Not “No, thanks.” Not “nope.” Just “no.” clear, unambiguous, empowering “no.” But not in a mean way.
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive.
A recent anti-cloud computing rant in the Guardian raises a good point, but the author’s vision of what the cloud is and where it’s going is a bit, er, cloudy. If you get your cloud information from enterprise IT vendors and not Web 2.0 hustlers, then the picture gets a lot clearer.
One of the biggest changes we made with the launch of the new NPR.org was offering free transcripts on the site. Ever since NPR started transcribing its radio programs in 1990, we have been selling transcripts to help defray the costs of producing them. In the old days, we used to mail out copies of the transcripts, a time-consuming and expensive process for all involved. In 2002 we added e-commerce to the transcript operation and were able to drop the prices and deliver the transcripts via email.
A new lawsuit from the EFF seeks to shed light on the mysterious “Other Intelligence Activities” that the NSA was engaged in after 9/11, and that the DoJ eventually found to be illegal. Based Ars’ reporting of the government’s datamining efforts, we suggest that it probably looks a lot like social network crawling.
Have you been hearing all the chatter about Google Voice but still haven’t caught up on what it is? Ars gives you the rundown on Google’s calling service and how you can use it to screen and forward calls, send free SMSs, and even get your voicemails transcribed and sent to your inbox.
Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year.
Kids these days have it all—their own laptops, cell phones, music players, and even digital cameras. A new report from the NPD Group says that use of these devices has grown by an “impressive” rate among 4 to 14 year olds, and that their usage is even changing over time as technology matures.
A link between massive volcanic activity and a mass marine extinction event is unearthed in southwestern China. The ensuing shift in the ratios of carbon isotopes suggest a major disruption to the planet’s carbon cycle.
Late last week, Plastic Logic demonstrated a touch-screen reader designed to compete with the Kindle DX. Then, over the weekend, Google pitched its upcoming book content store to publishers at BookExpo America. It’s looking like the e-book market is on the verge of getting very crowded.
The Torpig botnet was hijacked by the good guys for ten days earlier this year before its controllers issued an update and took the botnet back. During that time, however, researchers were able to gain a glimpse into the kind of information the botnet gathers as well as the behavior of Internet users who are prone to malware infections.
The deal Google cut with publishers to settle their copyright infringement suit would give a green light to the search giant’s book-scanning services and turn it into a retailer of out-of-print books. But resistance to the deal has been growing, as a variety of parties are realizing that the settlement gives both Google and the Book Rights Registry created by the deal enormous power over the dissemination of the scanned material. The latest groups to weigh in represent research librarians, who are worried about the deal’s privacy implications and the lack of guarantees of current and future access. The solution, in their view, is to structure the settlement in a way that guarantees the court the right to intervene in the future.
That’s the question on the mind of Robert Darnton, who runs Harvard University’s library system. For years, the Google Book Search project has digitized millions of books from libraries around the world, running into copyright law and a class action lawsuit from the Association of American Publishers in the process. When Google reached a tentative settlement of the suit in October, Darnton got nervous and refused to abide by the settlement; at least, not until he studied it a little more. Now, after poring through all 134 pages and 15 appendices, he’s feeling even queasier and has written a lengthy explication of his fears (what he calls a tension between “jeremiad” and “utopian enthusiasm”) in the New York Review of Books. Google, Darnton ultimately worries, cannot be trusted. Because the history of literature and publishing since the Enlightenment shows that no one, however noble, can be trusted with control of the entire corpus of human thought.
Microsoft’s (MSFT) supposed plan for Windows 7 on cheap netbooks is a cut-down version called “Windows 7 Starter.” The forced limitation, according to reports, is that it will only let you run three or fewer apps at a time; if you want to run more, you’ll have to pay up for a full version of Windows 7.
If you want to find out how the Obama administration is spending the stimulus money, you can go to recovery.gov for detailed spending data. Many executive branch agencies provide information about their activities via the government’s regulations.gov portal. And the Library of Congress has the Thomas system, which gives the public free, searchable access to information about the activities of the legislative branch. But the judicial branch is a conspicuous laggard when it comes to making public documents available online. Theoretically, public access to federal court records is provided by a Web-based system called PACER. Unfortunately, PACER locks public documents behind a paywall, lacks a reasonable search engine, and has an interface that’s inscrutable to non-lawyers.
