Blogs

The Red Sox have won the World Series!

Wow - that was a great win and a great series. As many have said, I think the Red Sox exorcised a number of demons in that series, and the omnipotence of the Yankees wore off a little more. Just last year they were losing the World Series to a team with a fraction of their salary in Florida. I also give credit to the Patriots, for they’ve been fundamental in the feeling of sports optimism that pervades the Bay State.

Nicereport by AKMA on a lecture about security based on control v. based on trust.

Watching the US get destroyed in the Ryder Cup last weekend repeatedly conjurred up images of the US basketball team (aka “The Bad Dream Team”) from the Summer Olympics. The parallels are many: a group of players from the US are drawn from their separate teams or individual situations to fight as a team against other national teams. Given the manner in which these players are measured in the US ($ on the PGA tour, NBA star status), the US teams should dominate the other countries’ entries, but are beaten multiple times, sometimes handily.

Ed Felten’s suggestions for monitoring and filtering what your kids watch totally resonated with me. It’s not a hard-core architecture enforced approach, but instead an architecture enabled approach which balances practicality and other lessons you’d like to teach your kids. We already have our kids PC in the family room for the same general reason (but also have the same issue early in the morning!).

Lawrence Lessig says that Kerry has selected an “IP Czar” that is not (if Kerry is elected) make the our current IP environment get any better.

Jonathan Schwartz has an interesting point about the movement of technology decisions and trends outside of IT, using cell phones and search engines as examples.

Dave Winer writes: _From For your consideration: Why isn’t the USA Patriot Act being discussed in this election? Are we supposed to assume that if Kerry is elected he will withdraw executive branch support for that? Who will be Kerry’s attorney general? We know it won’t be Ashcroft. Why don’t they ever tell us who their key people will be? _ Interesting question. I always assumed that Kerry (if elected) would back off of a lot of that stuff until I read an article in October’s Reason magazine (not on-line yet) that discussed Kerry’s long-standing positions in this space.

Good note by Ross Mayfield about the trustworthiness of Wikipedia. In some ways it parallels the relationship of the traditional press to bloggers…..

Belated link to a good summary of the key points of the MGM v. Grokster ruling.