Culture and Society

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. …

Sony is becoming the exhibitionist of the media and electronics empires: In a rare and incredibly candid interview, Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation, tells AlwaysOn what he really thinks. This is Part 1 of a three-part series. At this year’s World Economic Forum, held recently in Davos, …

Tony Scott, CTO of General Motors, says the auto industry may be what drives wireless: The automobile may just be the vehicle (pun intended) to bring on the next generation of wireless technology. One current example — the mass adoption of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags (such as E-ZPass on …

Our own Jeff Jarvis, probably the single blogger with the most real-world media experience, has thoughts on the Ragng Cow/Dr. Pepper affair (as notably related by Glenn Reynolds here). Jeff: Now you could argue that this nitwitted idea has actually paid off — if you’re a member of the say-anything-just-spell-the-URL-right …

Philip S. Corwin, partner at the Washington, DC law firm of Butera & Andrews, which specializes in federal government relations and litigation, has written up an amazingly comprehensive and readable assessment of digital Washington. He participated yesterday in the “Digital Copyright Debate” panel at the Digital Music Forum. Not incidentally, …

While digital rights management was under discussion at Berkeley last weekend, the nearby Stanford Center for Internet and Society held a conference titled “Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons?” Amy Harmon of the NY Times was there: technologists, economists and lawyers clashed over how the airwaves should be allocated with the …