Castro; Dead, Zombie, or Animatronics?

The news is out that “It’s official: we can unequivocally declare that it wouldn’t be inaccurate to assume that there isn’t reason to not believe that Fidel Castro may or may not be dead (maybe)” Which is how the headline was submitted on Fark
If you want to keep up on what’s going on in [...]

09 f9: A Legal Primer … or … What is the AACS-LA’s Legal argument?

The AACS-LA made some news yesterday. Read about some of it here, here, and here, as well as the following from the EFF Deep Links section:
What is the AACS-LA’s argument? In its takedown letters, the AACS-LA claims that hosting the key violates the DMCA’s ban on trafficking in circumvention devices. The DMCA provides that:
No person [...]

Net Neutrality

save the internet

Professor Lawrence “RW” Lessig’s “The Withering of the Net”

Professor Lawrence “RW” Lessig’s “The Withering of the Net”

On June 16, 2006, Professor Lawrence Lessig gave a talk at the Center for American Progress entitled “The Withering of the Net: How DC Pathologies are Undermining the Growth and Wealth of the Net.” This talk was the second in a series of three. The first talk [...]

Has your video been removed from YouTube based on a bogus Viacom takedown?

Unfairly Caught in Viacom’s Dragnet? Let the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) know!

Well, with its 100,000 DMCA takedown notices aimed at YouTube users, now it’s Viacom that is netting its share of dolphins. Among the 100,000 videos targeted for takedowns was a home movie shot in a BBQ joint, a film trailer by a documentarian, and [...]

Turn your blog into a book, part II

Gina Trapani has posted Pat II of her Geek to Live instructional series:

Geek to Live: Turn your blog into a book, part II

Part I of How to turn your blog into a book covered the basics for blogging your book idea, getting an agent, and drafting your book proposal. Now you’ve got 300 pages due [...]

Turn your blog into a book

Part one of a multipart article at Lifehacker…

Geek to Live: Turn your blog into a book, part I

There’s a world of difference between being a blogger and a book author, but more writers are wearing both hats these days. It’s not surprising that pro writers are becoming bloggers, but “amateur” bloggers getting book deals are [...]

Banned by GooTube

Well one of my GooTube uploaded videos has been relegated to the bit bucket. And I didn’t even get a “strongly worded letter” from the GooTube management.
All Americans should be free to express themselves in song! Satire is a form of political expression and speech such as this should be protected, never suppressed or censored!

And so it Continues: YouTube Adds “Hate Speech” Flag To Its Videos

This is not good…Who defines “Hate Speech? Are we to depend on the “wisdom of the group” to regulate what “is” and “is not” appropriate speech? Browse Digg.com for a few minutes and let me know how you think it will go.

YouTube Adds “Hate Speech” Flag To Its Videos
Posted by Noel Sheppard on [...]

And so it begins: YouTube nukes 30,000 videos

YouTube has removed nearly 30,000 videos after being contacted by the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers.

And so it begins: YouTube nukes 30,000 videos
Long before Google swooped in to buy up YouTube there were questions about the video sharing site’s future. In particular, concerns relating to copyright infringement have persisted: can YouTube [...]

YouTube Tags Political Video as “Inappropriate”

Wasting no time joining those champions of free speech, Google; YouTube has also now gotten into the business of censoring political speech. But they don’t limit the censorship to China.
First amendment? What’s that?
This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community.
Well the video will make you [...]

Fight DRM: Ten things you can do today

“If consumers even know there’s a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we’ve already failed” - Disney Executive.

Defeating DRM is all about awareness.

The direct actions that we have taken are all about this. Today we are asking you to let the people around you know that DRM is bad for our society. [...]

Free-Market Science vs Government Science

Free-Market Science vs. Government Science By: George Reisman
In a free market, science originates in the minds of individual scientists, who have studied and thought about problems that interest them and who from time to time arrive at new insights, which they develop further and verify. State-sponsored science is the destroyer of science. If science is [...]

Penn and Teller: On Gun Control

UPDATE: In Sweden they can download all four seasons of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! That’s right, the complete series (49 Episodes) right off the internet … Imagine that!
UPDATE 1: It looks like this video was pulled. Google video has censored this video and YouTube says “This video has been removed at the request of [...]

