Wikileaks.org has been ordered (last week!? how did I miss that?) to be taken completely offline in the United States because of a number of documents that “allegedly reveal that [a Swiss] bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.” While it appears that the site is still available, but many are calling the injunction unconstitutional. I’m surprised I haven’t heard the words “prior restraint” used yet. You make the call: is this just commercial speech, or is posting to wikileaks a political act? If it’s political, is the “heavy burden” against censoring someone before they publish met? Is wikileaks acting as the “press?” Must they to receive protection?
This is another one to watch
Monthly Archive for February, 2008
Here’s a really interesting read on the relative cost of things that are easy to copy.
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
The conclusion? There are 8 things that can’t be copied that have the potential to make something even “better than free,” even though some of these things (like immediacy or interpretation) might have a cost attached. I’d like to think about how these “generatives” play out in the physical, or for-pay digital, world… but not today.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Here’s an interesting idea on how legislation drafting might follow the “development cycle” used for software. The post turns into a rant on civil procedure by Commander Taco, but it’s interesting food for thought.
If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to “developers”) write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the “test case writers”) would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the “testers”, would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other.
Slashdot | Next Year’s Laws, Now Out In Beta!
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Is Ombudsman Already in Jeopardy? – washingtonpost.com (via FOIA Blog)
Here’s a story not to loose track of:
Bush proposed shifting a newly created ombudsman’s position from the National Archives and Records Administration to the Department of Justice.
The FOIA Blog defeats the administrations claims smartly, noting the “inherent conflict” between the Justice Department’s role in defending the government FOIA disputes and the new ombudsman’s role of ensuring openness.
I hope this story gets the attention it deserves.
How one clumsy ship cut off the web for 75 million people | Technology | The Guardian
I have always been a fan of the Wired section entitled “Infoporn,” and the image linked to this story about the undersea internet wires being cut certainly qualifies. This is also a good story about what some might call the “invisible” internet infrastructure.
