Rumor — and that’s all it is — is that Google will announce  a $10/month Chrome OS laptop rental.  That such a rumor could be credible, whether or not it actually bears out, is a testament to how much our IT ecosystem has evolved in just the past few years.  I’ve long been concerned about [...]

The European Journal of International Law published on an affiliated web site a short book review.  The author of the book reviewed was displeased, and wrote to the editor asking for it to be taken down.  He declined in a very thoughtful letter, part of a correspondence reproduced here. He suggested that he would forward [...]

You may have heard of Herdict, the Berkman Center project to crowdsource reports on the moment-to-moment health of the Internet.  (Video introduction here; FAQ here.)  We are seeking a CEO for it! Since last year Herdict has tracked big blockages like those of China’s Great Firewall, and small ones like the temporary block of WordPress [...]

[cross-posted at the CDT blog] How the Internet is running out of room, and what we must do about it “CDT Fellows’ Focus” is a series from CDT that presents the views of other notable experts on tech policy issues. This week, CDT Fellow Jonathan Zittrain and Leslie Daigle write about the end of IPv4 address space. [...]

A few months ago it looked like there’d be no action on net neutrality in the US by the FCC or Congress.  After some momentum gathered during both the Bush and Obama administrations, a federal court ruling had cast doubt on the FCC’s ability to regulate in the area, and a rancorous election season suggested [...]

Yesterday the FTC announced a new project to encourage the formation of a “do-not-track” list, where Internet users could opt out of certain kinds of cookie-based Web tracking in one place and for good.  The NYT room for debate blog asked for reactions – It’s amazing to think that the sophistication and intensity of behavioral [...]

The NYT Bits blog broke the story of an Android app called the “SMS replicator.”  This odious piece of spyware is described here; unless it’s a prank, the idea is that a stalker type with momentary access to someone else’s Android phone can install it.  It doesn’t show up as an icon, but runs quietly [...]

Tweeting has become a foundational Internet technology.  It’s not even dependent on the World Wide Web — people can send and receive tweets without having to visit twitter.com.  And the act of tweeting isn’t even unique to Twitter — many other Internet platforms are seeking to compete by allowing people to “emote” an update to [...]

I saw these two stories today — or is it one story? From Slashdot: “Turnkey CPU upgrades aren’t just for mainframes anymore. According to Engadget, OEMs (including Gateway) are selling computers with the Intel Pentium G6951, which can have extra cache and hyper-threading enabled through a $50 software unlock called Intel Upgrade Service.” Also from [...]

Lately I’ve been interested in both cybersecurity and human computing.  The former increasingly relies on PATRIOT-missile-style automated defenses against attacks as cyberattacks happen, and ideally are repelled, in mere nanoseconds.  The latter involves taking tasks normally mundane enough for computers and turning them over to people to do — in ways that enable to tasker [...]