Month: April 2010

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DA investigates Gizmodo guy over iPhone

Oops. Seems like Gizmodo Editor Jason Chen is in plenty hot water for publishing details about Apple’s new 4G iPhone before the official company release date. It seems that an Apple employee took the phone with him to a bar, left it behind, and Gizmodo bought it for between $5 and $10,000 dollars from the person who found it. Apparently, that’s not a good thing to do in California.

The District Attorney seized Chen’s computers but haven’t begun to search through them. Gizmodo’s attorneys filed a lawsuit claiming that Chen should be protected from investigation by California’s Shield Laws and TechCrunch reports the San Mateo district attorney has put the investigation on hold while they review the laws. read more

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The Crime of Reason

Robert B. Laughlin, Department of Physics at Stanford University gave this talk at the Xerox PARC Forum on October 23, 2008.

There is increasing concern about the disappearance of technical knowledge from the public domain, both on grounds that is presents a security danger and because it is economically valuable “Intellectual Property”. I argue that this development is not anomalous at all but a great historic trend tied to our transition to the information age. We are in the process of losing a human right that all of us thought we had but actually didn’t–the right to learn things we can and better ourselves economically from what we learn. Increasingly, figuring things our for yourself will become theft and terrorism. Increasingly, reason itself will become a crime. read more

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Landline loss can hurt elderly, disabled and low-income families

AT&T is now pushing for the FCC to relieve telephone carriers of the expense of maintaining copper phone lines and the POTS (plain old telephone service) that goes along with it – traditional phone service known today as “landlines”.

It’s worthwhile noting that low-income families, seniors and people with disabilities receive protection of their essential utility services, including POTS under fcc regulations. But VOIP falls under the bailiwick of broadband internet connectivity, which is not regulated by the government, so those protections would not be in place for these vulnerable individuals and families should they lose their POTS. read more