Tuesday, October 12, 2004

The Bush bulge goes big time. Not long after Salon gave birth to the intriguing little campaign story-that-could late last week, mainstream media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, took an interest as the story's binary thrusters kicked in and rocketed it around the wired 21st-century globe. [Salon.com] 10:32:29 PM    comment []

Supreme Court Denies Cert in RIAA v. Verizon (Donna Wentworth). This just in: the Supreme Court has denied cert in RIAA v. Verizon, the case in which the recording industry initially won the right to unmask an anonymous KaZaA user with a special non-judicial, PATRIOT Act-like subpoena under the DMCA. The DC Circuit reversed (PDF) that ruling, but the RIAA appealed. Now the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case. This is not about P2P filesharers "hiding" from the law. It's about making sure that the law keeps protecting innocents until there is a bare minimum showing of illegal activity. Just because someone suspects you of being a "pirate" -- or would like to use claims of copyright infringement to gain easy access to your personal information -- does not make you guilty until proven innocent. The DMCA allows anyone simply claiming copyright infringement the ability to get your name, address, phone number, etc. This removes critical constitutional and privacy safeguards on the mere assertion of wrongdoing. Many people are angry about the PATRIOT Act for removing these kinds of safeguards. Shift the context to filesharing, and they tend to shrug it off because it's about "pirates." But it's the same Consitution, and the same rights are being eroded. [Copyfight] 10:31:26 PM    comment []

End of the Private Networks. The private networks might be on their last legs. Latest data from TeleGeography's Global Internet Geography research service, shows that the Internet backbones now account for over 85% of the world's cross-border capacity used in fiber-optic networks. The balance of used capacity is dedicated to private corporate networks and international telephone traffic. Among other highlights of the recent report, the rate of Internet backbone growth varies dramatically by region. Mature Internet markets in the U.S. and Europe have seen relatively slow growth, just 30 to 40 percent over the last year. Asian backbones have upgraded much more rapidly—over 70 percent last year—and show no signs of slowing down. Technology Futurist offers a brilliant explanation for the trend. As a sobering though, our friends at Telegeography remind us that despite the super growth, a huge portion of international fiber-optic bandwidth still goes unused. On trans-Atlantic routes, for example, only about a quarter of currently lit capacity is actively deployed to carry voice, Internet, and corporate traffic. The remainder lies idle, either unsold or unused by service providers. This mismatch of supply and demand could persist for several more years due to the still untapped "upgradeable" capacity of current submarine networks. [unmediated] 10:27:20 PM    comment []

Doc pointed at this amusing-if-it-weren't-a-reminder Florida ballot. 10:17:01 PM    comment []

The Molecular Art of Grilling. The Molecular Art of Grilling -- something I found while looking online for the proper final internal temperature for a pork roast. It's pretty cool -- lots of groovy animations and food science stuff. From the Exploratorium. [Learning The Lessons of Nixon] 10:14:07 PM    comment []

Nobodies business, by Scott Rosenberg, follows on the Klamm-NYT story on bloggers. Scott not only has a savvy read on what Klamm's piece is really all about, he seizes on the occasion to get at something big about the Net, eyeballs, and niche media. Great post. 3:45:17 PM    comment []

Jurys Out. The jury system is supposed to produce verdicts that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But a courtroom is not a scientific laboratory, and one former juror who served on an early 1990s homicide trial now believes she and her peers convicted the wrong men. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 6:36:44 AM    comment []

Jacket Grows From Living Tissue. Put off by the idea of wearing jackets made from dead animal skins, a team of Australian researchers attempts to grow a stitchless coat from live cells. By Lakshmi Sandhana. [Wired News] 6:36:21 AM    comment []

Bush on Hard Work. This remix of George Bush on "hard work" is wonderful. (I should have been doing this before, so forgive the unkindness before but: Thanks, John Driscoll!) [Lessig Blog] 6:36:16 AM    comment []

A Lesson in Linguistics From the Mouths of Babes. What slips of the tongue say about a child's development. By By MICHAEL ERARD. [The New York Times > Science] 6:28:13 AM    comment []

Undecided Voter? Try This Quiz. While most voters have chosen their favorite candidate for president, several sites offer online tests for the undecided. In some cases, the results can be quite contradictory. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News] 6:25:47 AM    comment []

CatchBob!. CatchBob! is an experimental platform in the form of a mobile game for running psychological experiments. [via AdMblog] It is designed to elicit collaborative behavior of people working together on a mobile activity. Running on a mobile device (iPAQ, TabletPc), it's a collaborative hunt in which groups of three persons have to find and circle a virtual object on our campus. CatchBob position paper was presented at the CSCL SIG Symposium in Lausanne. [Smart Mobs] 6:24:31 AM    comment []

Spamford! From spam king to spy master?. Sanford Wallace is the target of the FTC's aggressive new strategy to fight spyware on the Internet. [CNET News.com] 6:24:30 AM    comment []

Stuff. The new JFP is out, with 322 jobs. Like last year I’ll be doing a breakdown of the jobs available by rank, area, location (in a philosophy dept or not) and (a rough-and-ready measure of) attractiveness. The first thing to note is that 322 is a lot higher than 254, the number of jobs in last year’s edition. The breakdowns (and November’s ads) may reveal things are worse than last year, but the first impression is that things are much better. And just a reminder that Cornell’s job, number 7 in the JFP, is a genuine position, not a merely possible position. [Thoughts Arguments and Rants] 6:22:15 AM    comment []