EFF Honors Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales with Pioneer Awards
15th Annual Ceremony Highlights Innovations in Information Technology
Washington, DC - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will honor craigslist and its leaders, Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster; Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge; and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia at its 15th annual Pioneer Awards ceremony. The presentation […]

In the early evening last week, I want to a presentation by a Yale professor of psychiatry. It was about what he called “the neurobiological antagonism to difference” — all about how, after we reach a certain age (12, about the age of sexual maturity), our brains look at the world for confirmations of […]

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading Tim Powers’s novel DECLARE. I’ve read a bunch of Powers’s books over the last 20 years, including THE ANUBIS GATES, and find myself thinking that Powers is as much a fan of the literature of espionage as anyone could be — everything he writes about […]

This is a letter I sent today to Texas Student Media, the umbrella organization that operates The Daily Texan and other publications and entities at the University of Texas at Austin. (Seems like I get caught up in events at my alma mater every year at this time. Must be a seasonal thing.)
Date: […]

In what looks to me like a major defection by an American conservative, William F. Buckley, the founding editor of The National Review, has declared the war in Iraq as a failure, and has argued that the United States must now plan to pull out in defeat.
“One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq […]

Distressing to read in the New York Times that political appointees are trying to dictate how NASA reports science. I note that one White-House-appointed flack apparently wants “intelligent design” to be considered as an alternative to Big Bang cosmology. This is new and weird, since “intelligent design” has up until now been offered […]

Paul Di Filippo has posted a lovely science-fiction mini-story about the (future, presumably) death of the blogosphere:
Ex-bloggers were everywhere in this high-foot-traffic neighborhood. As the capital of Silicon Valley, San Francisco had drawn members of the obsolescent tribe from all across the nation, to bolster the native population. In just the space of a few […]

Bruce Schneier has a great Salon column today on President Bush’s authorization of the NSA to engage in domestic wiretapping without seeking court approval:
Most likely, Bush wanted a whole new surveillance paradigm. You can think of the FBI’s capabilities as “retail surveillance”: It eavesdrops on a particular person or phone. The NSA, on the other […]

My friend Eric Goldman, who’s a law professor at Marquette, has bet me that Wikipedia will fail within five years. Here’s his blog posting about the bet.
I read Jimbo Wales’s announcement — that soon anonymous authors won’t be able to start Wikipedia articles — as being less significant than Eric thinks it is. First […]

My friend John Siegenthaler, whom I know from my affiliation with the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, recently published an op-ed in USA Today about his experience with Wikipedia — it turns out that some malicious, anonymous Wikipedia author crafted an utterly false “biographical” entry for Siegenthaler.
I won’t repost what the bogus Wikipedia entry […]