by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.
The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.
In yet another repudiation of its predecessor, the Obama administration this week migrated the White House Web site to Drupal, the popular open-source Web site management software.
by Keith Johnson, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
And then there were five–defections from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its climate-change policy, that is.
Apple today resigned its membership in the Chamber “effective immediately.” That’s a harsher tone than the other departures–three utilities said they’d let their membership lapse at the end of the year, and Nike simply quite the Chamber’s board of directors.
On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.
Obama officials received some 2,200 applications from companies and organizations for some of the $7.2 billion in stimulus money set aside by Congress to build out new high-speed Internet lines and services.
by Spencer S. Hsu and Cecilia Kang, Staff Writers, Washington Post
The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies” and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.
The Obama administration’s most radical idea may also be its geekiest: Make nearly every hidden government spreadsheet and buried statistic available online, all in one place. For anyone to see.
A group of 10 tech-industry executives spent Tuesday and Wednesday lobbying members of Congress and the Obama administration on issues like taxes, immigration reform, and software piracy.
The group, which included Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, and Sybase CEO John Chen, met with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, among others.
Andrew McLaughlin’s departure from Google to the Obama administration has prompted a little grumbling among some consumer advocates and the search giant’s corporate foes.
Mr. McLaughlin, who was Google’s head of global public policy and government affairs, is leaving Silicon Valley for Washington, D.C., to become a deputy to Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, who’s in charge of advancing the president’s tech agenda.
Cisco on Monday announced an initiative to sell high-tech gear to utilities, a market the company says could be a $20 billion-a-year market by 2014.
Political junkies may have heard the term “smart grid,” which is one of the areas that the Obama administration has targeted with its stimulus package. The government is committing billions to facilitate building a next-generation electrical grid that’s more energy efficient.
by Andy Borowitz, Comedian and Satirist, The Borowitz Report
A mood of tension has gripped the White House in recent days as President Obama prepares himself for a new round of criticism from one of the nation’s most powerful and influential constituencies: pajama-wearing Internet users who post anonymous comments on liberal blogs.
by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Vice President of Content Development at ReadWriteWeb
The White House is making unprecedented use of consumer web technologies but those technologies aren’t always well suited to fit the government’s needs.
When we first heard about President Obama’s “broadband” stimulus, we worried that it was nothing more than a boondoggle for incumbents rather than an actual broadband plan.
by Arik Hesseldahl, Senior Technology Writer, BusinessWeek.com
Wags in Britain are up in arms about the gift that President Obama, in London for the G20 summit, has given to Queen Elizabeth II: an iPod loaded with video and photographs of her 2007 visit to Richmond, Va.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.
