If I’d been forced to wager, I admit that a week ago I’d have If I’d been forced to wager, I admit that a week ago I’d have bet China wasn’t going to swallow Google’s scheme to offer unrestricted search inside China by directing Chinese people to the Hong Kong version of Google. I’d have […]
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.
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The Google and China Showdown.
Google is Google is betwixt and between, waiting at this very moment to see if China wants to get along badly enough that it will accept Google’s new approach to Internet filtering. The new set-up has users inside China click a bright blue link (pictured at right) to lead them to the same unrestricted search […]
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Gambling the World’s Wheat.
In the newest Harper’s, Frederick Kaufman fills in backstory (subscription only) on the food-commodities part of the financial-reform debate, making the case that Goldman Sachs contributed to the tragic global wheat shortage of 2005 to 2008 by creating an agricultural commodities index that backfired when the market couldn’t get enough of those delicious food futures: […]
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The Supreme Court’s Anti-Software Patent Decision.
Sure, this week’s Supreme Court decision [PDF] in Bilski v. Kappos was hardly the lightning bolt of judicial clarity hoped for by those with an interest in patent reform — in particular, those who hoped for a reform of so-called business-method patents and the software patents that piggyback off them. But reading what happened as […]
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Chicken Little-ing Lieberman’s ‘Kill Switch.’
If you track tech politics closely, there’s a good chance you can spot a Declan McCullagh column before you glance at the byline. McCullagh, a reporter and commentator for CNET, has a tendency to hang any tech news of the day on an anti-government framework, rarely stopping at healthy skepticism when there’s a chance to […]
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Port Chester Elects Luis Marino.
By way of quick update on how the town of Port Chester, New York, was using cumulative voting in its election Tuesday, it turns out that a Latino candidate did, in fact, find himself elected to the town’s Board of Trustees. That’s the first time a Latino Port Chesterean has received such a distinction, despite […]
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Coming to Terms with Our Cyber Dependence.
Richard Clarke’s vision of the coming cyber-Armageddon is easy to poke fun at. The former White House cybersecurity point person’s recent book is full of convoluted worst-case scenarios, like foreign agents wishing the U.S. ill triggering destructive office fires by causing Internet-connected photocopiers to jam. Clarke’s going for high drama to get attention, and he […]
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Towards a More Perfect Way of Voting in Westchester.
Tomorrow, the town of Port Chester, New York, population 28,000, wraps up the first round of its experiment with cumulative voting, a system whereby voters get multiple “votes” to distribute across their ballot. This new style of electing members of the town’s board of trustees came about after a Voting Rights Act lawsuit questioned why, […]
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Washington’s I.T. Guy
One man’s quest to liberate all government information — with or without the government’s help
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Fox’s Fantasy World Version of Copyright.
Christina Mulligan argues that among the areas where the hit Fox show Glee diverges from reality is that copyright infringement is a source of spiritual uplift, instead of litigation: In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying […]