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Database protection bill advances in Congress
October 17, 2003CNET News.com October 16, 2003. The House of Representatives intellectual-property subcommittee voted 11-4 to provide a legal umbrella for publishers of factual information, such as courtroom decisions Business, consumer and library groups have blocked passage in previous sessions of Congress, saying database publishers can protect themselves through existing laws and terms-of-service agreements. Background at ALA
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PLoS story on NPR
October 15, 2003The October 13 broadcast of Marketplace on public radio included a commentary on the inaugural open-source scientific journal from Public Library of Science. It was rebroadcast as part of the Marketplace Morning Report this morning on KPBS. Here’s the audio clip.
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Secrecy News
October 14, 2003Secrecy News is so informative! For example, today’s SN had stories about Thomas Butler, a Pentagon website that’s been suppressed; an OMB report to Congress on combating terrorism. The one that caught my eye was about the suppressed site. Evidently, Last week the Department of Defense moved to block public access to a DoD web [...]
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Pushing Peer-to-Peer
October 8, 2003Simson Garfinkel has written a great piece for Technology Review, describing the ways in which P2P technology could give us a more secure, stable, efficient Internet. “At the end of the day, peer-to-peer technology is about increasing the reliability and the redundancy of Internet-based systems. ThatÕs why the recording industry is afraid of itÑbecause peer-to-peer [...]
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p2p, and academic literature
October 5, 2003Peer to peer technology is just a technology. It can be used for sharing copies of copyrighted music that the RIAA wants you to purchase, or sharing copies of academic literature that academics want to share. One kind of sharing does not have the consent of the person who created the content, the other does. [...]
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Supermarket Loyalty Cards
October 4, 2003Baltimore City Paper: Card Games (October 1 – October 7, 2003). By Joab Jackson. This article is about those “loyalty cards” that 80 percent of supermarket chains use, granting small discounts in return for the ability to track what you buy. It is interesting to read about this and think about libraries and the issues [...]
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New academic RSS feeds
October 3, 2003found two universities’ rss feeds today: BYU’sNewsnet and Emory University School of Law’s News&Events
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We place a counter on your computer’s hard drive…
October 3, 2003Google Frequent Searchers This page is no longer on Google’s site, but the Google Cache still has a copy! It says in part… Why is there a number and colorbar on my Google homepage? The counter tells you how many searches you’ve conducted since it began counting. The color bar is just a visual representation [...]