Who owns the right to an idea? The first to have it or the first to claim it?
Nancy Scola
Nancy Scola is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in Science Progress, Politics Magazine, AlterNet, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Posted inArticle
The Google Missile Crisis
Buying Motorola is about shoring up the tech company’s patent arsenal.
Posted inArticle
Doubling Down on Twitter?
Down below, my very smart colleague Paul Waldman entertains the idea of increasing Twitter’s character limit, riffing off a recent piece on the same by Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. Sidestepping the linguistic specifics of the tweet capacity question, I have to ask, if there was enough demand for that sort of thing, wouldn’t that be called […]
Posted inArticle
Murdoch, Media Consolidation’s Poster Child
Over at the New York Times, Brian Stelter reports that media reform groups in the U.S. are seeing opportunity in the News Corp hacking situation in the U.K.: Progressive activists and public interest groups have long blasted Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation for political biases. But in recent weeks they have seized on a […]
Posted inArticle
Free the JSTOR Four Million!
The news that Aaron Swartz, a technologist and activist involved in the early days of Reddit and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, has been indicted in Boston for allegedly breaking into an MIT wiring closet and downloading in excess of four million academic journal articles from JSTOR while a student at, wait for it, Harvard’s […]
Posted inArticle
There’s No Such Thing as Free Gmail
Google’s latest foray into social networking makes headway on giving users control over their information, but it’s up to us to stay vigilant.
Posted inArticle
Skype in the House
The House of Representatives will now let members and their staff use the video conferencing tool Skype and its lesser-known competitor ooVoo on campus, the Committee on House Administration has announced. This embrace of Skype by the House has long been in the works. The use of services like Skype was prevented before for security […]
Posted inArticle
Safety Net for the Net
Barack Obama’s new plan makes the case for government involvement in cybersecurity.
Posted inArticle
The Return of Big Bell
AT&T wants to convince us that the merger with T-Mobile is inevitable. We shouldn’t let it.
Posted inArticle
Big Brother Apple
Apple’s decision to remove an anti-gay app from iTunes might be seen as a victory for gay-rights groups, but are we losing something bigger in the long run?