The Command Line

I saw on EFF’s Deep Links Blog that this week is sunshine week.
According to the Sunshine Week site:
Sunshine Week is a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. [...]Sunshine Week is about the public’s right to know what its government is doing, and why. Sunshine [...]

Professor Lessig has just posted another video announcing his decision not to run in the special election for the vacancy left by the passing of Congressman Lantos. I am disappointed but understand his reasoning. My own support was for whatever decision he ultimately felt was the right one. It is not like [...]

Head over to Lessig08.org where Professor Lessig has posted a video discussing two very important announcements.
The first is a commitment to act. The site for this movement is a stub, I don’t know how rapidly it will develop once it launches. This was one of my frustrations as an activist when I spoke [...]

Saw this on the Open Rights Group. A nice reminder that at least when it comes to the question of privacy in the market, Europe seems a bit more progress. The ORG poster did call some attention to recently, noteworthy issues, but the basic standards seem better than here in the US. [...]

Boing Boing has the story which includes a list of possibly key senators. Dobbs has been filibustering to stall or stop outright this bill that will grant amnesty to the telcos that were complicit in the executive branch’s domestic wire tapping activities. It sounds like he could use the support from any or [...]

Saw this on Engadget. Details are few and the time frame is vague, but another step towards applying stronger competitive pressure on Apple.
I also wonder if this will strengthen the push by some countries in the EU to make Apple allow for better device portability with their DRM’ed offerings? Ideally, it would suggest [...]

Boing Boing has the story. I inferred from the comment about the Minister being required to review exceptions after two years that this is similar to the DMCA exemption process. The Boing Boing piece also has information for Australians wishing to submit comments, which I also highly recommend. Is there an Australian [...]

I can’t say this surprises me, there’s already what looks like an easy way to bypass the new Pandora US only checks. If the non-US collecting societies had found a lesser but still agreeable rate for Pandora, they’d get a piece of those streams. Now, though, they are putting the remaining legal, US [...]

I mentioned that Bruce Lehman, architect of the US DMCA, was on search engine. The tease text at their site made it sound like Lehman was copping in some way to the DMCA being a failure. This is understandable since the discussion was about the forthcoming Canadian DMCA specifically about criticizing it.
Unfortunately, after [...]

Both Boing Boing and Michael Geist have been covering this proposed legislation in depth. I noticed that the legislation has taken its first step towards law over on Boing Boing. This article also republished a link Cory posted earlier for Canadians who wish to act against this law. Its looking pretty bad, [...]