Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

What’s the Matter With .kids Today?

Fabulous piece on The Shifted Librarian about the House of Representatives approving a new .kids.us domain. For those tuning in late, there are two domain systems on the Internet. One is the TLD system like .com and .biz and the new .info and .name. The other is a system of country domains like .us, .uk […]

More FUD From MS

From Internet Product News: Microsoft Gets Defensive About Open Source Software. According to a report in The Washington Post, Microsoft is “aggressively” trying to convince the Pentagon to abandon its use of freely distributed software, claiming open source software threatens Department of Defense security. What’s wrong with this picture? In his testimony for the Microsoft […]

Terror Alert in New York

A data point: The heightened alert in New York City is indeed having an effect. Traffic crossing the Brooklyn Bridge this morning is being restricted and apparently closely examined, with attendant delays. The bridge was closed for a half-hour to investigate a suspicious package. And there are helicopters patrolling the neighborhood. I need to go […]

Why Blog?

This is from Robert Scoble. I wanted to post it as is, because it gets at some interesting questions about weblogging that I don’t have time to develop just now but need to get back to. Weblogging Success Based on Traffic?. Is weblogging all about the traffic? This writer seems to think that traffic is all […]

New Ways to Search

Robert Scoble and some others point out a new search engine, Vivisimo, which organizes results in some interesting ways. It’s not really a search engine, actually; more properly, Vivisimo organizes information it finds at other people’s search engines. (No, I don’t entirely understand it either.) Vivisimo is a spinoff of Carnegie Mellon University, and has […]

Another Fun Use of the DCMA

Phil Zimmermann wrote the encryption program PGP, and nearly went to jail over it. He sold his company to Network Associates, which barely seemed interested in marketing the program. Now NAI has not decided to stop selling PGP, but now NAI Tells Sites To Remove PGP, under threat of prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act […]

I Think I Liked it Better When They Didn’t Tell Us

It’s not like they have a real threat or anything, but it seems that the FBI has alerted New York City to be watching out for another terrorist attack against a landmark. Specifically listed are the Statue of Liberty, which is within easy view of here, and the Brooklyn Bridge, which a few blocks from […]

Librarian May Yet Save Webcasting

Radio broadcasters don’t have to pay record companies to play music over the air. Webcasters were facing the possiblity of having to do just that — and many of them were saying that the proposed royalty was unfair and ruinous. Except that Librarian of Congress James Billington, whose business it is to set the royalty […]

More Proof That Copy Protection is Always Doomed

The Register had this story first, but I didn’t quite believe it. Now Reuters has picked it up and confirmed it in great detail. Sony has taken to screwing with its music CDs so that they won’t play on computers. God only knows how much they spent developing or licensing the technology. Here’s how to […]

Kids Can Be Cool

Impossibly Hip meets the Biological Clock: Babies have long been a fixture in the area’s Latino, Polish and Hasidic communities. But the pioneering artists and those who followed them to Williamsburg in the last 20 years seemed to float above such corporeal concerns as pregnancy and child-rearing. They were known for pierced navels and creative […]