“[I]f Google couldn’t make RSS work, why are so many others interested … . The answer is simple. RSS is the way news is distributed on the Internet. That’s why so many people want to be #1 in this area. News is big business.“


—  Dave Winer at Scripting News


After sampling most of the Google Reader replacements (e.g., Digg, NetNewsWire, NewsBlur, Old Reader, Curata, Sismics and a few others), I’m settling on Feedly (Firefox, Android and iOS) and Mr. Reader (iPad). Provided you take the time to spend a few minutes in Feedly’s settings configuring your preferences (e.g., vertical rather than horizontal scrolling), Feedly is already superior than Google Reader in many respects. With a few tweaks (filtering of feeds by keyword; option to eliminate folder splash screens; better integration with 3rd party services; faster responsiveness) that hopefully Feedly’s developers will soon address, Feedly would be close to perfect (though not everyone agrees).


06/26/2013: 
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“A lot of people assume that the police are required to read a suspect his Miranda rights upon arrest. That is, they assume that one of a person’s rights is the right to be read their rights. It often happens that way on Law & Order, but that’s not what the law actually requires. The police aren’t required to follow Miranda. Miranda is a set of rules the government can chose to follow if they want to admit a person’s statements in a criminal case in court, not a set of rules they have to follow in every case.“


—   Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy


There’s been a fair amount of misinformation circulated over the past week about Miranda warnings. Lawprof Orin Kerr’s short piece at The Volokh Conspiracy presents a nice summary of the basics, including the effects of not giving the Miranda warning to a suspect.


04/22/2013: 
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Europe’s other problem: where are all the tech startups? European leaders want you to ‘test your own wings,’ but there are systemic headwinds getting in the way – at The Verge:

As noted in The Verge article, regulatory fragmentation is a big part of the problem in Europe – the need to comply with a patchwork of diverse regulations across the continent. This is also increasingly becoming a problem here in the United States with, for example, both federal and state-by-state privacy, data and similar regulations, which impose significant legal, compliance and related costs on startups.

Want To End The Litigation Epidemic? Create Lawsuit-Free Zones – LawProf Eric Goldman at Forbes.com:

”[F]inding ways to dial down litigation might be the best ‘jobs stimulus’ effort our legislators could undertake. The way to create lawsuit-free zones is through ‘immunities’ and ‘safe harbors.’ Immunities categorically eliminate legal liability in the specified contexts. Safe harbors allow defendants to avoid liability if they take the specified steps. Both help motivate socially beneficial and job-creating activity.”

04/11/2013: 
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California Lawmaker Introduces Personal Data Disclosure Bill: ‘Right to Know Act of 2013’ Would Force Companies to Tell Californians What They Know

The Proposed Bill, as amended April 1st (including legislative summary): Right to Know Act of 2013.

From the Legislative Summary: “This bill would … . [among other things] require any business that retains a customer’s personal information, as defined, or discloses that information to a 3rd party, to provide at no charge, within 30 days of the customer’s specified request, a copy of that information to the customer as well as the names and contact information for all 3rd parties with which the business has shared the information during the previous 12 months, regardless of any business relationship with the customer. This bill would require that a business subject to these provisions choose one of several specified options to provide the customer with a designated address for use in making a request for copies of information under these provisions.”

More:

Electronic Frontier Foundation: New California “Right to Know” Act Would Let Consumers Find Out Who Has Their Personal Data — And Get a Copy of It

VentureBeat: California Lawmaker Introduces ‘Right to Know Act’ to Give Citizens Access to Their Data

04/10/2013: 
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Facebook “Home” Initial Reaction

**The consensus early reaction, the day after the Facebook Home announcement, appears to be:**

+ Facebook Home is well-designed, with some clever elements such as the messaging bubbles;
+ Google and Android app developers will dislike Facebook’s lock/home-screen and launcher approach which makes Google services and 3rd party apps less visible;
+ Facebook home might appeal to certain Android users in the United States (i.e., Facebook power users and mobile phone newbies), but Facebook Home might be more of a play for new users internationally, particularly in emerging markets;
+ So what’s new: Facebook Home poses additional privacy concerns through enhanced data collection.

