When you see the headline “Powerful ‘Flame’ cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game,” does it cause you to think that there is actually some connnection between the recently discovered malware Flame and Angry Birds? That would be entirely reasonable, but wrong.

In 2009, Amazon staff panicked when they came to believe that they’d allowed copies of George Orwell’s classic 1984 to be sold through the Kindle store without properly clearing copyright permissions.  They reacted by eliminating copies of 1984 not only from the Kindle Store, but from the Kindles of individual purchasers.  Those reading the text […]

Last week, a number of developers reported that Apple was rejecting iOS applications that used Dropbox, a popular cloud file storage and backup system. An initial thread on the Dropbox developers’ forum has led to a outpouring of tech news full of hyperbolic claims. However, none of this reporting has covered the real problem – […]

We at the H2O project are seeking a full-time Project Manager. H2O is an online platform for textbook development and distribution, currently in a pilot stage. H2O is based on the open source model – instead of locking down materials in formalized textbooks, we believe that course books can be free (as in free speech) […]

I participated in the Berkman Center’s fascinating HyperPublic symposium in the summer of 2011.  When moderating a panel I invoked the aphorism that “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”  It’s a way of encapsulating the idea that online free services usually make money by extracting lots of data from […]