The Berkman Center has just launched a very cool new project, MediaCloud, which you can see over at mediacloud.org.  They’re gathering stories from thousands of newspapers, blogs, and other news sources around the web, and then extracting piles of data from the stories—source, topic, entities mentioned, and so on.  Their idea is to figure out […]

—by Elisabeth Oppenheimer In several of the posts on this blog, we’ve talked about how we’ll be waiting to see how Apple’s semi-open model competes with Android’s mostly-open model over the next several years. Slashdot links to a few articles addressing that question. The first two articles say that Apple is totally overwhelmed by trying […]

Some thoughts on the Facebook terms of service privacy storm: Facebook and other social networks have an especially tricky time in this zone, since so much user data is relational.  You upload a photo of you and me; I tag it with your name.  I leave Facebook — does your name disappear from the photo […]

John Markoff’s article in the NYT about Internet vulnerabilities and projects like Stanford’s Clean Slate has been getting a lot of attention, including a thoughtful response from David Isenberg.  David’s right that a lot of the ideas in the NYT piece echo my book’s thesis.  Here’s my reply to David: Suppose that we agree on […]

Amazon has just introduced its second-generation Kindle book substitute.  As a reader, I’m intrigued — I can download a bunch of books and apparently use it for days without a charge.  Looking at the overall IT ecosystem, I’m also intrigued, but for opposite reasons. The downloading takes place over an “EVDO modem with fallback to […]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer FOI readers may have noticed the story (or experienced the phenomenon!) last weekend about a Google malfunction, where Google temporarily labeled all sites as potentially dangerous and placed interstitial screens with warnings if any were clicked upon in the search results.  Since 2006, Google has teamed up with the FOI-approved (and JZ-cofounded) […]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer There’s been some recent discussion about a “rogue” Android app, MemoryUp, which was supposed to manage memory on the G1 phone, preserving battery life and allowing apps to run more smoothly. Apps are posted in the Android Market with user reviews, and many of the reviews for MemoryUp complained that it froze […]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer If you use Facebook, you’ve probably seen some of the viruses that have been hitting site users.  (That message from your aunt telling you to “click here to see paRiS Hilton!!1”—probably not actually from your aunt.)  Initially, it was phishing scams—the user would click on a link, be taken to a site […]

Note: Brendan Ballou is solely responsible for the content of this article. It is not necessarily endorsed by Professor Zittrain Our little corner of the blogosphere has been lit on fire by the recent article in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Google was coming out against Net Neutrality. Now, there are plenty of problems […]

By Yvette Wohn Creative Commons held a special panel and fundraiser on Friday featuring Board Chairman James Boyle, Stanford professor and CC founder Larry Lessig, CEO Joichi Ito, and former Executive Director Molly S. Van Houweling. The event kicked off with HLS Dean Elena Kagan announcing Lessig’s return to Harvard (in fall 2009) and an […]