East-Coast Code, Fly-Over State

2009-11-28

Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town.

As the finals-prep fever-dream continues, a flitting reminder of something else.

Public Knowledge’s campaign, and this video especially, are singled out in the document. The video provides a fairly good, if low-rent, introduction to the Selectable Output Control issue, but a more polished media campaign will be necessary to bring the issue to a mass audience.

Frankly, Feld comes off as a bit of a sweaty nerd, and I can see why the MPAA would want to highlight him as the opposition’s spokesman.

2009-11-23

The bill contains no sanctions against suspected P2P file-swappers, but it introduces a “reserve power” that can be deployed whenever the Secretary of State feels that it’s time to bust out the switch and administer some beatings.

— From a great little piece by Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson on the U.K.’s freshly delivered digital piracy legislation. The assertion of vaguely defined powers like these is only going to embolden those wrong-headed officials who have so mismanaged the gov’t response in the past. Clearly articulating (read: limiting) powers wouldn’t needlessly tie hands here; it instead would channel energy into the focused and measured response the density of the piracy issue requires.

2009-11-21

Speaking of which.....

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She and Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu and the Blue Dogs in the House shouldn’t come into Congress expecting long careers. Like COME ON. You’re in the South, in the same party as a black president, and the economy is shit… it’s *probably* not going to be a victory next year. Sorry! But don’t screw it up for everyone else, please?

— Wonkette’s Jim Newell on new polling showing Blanche down by double-digits against 2010 opponents if she supports real health care reform.

2009-11-20

merlin:

Phoenix WordCamp 2009 Archives - (Something Something Social Media: The Overdue Minority Report)

Tipping my media-geek hand a little low here, but the “publishing vis-à-vis social media” understanding Mann lays out here prompts me to tip specifically my Merlin-crush card. Again.

2009-11-18

To connect the browsable index on its website to the content in question, The Pirate Bay now offers “magnet links” for most of its content. Rather than pointing to a .torrent file hosted at some tracker, magnet links simply contain a hash of the file in question. This hash is passed along to the BitTorrent client, which can then use DHT to find BitTorrent peers who have the file available for download.

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Piracy is still a dicey moral proposition, and we need to be careful about ascribing intrinsic natures to tech, but I can’t help but be encouraged to believe that “the network wants to be free” when I see things like this.

Via Arts Technica.

2009-11-16

"Windows Mobile loses nearly a third of market share."

This is all according to Ballmer and Co.’s plan: Lull Google and Apple into a false optimism in the lead-up to Windows Mobile 7’s unannounced matter-compiler feature.

2009-11-13

Heads Up, Verizon Folks

The second-largest cellular data provider is about to start issuing “copyright notices” on behalf of the RIAA to users suspected of illegally downloading. I’m not sure how many folks are pulling down big data like that on their phones/cellular modems, but the continuation of the trend from broadband providers to cellular is annoying/troubling.