- Thinking Further About Copyright (Confused of Calcutta) — several nice illustrations of the “copying is not theft” distinction. Copying per se is not stealing. After Michael Jackson did his moonwalk, children the world over copied him. They were not stealing. Digital forms of music, film, book and newspapers are cheap to copy and to distribute, because of the internet. The internet is a commons, specifically designed for doing this. For copying and distributing. Throwing that away just to protect the “rightsholders” is questionable in the extreme. Digital assets are nonrival goods, shareable without affecting the rights of anyone else to enjoy the same thing.
- DUI: Digg User Library — Javascript UI library from the folks at Digg.
- Building a Handheld HIV Detector — gadget the size of an iPod, that detects the T-cells that HIV kills. Prototype cost $250 to make, orders of magnitude less than the typical medical instrument. This is just one of many approaches to the problem, including disposable test kits funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (via @parc)
- How I Got Sued by Facebook (Pete Warden) — he’d previously reported security holes to Facebook’s security team, and that apparently saved him from a full-on lawsuit. Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission. Obviously this isn’t the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me.
ENTRIES TAGGED "digg"
Four short links: 6 April 2010
Copytheft, Digg UI, HIV Detection, and Facebook Sueage
Joe Stump on data, APIs, and why location is up for grabs
The SimpleGEO CTO and former Digg architect discusses NoSQL and location's future
Personalization and the future of Digg
A recommendation model could quell competition for Digg's front page
I recently talked to Joe Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, about a number of topics related to location and databases. However, in the course of the interview, we also got around to discussing Digg. Previous to launching SimpleGeo, Joe was the Chief Architect at Digg, and he has a lot of insight into where the site is heading. We'll be running the rest of the interview soon, but what Joe told me about Digg got me thinking.
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