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EFF history and overview

Scott Harris has written an excellent history and overview of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that was published in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.Harris quotes Dave Farber summing up the...

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Bowling for Columbine opens tomorrow

Michael Moore‘s latest film, Bowling for Columbine, opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. Asking the timeless question, “are we a nation of gun nuts, or just plain nuts?” Bowling for Columbine...

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Feeling the boot heel of the Patriot Act

“Feeling the bootheel of the Patriot Act” is an especially disturbing — and revealing — first-person account of life under Homeland Security. Jason Halperin is a resident of New York City, and you...

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Are you safer now?

Ronald Reagan, when he was awake, got more than a little campaign traction when he asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” This time next year, you can bet the farm that any...

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District court judge strikes part of USA PATRIOT Act

In another clear sign that the federal judiciary intends to reign in the Bush administration, Judge Audrey B. Collins of the Los Angeles District Court has struck down a portion of the USA PATRIOT Act....

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The Center for American Progress fact-check’s Condi’s ass

Fact-checking asses on the web has become such a widespread participatory sport that it’s almost a cliche. The Center for American Progress has published two truly masterful — and painstakingly...

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It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that

Bob Dylan, Minnesota’s favorite son, rarely gives interviews. Los Angeles Times staff writer Robert Hilburn got a good one that was published last Sunday but managed to evade me until today. Kicking...

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Flashback!

LA Weekly has published Michael Hoinsky Hoinski’s wonderful retrospective of Ken Kesey’s adventures in Los Angeles, on this, the 40th anniversary of the first acid test, including this quote from...

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New York Times under fire

The New York Times, often mischaracterized as a newspaper with a left-wing agenda because of its opposition to the Iraq war on its editorial page, is coming under increasing fire for its government...

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China to crack down on journalism

China has a new draft law — one that is surely the envy of President Bush and his administration — that fines media outlets for reporting on “sudden incidents.” The proposed legislation would levy...

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Kidney transplant and the mathematics of “net lifetime survival benefit”

Is it ethical to transplant a kidney in an 85-year-old dialysis patient?Before answering, consider that unlike heart and liver transplants — which go to the patient most likely to die without them —...

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Paul Krassner on Chicago 10

Last Sunday, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece by Paul Krassner about his involvement in Chicago 10, a documentary about the 1968 police riots during the Democratic convention.Krassner’s article was...

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Jobs baits, RIAA spins

Steve Jobs is getting lots of link-love with his initial “Thoughts on” column, which almost — but not really — calls for the abandonment of digital rights management (DRM) schemes on music distributed...

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New verb alert: Klein-spiked

Mark Klein, the former AT&T engineer who was the source for the New York Times story revealing the telecommunications giant was wiretapping the internet under the auspices of the US government,...

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The remedy for American health care’s pre-existing condition

In America, unlike the rest of the industrialized world and much of the developing one, you get exactly how much health care you can pay for — and even then, not always. Call it a pre-existing...

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As journalism goes, so goes democracy

That’s what Bill Moyers said in the middle of his plenary address at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis yesterday morning.Last evening I twittered that there wasn’t much worth...

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Has Boing Boing jumped the shark?

Boing Boing was one of the first things I read every day, and not just because it was near the top of my RSS aggregator. It really was a “directory of wonderful things.” Now I’m not so sure. The group...

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Twitter-enhanced luminary spectacle, indeed

First the Wall Street Journal publishes a breathless article announcing Steve Jobs’s liver transplant. The article was unsourced and disgraceful in its violation of the Apple chief executive’s...

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A different kind of car; a different kind of car company: Not so much

Yesterday, US carmaker Saturn — a subsidiary of General Motors — failed. As soon as I heard the news, I tweeted: “Different kind of car — different kind of car company. Well, not so much:...

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Is Google selling out net neutrality?

Google and Verizon are reportedly close to an agreement ending network neutrality — the principle that all information traversing the internet is treated equally — and allowing Verizon to offer higher...

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The blotter: Week ending 10 October 2010

BusinessThis interview with Craig Silverstein, Google’s first hire, by Mike Swift, writing for the Mercury News, indicates there is little hope for Google or corporate news organizations. Swift writes...

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The blotter: Week ending 2 January 2011

BusinessThe New York Times‘ “Mapping America” by Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter, and Alan McLean culls data from the US Census Bureau’s 2005-09 American Community Survey to deliver tremendously usable...

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The Egyptian internet blackout and the US “kill switch”

On 27 January 2010, the Egyptian government appears to have issued the order to sever all international connections to the internet. James Cowie, writing for the Renesys blog, reports “… every...

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The blotter: Week ending 13 February 2011

LawThe US House of Representatives needed a two-thirds majority vote to extend the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act. The provisions in question were roving wiretaps, seizure of “any tangible...

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The blotter: Week ending 6 March 2011

BusinessThe US Supreme Court has ruled (.pdf; 139KB) that corporations do not have personal privacy rights accorded to natural individuals. As a result, AT&T can’t prevent embarrassing corporate...

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Foolish writers and a particularly foolish lawsuit

Writers who worked for free for Huffington Post figure they’re owed a pretty big slice of Arianna Huffington‘s slice of the online publication’s sale to AOL in February for US$315 million. Said...

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The blotter: Week ending 17 April 2011

BusinessStill looking for proof that the US needs labor protections on a par with the EU? Consider the Ikea plant in Danville, VA. Nathaniel Popper, writing for the Los Angeles Times, reports “state...

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Another problem with kidney transplantation: Insurers

There’s a big pile of things that are wrong with the way kidney transplants take place in the US. Starting with providing organs to drug addicts — who go back to buying street drugs instead of their...

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Media and post-truth politics

In the days leading up to the Republican convention in Tampa, Jay Rosen published another insightful piece asking if journalists should call-out lies when they occur. He’s referencing Daniel Patrick...

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Amazon sets sights on changing writing process

Chances are Amazon will have as big of an effect on some forms of writing as it has had on bookselling (and has begun to have on publishing). At the same time the company introduced its Kindle Fire...

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US Supreme Court declines to review warrantless wiretapping dismissal

For six years the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fought a good legal battle to bring the US telecommunications giants to justice for allegedly providing backdoors to their networks allowing the...

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Disrupting publishing’s business skeuomorphism

Honda disrupted the automobile industry in the US by taking everything it knew about transportation and the individual automobile and distilling it to its simplest set of components that meet a...

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This is the end of for-profit health insurers

I am by no means a supporter of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly called Obamacare, that goes into effect tomorrow. It was a despicable response by the hard right Heritage Foundation to the...

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Reasonable and necessary indeed

I first qualified for Medicare on 21 August 2002, but I was scared off by various horror stories I’d heard about moving from private insurance and I managed to resist until this past June. As...

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Victors and authors of history

In March 1971 I was a junior in high school, fascinated with the idea that someone would break into a suburban Philadelphia office of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) solely to steal every...

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