Virtual Friends in Virtual SpacesThe Orkut communi …. Virtual Friends in Virtual SpacesThe Orkut community continues to grow with many academics and researchers that I am familiar with. I tend to look at other people's friends to see who is on Orkut, and I came across a “person” called Gollum, complete with a LOTR picture. […]

The Register: Why wireless will end 'piracy' and doom DRM and TCPA – Jim Griffin. OK, so he likes compulsory licensing, but what's that got to do with wireless? This quote is great: “It costs $20,000 to fill an iPod from iTunes Music Store. Quite simply, no one looks at a 40 GB iPod and […]

the judge did the right thing. ashcroft, et. al. once again demonstrate a profound lack of judgement about civil rights such as privacy.

the current political economic strategy of the cheney-bush administration seems to be increase public debt to extreme proporttions until the electorate are left with two choices, cut back major government programs or cancel the debt. either one of these options will be ruinous to the average american because they will have to pick up the […]

MacCentral: MacMall sells pieces of Virginia Tech G5 supercomputer. I still think only a dumbass would buy millions of dollars of equipment and sell it a few months later. [Hack the Planet]

Networks aren't necessarily communities. Kevin Barron, Systems Manager at UCSB's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (thank you Google!) posted this comment earlier today: Anne, just to let you know I quoted you at Etech yesterday during a session w/ Joi, Howard et al. The quote which I read was an aside in this thread, and […]

“Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment”. Check out this conference on cybercrime and digital law enforcement to be held at the Yale Law School next month. It’s being organized by folks at the Information Society Project and features a list of interesting speakers from related fields. Some of them are frequent bloggers (Balkinization, Discourse.net) so […]

New JASIST. The March issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is now online. Here are the OA-related articles. Marcia Lei Zeng and Lois Mai Chan, Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems Padmini Srinivasan, Text mining: Generating hypotheses from MEDLINE Massimo Melucci, Making digital libraries […]

Playing dumb at Bowdoin, too. In response to yesterday's post about the responses of Duke faculty and administrators to the news that a strikingly disproportionate… [Critical Mass]

Another victory! US withdraws subpoena of antiwar meeting Facing growing public pressure from civil liberties advocates, federal prosecutors on Tuesday dropped subpoenas that they issued last week ordering antiwar protesters to appear before a grand jury and ordering a university to turn over information about the protesters. From the National Lawyers Guild press release The […]