the point that ...deleting information from the Google Cache would be like stealing holy icons out of the Vatican.
The Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act
Cory Doctorow
The CBDTPA (let's call it the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act and have done with it) requires technologists to arrive at a trumped-upconsensuswith Hollywood Political Officers before they can bring any new products to market. Thisconsensus, reached at lawyerpoint, establishes what features every product that can store, trasnmit, display or manipulate digital files must have and which files it must not have: everything not mandatory is verboten.
No Guns In The Cockpits
Charley ReeseMaybe I'm missing something, but I don't see that a pilot shooting a terrorist in a cockpit is any more dangerous than air marshals having a gunfight out amongst the passengers. And certainly a gun in the cockpit is less dangerous than being blown out of the sky by an F-16.
