Science and Technology

The FCC and Congress are arguing about jurisdiction over possible rules involving a “broadcast flag”: A political rift over copy-protection standards for digital TV has developed between the Federal Communications Commission and a key panel in Congress. During a hearing Thursday, members of the House of Representatives’ subcommittee overseeing intellectual-property …

New service let’s you upload entire song as your ring-tone – labels starting to twitch already: A tiny company called Xingtone on Thursday said it has developed technology to enable users to load digital songs onto cellphones for the first time, but admits the software may hit a sour note …

Kazaa is in the middle of a legal battle with the RIAA and MPAA, the outcome of which may hinge on proof of “legitimate uses” of the file sharing network. Here’s an interesting use: Digital broadcaster Pseudo.com plans to release a weekly TV show hosted by rap star Ice-T on …

Or, the unintended consequences of law: the DMCA.

Another roundup of the status of the legit online music services, this one from David Pogue of the NY Times: THE only thing record companies know for sure is that they want to kill off the insanely popular Sons of Napster: free music-sharing services like KaZaA, Gnutella and Morpheus. After …

Cornell U. will begin a monitoring system for its computer network and will charge incrementally for “irrational consumption” of bandwidth: Cornell’s costs for providing Internet services — currently about $1.4-million a year — are going up by more than 40 percent annually, and the university says it had to do …

Last week we reported on the accumulating signs of imminent war with Iraq. They keep piling up, so much so that Slate has said the chance of war is 99%. Another indication is that the news media are speaking as though was were a certainty, although they always add a …

My family loves to make sculptures by assembling found objects, or parts of objects, into weird new creations. Our aesthetic is kind of “Clockwork Orange” in that we tend to combine natural and man-made elements into an organic/inorganic, yin/yang amalgam – very holistic and whatnot. We haven’t been at it …

Grokster says lawsuits good for biz: “any love is good love so I took what I could get….you ain’t seen nothing yet”: The head of the online file-sharing network said on Tuesday that lawsuits by major record labels seeking to shut down the service helped raise its profile and attract …

Resources from the Digital Right Management conference at Berkeley. This page contains a wealth of general DRM background, news, opinion, and the like, as well as more specific resources on the impact of DRMs on innovation, competition, and security. The centerpiece of the page is a paper by Lionel S. …