**Facebook Home Link Round-up:**

• **What the Analysts are Saying:** A dozen analyst reactions at CNN.Money.
• **How Facebook Home Is (and Isn’t) an OS:** Fast Company.
• App Developers Are Scared Facebook Home Will Bury Their Stuff: Business Insider.
• Facebook Home’s uneasy relationship with Google: Tim Carmody at The Verge.
• I Like It, but I Don’t Like It Like It: Farhad Manjoo at Slate.com.
• Facebook Home at First Glance: Web/App designer, Khoi Vinh.
• The Soul of a New (Facebook) Machine: The Atlantic.
• Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Home, Money, and the Future of Communication: Steven Levy.

04/5/2013: 
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The SEC on Social Media Use for Company Announcements

From the SEC today: “The Securities and Exchange Commission today issued a report that makes clear that companies can use social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to announce key information in compliance with Regulation Fair Disclosure (Regulation FD) so long as investors have been alerted about which social media will be used to disseminate such information.”

More at the Securities and Exchange Commission website, including the report (pdf) in its Reed Hastings investigation, which triggered today’s announcement.

And even more at the Wall Street Journal – their analysis of today’s SEC embrace of social media with respect to public disclosure.

04/3/2013: 
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Morozov Long Read

“The Meme Hustler; Tim O’Reilly’s Crazy Talk” by Evgeny Morozov at The Baffler – a little history of “open source”, Web 2.0 and Government 2.0, and a lot of criticism of O’Reilly’s web media/meme empire by noted contrarian and critic of cyber-utopianism Morozov.

More Morozov: At Slate, Farhad Manjoo and Morozov discuss Morozov’s latest book (To Save Everything, Click Here) in a series of written entries and replies.

04/2/2013: 
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Can a digital music file, lawfully made and purchased, be resold by its owner under the first sale doctrine?

In a decision this past weekend, a U.S. District Court answers: no. More on the decision, and a link to the court’s opinion, at Wired.

Also: Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that the online streaming of over-the-air television broadcasts by the startup, Aereo, is permitted. More on the decision, which is bound to be appealed, at ArsTechnica.

04/1/2013: 
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Cyber Law + Tech: March 27, 2013

How much of an article or news report can an aggregator or clipping service copy under fair use? There’s no precise answer, but under the recent Meltwater ruling from a federal district court in the Southern District of New York, the answer in some cases may be “not much”. At PaidContent.org: AP wins big: Why a Court Said Clipping Content is Not Fair Use. The defendant Meltwater monitored the internett and ran a clipping service for its clients, sending newsletter alerts to its clients about articles in which they appeared. Meltwater included the relevant headline, lede and sentences in which keywords relevant to the client appeared. Key to the court’s decision was that Meltwater, by copying the headlines and ledes acted as a substitute to the underlying articles, rather than driving readers to the original article as a search engine might. As noted by PaidContent: “Cote’s rejection of Meltwater’s search engine argument was based in part on the ‘click-through’ rate of its stories. Whereas Google News users clicked through to 56 percent of excerpted stories, the equivalent rate for Meltwater was 0.08 percent …” The impact of the ruling outside the federal courts Second Circuit is unclear, but the result should be troubling for companies that scrape significant amounts of content from other sites in reliance on “fair use”.

The EFF’s critical take on the decision. The court’s decision (pdf).

FBI 2013 priority: obtaining new powers to surveil internet and cloud services in real time (Slate).

At ArsTechnica, news of new data transmission research: Fiber cables made of air move data at 99.7 percent the speed of light

TechDirt: Court Tosses Lawsuit That Said MMS Was An Illegal File Sharing Network”

03/27/2013: 
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The makers of my favorite iOS weather app, Dark Sky, have just released a new weather service: Forecast, which is explained in the developers’ release announcement here and available at Forecast.io. The beauty of Dark Sky has been its ability provide practical weather notifications, e.g., in thirty minutes it will rain for twenty minutes . The new service, at a glance, looks equally interesting.

03/26/2013: 
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ArsTechnica: Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse

ArsTechnica: Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse

According to ArsTechnica, a draft revision to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is being circulated by the House Judiciary Committee, expands the punishments available under the CFAA and, on balance, expands the definition of “exceeding authorized access” – the troublesome clause that should be eliminated in its entirety or dramatically circumscribed as so many legal scholars and practitioners have argued.

The draft bill being circulated is available at the link.

03/25/2013: 
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