Reuters Caught With It’s Electronic Pants Down

This weekend Reuters was caught with its electronic pants pulled all the way down. Another big media embarrassment that illustrates how much the “News Game” is changed in this brave new millennium.
Accuracy In Media reports that this photo may be the actual original. Was it an Associated Press photo before it was plagiarized [...]

Google Admits To Having Compromised It’s Principles

So how is that Google China thing working out for you there Brin?
Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.
BUT Everybody else was doing it!…
Google had agreed to the censorship demands [...]

Kerry Opens Mouth and Inserts Foot

Kerry gets screwed by bloggers after they publish his “Off the record” comments.
Here is the link to the lefty blogger that betrayed Kerry … with friends like that, who needs enemies?

Failed presidential candidate John Kerry blasted President Bush on Thursday as a “criminal” who has been “looting the country.”
The Massachusetts Democrat offered the incendiary [...]

Record it on Your Phone … Upload it to YouTube

YouTube Allows Video Sharing From Devices
NEW YORK - You can now bypass your computer completely to share your video with the world. YouTube Inc., one of the Internet's leading video-sharing sites, is accepting clips directly from mobile phones and personal digital assistants with built-in video capabilities.
Bands can share footage of performances from the road; protesters [...]

Google’s latest evil, Advertising Fraud

I previously posted here about google and the litany of questionable decisions and actions that Google has been part and parcel to over the years.

Graphic courtesy of The Consumerist
Google has been criticized for installing “cookies”; for offering a reverse-lookup phone directory that can be used to find a person’s address; for filtering out too [...]

694 Million Potential Readers of this blog

Worldwide survey estimates 694 mln adult Web users
Seeking to standardize global online measurements, comScore Networks Inc. introduced on Friday a new global survey with an estimate that 694 million people, age 15 or higher, used the Internet during March, or around 14 percent of adults.
So increasing blog readership should be a cake walk!

Yahoo stock, and the internet search engine roadmap

From the Joe Duck blog:
I’ve been waiting for a “sign” to buy Yahoo (well, some SHARES of Yahoo ) which seems due for a huge surge when their publisher network revenues kick in later this year. Yahoo has more traffic than Google but you sure wouldn’t know it from the buzz, even among industry insiders. [...]

Regressor luddites in the recording industry

A fine example of our favorite regressor luddites “the recording industry” desperately clinging to the past, but now with even more draconian govenrment help.
Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill
For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium [...]

Hints of the new economy

Man using Web to barter paper clip for house

Kyle MacDonald had a red paper clip and a dream: Could he use the community power of the Internet to barter that paper clip for something better, and trade that thing for something else — and so on and so on until he had a house?
After a [...]

Beware the regressors!

The Time Traveler …
by Dan Simmons
The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid [...]

A new MIND HACK

Cal vs. USC Basketball Prank.
Victoria was a hoax UCLA co-ed, created by Cal’s Rally Committee. For the previous week, “she” had been chatting with Gabe Pruitt, USC’s starting guard, over AOL Instant Messenger. It got serious. Pruitt and several of his teammates made plans to go to Westwood after the game so that they could [...]

Al-Reuters is still rooting for Civil War in Iraq

Bodies found garroted in Baghdad
Some choice bits,

In its annual report on human rights abuses worldwide, the U.S. State Department said reports increased in 2005 of killings by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government or its agents and members of sectarian militias dominated many police units.
Yep it’s those US backed forces that are doing all the killings! [...]

Oh No!!! Undercover recording devices in schools!

High school teacher’s comments investigated by district. 
Sean Allen frequently recorded his teachers to back up his notes.  Allen recorded Jay Bennish, his 10th grade World Geography teacher, making comments about President Bush’s State of the Union Address. 
Allen’s father claims the comments made in the recording are biased and inappropriate for a geography class. 
Will the press demand [...]

Feedom of speech under attack … (yet again)

 Boing Boing Falls Victim to a Content Filter
THERE are lots of ways to describe Boing Boing, the Web’s obliquely subtitled “Directory of Wonderful Things,” which draws millions of eyeballs to its relentless, stylistically minimalist scroll of high-weirdness each month.
It is a site where, on Saturday morning, there were links to video games that “subvert post-industrial [...]