- Will copyright change in the face of ubiquitous recording?
Mike Masnick at Techdirt ponders a scenario that makes the impact of technology on copyright to date appear quaint. The story he digs into is of a fellow with a prosthetic eye capable of recording and broadcasting everything it sees. I think there are parallels in research on genuine life streaming and the not entirely fictional lifebox idea suggested by Rudy Rucker. Masnick hints at these with his mention of ubiquitous, constant recording being applied to help with memory. - Australia going all in on open access fiber
Jacqui Cheung at Ars Technica has the details of a move by the Australian government, now in cooperation with the dominant telco, Telstra, that will be well worth watching. The speeds are pretty modest for fiber but the model could provide interesting fodder for broadband access discussions elsewhere. The infrastructure itself will by run so that any ISP can pay non-discriminatory rates for access. Sounds an awful lot like what we had here until lobbying resulted in broadband being largely de-regulated. - Flexible touch screen made from printed graphene
I am floored by how far along this research described in Technology Review is. The key advance is the production of an astonishingly large continuous sheet of graphene. They’ve even used such sheets to prototype the titular flexible display, not just modeled or suggested it could be done. There’s no mention of the heated atomic force microscope work I talked about on the podcast but that would seem like a logical effort to pair with this work for all kinds of electronics applications based on graphene. - B&N launches cheaper WiFi Nook
The Globe and Mail was one of many carrying the story and as many others have the response from Amazon, to drop the price of the Kindle. I am really only interested in competition in the space hotting up in as far as it just might lead to dropping DRM altogether as a competitive move to get each retailer’s books onto the other’s device. - In NJ, higher tech lowers crime
- Urgent ACTA communique to which you can add your name, by June 23
- Recent quantum random number generator record already broken
- File sharing has weakened copyright, helped society
- NSA gets geeky after dark
- VLC forced to drop shoutcast support due to AOL anti-OSS provision