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Old habits die hard: Russian deputies on Friday approved tough new media curbs during “anti-terrorist” operations, giving authorities greater control over coverage of crises such as last week’s Moscow theater siege. The measures, brought to the State Duma lower house of parliament long before last week’s mass hostage-taking by Chechen …

Those of you who are regular readers know I have not courted (political) controversy on this site, especially compared with my writing on my old site. But if the fight comes to me, I’ll certainly never turn the other cheek. I’m the other kind of Christian. In a post on …

The production players are the same: Fox, Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, the Idol format; but this time I may actually have some interest in actually seeing the performers, who already have some cultural heft to throw around: Fox Broadcasting Co. and Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment are working on a variation …

USA Today goes WAY out on a limb and picks six sequels, all from wildly popular series, as holiday season hits. Their seventh pick for blockbusterdom stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, and is directed by Steven Spielberg – hmm, sounds risky: In each of the past two holiday seasons, …

I don’t much like prefab faux-R&B teen pop, so you can imagine that I’m not a real big ‘NSYNC fan – I don’t hate them or anything, but they’re just not really on my radar screen. But I have an impression that they are not bad guys, that they have …

Happy Halloween – the scariest thing that happened was when our server went down for a couple of hours. That blew chunks. Dawn is off trick-or-treating with Lily and Lily’s bestest little friend, Maddie. Maddie and her mommy are moving away very shortly, very sad. My son Chris is off …

The Free Network Project: What is Freenet? Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is: Highly survivable: All internal processes are …

Isn’t this the kind of thing the War on Terror is supposed to be fighting? Didn’t they learn anything from the Who Wants to Marry a Whore fiasco? Reaching deeper into the pits of despair, and back in time to the feudal era, Fox has come up with a new …

Center for Democracy and Technology Executive Director Jerry Berman writes this week in the Legal Times on the need for more consumer input into all of the legal and governmental maneuvering going on over digital copyright protection: In the first week of its new term, the Supreme Court became the …

Stuntman lost and presumed dead after shooting a scene for upcoming Bruce Willis action film Tears of the Sun. As of late Wednesday, the Coast Guard was still searching for Michael Barber, a day after he and seven other parachutists leapt from a plane and were supposed to land on …