- RIAA lobbyist becomes federal judge, rules on file-sharing cases
The influences on lawyers and judges are manifold but Nate Anderson’s write up at Ars Technica of the judge, Beryll Howell, how recently green lit some mass infringement cases is not confidence inspiring in terms of her ability to compartmentalize past experience. It isn’t just that she worked as a lobbyist, as the lede teases, but she also worked on several of the most problematic copyright laws and bills in the past handful of years. - Post-packet switched networks
Klint Finley has one of the clearer summaries of what the Open Network Foundation is advancing with its support of the OpenFlow networking protocol. Just as post-relational databases make certain tradeoffs to improve scaling and flexibility, so software defined networks offer similar promise, at least according to the early press (all credit to Finley for the apt analogy to NoSQL and relational databases.) - W3C pushing for standards for online television
Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb has details of a workshop organized by the standards body with some 77 companies attending along with a good survey of the current state of play. The latter overlaps strongly with the recent report suggesting online TV could learn much from content pirates. Despite the short list of top priorities, the sheer number of players that could de-rail consensus on any one does not inspire optimism. - Artificial leaf could power your house for a day, io9
- Amazon launches a web locker for personal music streaming, ReadWriteWeb
- Treasures from AT&T video archives, BoingBoing
- Lessons the Tor Project has learned from recent uprisings, Slashdot