Monthly Archives: November 2006

Net Neutrality

By Michael Becker | Published: November 27, 2006
I saw my first “polit­i­cal ad” against Net Neutrality. “Are you Google eyed over net neu­tral­ity?” the com­mer­cial asked. According to Bresnan Communications, Net Neutrality will raise our access costs, allow­ing the, so called, big time Silicon Valley tycoons to line their pock­ets with our hard earned dol­lars. I half expected the candidate’s voice at [...]
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Wikispy

By Michael Becker | Published: November 25, 2006
Some U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies are using a sys­tem run­ning on wiki soft­ware to gather infor­ma­tion in a col­lab­o­ra­tive, real-time envi­ron­ment. The sys­tem gath­ers intel­li­gence, at vary­ing degrees of clas­si­fi­ca­tion, from 16 dif­fer­ent agencies. Interestingly, accord­ing to an arti­cle in the Los Angeles Times: Officials said they were not mak­ing the net­work avail­able to mem­bers of [...]
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Liminal Dictionary

By Michael Becker | Published: November 24, 2006
From Ben Vershbow on the if:book blog: a dic­tio­nary in transition James Gleick had a fas­ci­nat­ing piece in the Times Sunday mag­a­zine on how the Oxford English Dictionary is rein­vent­ing itself in the dig­i­tal age. The O.E.D. has always had to keep up with a rapidly evolv­ing English lan­guage. It took over 60 years, and [...]
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Wikipedia Conflict of Interests

By Michael Becker | Published: November 21, 2006
Wikipedia recently deleted an arti­cle on a lit­tle known psy­cho­log­i­cal the­ory called “NPA per­son­al­ity the­ory” because the arti­cle was writ­ten the the sci­en­tist who pro­posed the the­ory. Dr. Anthony Benis has since posted the arti­cle to his Web site, accord­ing to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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Publisher Protection

By Michael Becker | Published: November 21, 2006
The New York Time reported today that the California Supreme Court deter­mined Internet pub­lish­ers could not be held account­able for defam­a­tory com­ments posted to their sites. The deci­sion says that plain­tiffs may only sue the orig­i­nal source of the com­ment: the author, not Yahoo! or Google.
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