"And so too is the danger of this legal imperialism also about time. If the imperialists are wrong, then we will have lost something important by the time the Internet's Robert Bork graduates from Chicago. We don't have 30 years to get this one right."

Another case of "You'd-think-this-shouldn't-have-to-be-said,-but..."

In Search of Skeptics: The basic point of this article is that we should consider the consequences of laws constraining the Internet before we make them.

"Brand" is another word for the reputation of a company... which lives or dies based on the integrity of that company.

"By far the most important factors facilitating or inhibiting Internet access are education and age, and not income—nor race/ethnicity or gender, each of which accounts for less than a 5 percent change in rates of access and is statistically insignificant.

The digital divide is bunk: The article provides a much needed dose of common sense into the debate, but it does overstate its case a bit.

Thank you.

From someone who has NO stocks whatsoever, as I have NO assets whatsoever: Go scriosa maorlathaí míthrócaireach do chuid infheistíochtaí!

Update: Napster Takes a Nap: "Starting around 7 a.m. PDT Monday, servers and home pages for Napster, a popular service that allows Internet users to exchange MP3 music files, have been unavailable and disconnecting users." Napster's so easy to block it can even happen accidentally Thanks to Lawrence Lee for e-mailing me this link.

Cnet: Can Napster be Stopped? No!: Well, to pick nits, yes, Napster itself can be stopped, as it depends on central servers. Maybe you can't stop it but you can make it as hard to use as it is to find FTP servers with warez, which for someone who is not "in the loop" is quite hard. Gnutella, on the other hand, is virtually provably impossible to block. If the protocol becomes encrypted or compressed, then the data it sends will look just like any other encrypted or compressed data, and the only other clue will be the traffic pattern, which I doubt will remain unique to Gnutella as others come up with perfectly legitimate uses for that protocol, like massive distributed processing.