Sand, Sun and Spectrum Policy, By Craig Aaron, In These Times, August 30, 2005. [T]he real scandal of the digital television transition is whatÕs going to happen to the analog spectrum thatÕs being vacated by the broadcasters and returned to the government. After returning from the recess, Congress intends to auction off the public airwaves [...]
maps blog at UCSC This UCSC Libraries’ Map Room blog “is used to create a searchable historical record of difficult reference questions. It makes a great training tool for persons learning to work with the map collection. The Blog also provides the reference librarians at UCSC with a better understanding of the kinds of questions [...]
We’ve written a few times recently about municipal wireless, broadband access, and the digital divide (The Digital Divide, Race, Class, and Municipal Wireless and ALA gets on the broadbandwagon and Free community wi-fi is a library issue and What is Network Neutrality and Why Should Libraries Care?). Here is a list of some useful background [...]
Llibrary sues over controversial Patriot Act, By Chris Sanders, Thu Aug 25, 2005, Reuters The suit — filed on August 9 and made public by the ACLU on Thursday — calls the FBI’s order to produce library records “unconstitutional on its face” and said a gag order preventing public discussion of the lawsuit is an [...]
The Whiteness of Wi-Fi, By Roberto Lovato, In These Times, August 23, 2005. In this short article, Lovato draws parallels between the transformations brought on by railroads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the Internet and broadband access today. While we hear so much these days about the ubiquity of Internet access [...]
CIO Today has a three part article By Jack M. Germain on Google and privacy. Title of the series: “Google Has Your Data: Should You Be Afraid?” Part One An overview that concludes, “Google is bent on monetizing every user through keeping a careful watch on every Web page users access and every file users [...]
Boing Boing: Google stealthily monitoring clickthroughs from search-results BoingBoing reports that Google is monitoring what you click on from its search results and doing so in a way that is “stealthy.” It is indeed! BoingBoing gives examples of exactly how it’s done and how to see what’s happening. Cory notes: I have no doubt that [...]
The History and Future of the Book: Digital Copyright Ok, maybe not as bloodthirstingly exciting as a WWF cage match, But pretty close! On the 14th of April 2005, Cornell University hosted a debate between an EFF staffer (Fred Von Lohmann), a copyfighting academic (Siva Vaidhyanathan), and legal heads of the RIAA (Cary Sherman), MPAA [...]
Rewriting the Past: How Search Engines Construct and Forget Time by Iina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdorff, and Paul Wouters New Media & Society (forthcoming) Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older [...]
ABA Journal: Librarians Lead Legal Battles Over the Patriot Act, Copyright, Tech Issues All right! Just as the American Bar Association writes that ALA is becoming a force to be reckoned with as Òone of the most active players in legal fights over technology, copyright, national security, censorship and privacy lawÓ, I ran across this [...]