Big Brother Apple
Last week, the gay-rights group Truth Wins Out celebrated Apple's decision to pull from its store an app by Exodus International, perhaps the best-known "ex-gay" organization in the world. The app, a...
View ArticleThe Return of Big Bell
At this point, it's clear how AT&T intends to sell its $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile. "Indeed, the wireless marketplace will be more competitive," reads the company's 381-page report filed with...
View ArticleSafety Net for the Net
Last week, President Barack Obama unveiled legislation aimed at making cyberspace safer. "Cyberspace" is, admittedly, a clunky term, but no one has yet come up with anything better to describe the...
View ArticleSkype in the House
The House of Representatives will now let members and their staff use the video conferencing tool Skype and its lesser-known competitor ooVoo on campus, the Committee on House Administration has...
View ArticleThere's No Such Thing as Free Gmail
Last February, Google launched Buzz, adding a social-networking layer to the array of Google applications that already collect a vast amount of personal information from each of us. People freaked out,...
View ArticleFree the JSTOR Four Million!
The news that Aaron Swartz, a technologist and activist involved in the early days of Reddit and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, has been indicted in Boston for allegedly breaking into an...
View ArticleMurdoch, Media Consolidation's Poster Child
Over at the New York Times, Brian Stelter reports that media reform groups in the U.S. are seeing opportunity in the News Corp hacking situation in the U.K.: Progressive activists and public interest...
View ArticleDoubling Down on Twitter?
Down below, my very smart colleague Paul Waldman entertains the idea of increasing Twitter's character limit, riffing off a recent piece on the same by Slate's Farhad Manjoo. Sidestepping the...
View ArticleThe Google Missile Crisis
Google Inc. announced yesterday that it plans to pay $12.5 billion to buy Motorola Mobility, a 63 percent premium on the Illinois-based cell phone manufacturer's closing stock price last week. By...
View ArticlePatently Unfair
Congress has spent the last six years cobbling together a bill to overhaul the way the strapped and struggling U.S. patent system works. This week, lawmakers are on the cusp of passing the America...
View ArticleOur Municipal Dollars, Ourselves
"They don't know how to fix this," said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg about Occupy Wall Street on MSNBC yesterday, according to the Daily News. "They want their government to fix. They don't...
View ArticleOff-Season
The future is not looking bright for Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) in the United States. The pro league has dropped down to just five teams with October's disqualification of Florida's bungled...
View ArticleJust TELL Me You're Gonna Invade My Privacy
Washington, D.C., and Facebook Inc. took part yesterday in another round of what we might call "working on their relationship." But that we're fixated on specific privacy violations rather than the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jimmy Wales Needs Your Help
Robertolyra, Creative Commons licenseMuch of the Internet's attention the last two months has focused on stopping the various copyright bills being entertained in Congress, but at the same time,...
View ArticleFacebook Bares Its Soul
"Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg writes in the letter included in the initial public offering (IPO) filings...
View ArticleCopyright Fight Hits the Lab
This week, the scientific publishing giant Elsevier, which produces thousands of academic journals, and Representatives Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, and Darrell Issa, a California Republican,...
View ArticleA Mayor for the Occupy Set
In the early 2000s, Jefferson Smith grew a reputation in progressive grassroots political circles as the hulking 6’ 3” strawberry-blond force of nature behind Oregon’s The Bus Project, a non-profit...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The First Call Is Free; the Rest Are a Fortune.
(Flickr/ danostamper714)Paying a $4.25 connection fee and then 75 cents per minute thereafter seems costly, unless, perhaps, we're talking about a phone call from our future Mars colony back to Earth....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Making Prisoners Count
(Flickr/AJstream)With a prison population in the millions, the current method of counting inmates skews how representative democracy operates.Add these two facts together: (1) To the United States...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pasting the Web
Flickr/The Next WebShort-linking—that act of repackaging ungainly, often ugly strings of letters, numbers, ampersands, and question marks into elegantly tiny URLs—has been around for more than a...
View Article
