David Weinberger

Charlie Leadbeater has a terrific post on the threats posed by the fact that The Cloud (as in “cloud computing”) too often actually is a recentralizing of the Net by profit-seeking companies. The easiest example cited by Charlie is Google Books, which provides a tremendous service but at the social cost of giving a single company control over America’s digital library. The problem here isn’t capitalism but monopolization; an open market in which other organizations could (the pragmatic “could,” not the legal or science fiction “could”) also offer access to scanned libraries would create a cloud of books not solely controlled by any single company. (The Google Books settlement threatens to rule out competition because without an equivalent agreement with publishers and au... (more)

Piracy in Developing Countries

Joe Karaganis, of the Social Science Research Council, is giving a talk at the Berkman Center on a six-country study on media (music, film and software) piracy. The study began in 2004 and should be available in March. NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. ... (more)

StopBadware spins out of the Berkman Center

Congratulations to StopBadWare , a non-profit that today has spun out of the Berkman Center. StopBadware maintains a database of malware sites from lists contributed by Google and Sunbelt Software, analyzes the data, provides some end-user services, advocates for sensible policies to minimize badware, and resolves disputes about particular listed sites. It is supported primarily by Googl... (more)

[berkman] Brett Glass on the Life of an ISP

Wireless Technology on Ulitzer Brett Glass is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk. Brett runs a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) in Laramie, Wyoming. “Lessons from Laramie: Broadband Innovation on the Wireless Frontier” [his slides] NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters.... (more)

Google Pushing for Open Spectrum

Kevin Fitchard at TelephonyOnline reports that Google’s Vint Cerf is pushing for open spectrum among mobile operators. Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, is advocating a policy of spectrum sharing among operators. At the Open Mobile Summit, Cerf said that new modulation schemes in wireless would allow for the simultaneous occupation of the same spectrum by multiple parties, m... (more)