Earlier this year, I wrote a story about Maya, a four-year-old girl who used an app called Speak for Yourself to help her communicate with the outside world. Maya’s mother, Dana Nieder, preferred the app over more established …
Policy & Law
Weibo Credit: Chinese Microblogging Site Tests Points-Based Censorship
iOS: Can We Declare a Moratorium On the Prison Metaphors, Please?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Micah Lee and Peter Eckersley have published a post about iOS titled “Apple’s Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms.” In it, they do what you’d expect the EFF to do in an item with …
Grading How Well Companies Are Cooperating with ‘Do Not Track’
Remember “Do Not Track,” the initiative in the White House’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights that called for an opt-out button for users who don’t want to be tracked by different sites? Well, it’s still alive and it has an …
Police Need a Standard Policy to Deal with Flood of Smartphone GPS Data
Recently, smartphone owners became the majority of mobile subscribers. And a poll from the Pew Internet & American Life Project says that 74% of them use their phones to access location-based information — directions, local …
The Breakdown: Who Supports CISPA and Who Doesn’t
A Little Girl Finds Her Voice Thanks to Threatened New iPad App
The parents of Maya, a three-year-old girl with speech problems, thought they found a solution with a tablet app called Speak for Yourself. Now a patent infringement lawsuit could put an end to it.
The Case Against Letting the U.N. Govern the Internet
All this year, and culminating in December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, the nations of the world will be negotiating a treaty to govern international telecommunications services between …
FBI Hacked While Congress Ponders Cybersecurity Legislation
At a rare open hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified that threats from cyber-espionage and cyber-attacks will surpass terrorism as the number one threat facing the …
What Europe’s ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Has in Common with SOPA
In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth employs a “memory hole” to eliminate inconvenient facts. If a previously published photo or record later proves to be embarrassing for the government, it is thrown down the …
Why We Won’t See Many Protests like the SOPA Blackout
The SOPA blackout protest last week was an unprecedented event. Its massive success — with dozens of members of Congress switching their stance in one day under the withering intensity of thousands of phone calls — surprised …
Why Google’s Biggest Problem with ‘Search Plus Your World’ Isn’t Antitrust
Last week Google lit up the blogosphere with controversy when it introduced tighter integration between its Google+ social network and its organic search results. The main charge is that the new service – called Google Search …
