Blog: September 2007

The blog archives box, on the left or right sidebar, was getting very long, with one line per month for the three and a half years I've been keeping a blog (the site is much older, with photos going back farther, but I added a blog in April 2003). I trimmed the list and created a new blog archive page where you can see all the posts as well as some recent comments.

Speaking of comments, spammers have been relentlessly commenting on my blog about very important topics like halloween costumes (seriously - I'm not sure why this is such a lucrative spam topic) as well as the usual stuff, so I've set up Captchas from ReCaptcha. So far, no spam. Hopefully it will hold up.

And finally but most excitingly (for me at least), I've revamped the people index, which was also getting really long, with 1,488 different people who appear in my pictures listed on that page, many/most of whom appear only once. I set up a "tag cloud" style visualization, which is both more compact and also shows the more commonly appearing people most prominently.

Check it out, and comments welcome! But I won't reply soon - I'm off to Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia for two weeks. Bye!

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In a nation built on free speech, and where civil libertarians are fond of saying that "the solution to bad speech is more speech," these findings illuminate the difficulty of fighting misinformation. Appropriately, two days ago the Yale Law Journal ran a set of online articles discussing ways to fight Internet harassment such as the defamatory material on AutoAdmit.com that roiled the law school community last year.

Most of the Yale Law Journal articles suggest regulation such as imposing notice-and-takedown rules on search engines, but none of the proposed solutions would really fix the problem, and James Grimmelmann argues against censoring search engines, effectively and rightly in my opinion. The Post article suggests a few better ways to argue without repeating the false information, like "Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11" rather than "Saddam Hussein did not attack us, Bin Laden did", but acknowledges that such transformations may not be possible.

In both cases, we're still stuck with the problem that it's easier to anonymously defame someone than for the victim to clear his or her name, and it's easier to mislead the American public than to stand up for the truth.

Yet for millions of people who live in Comcast's service area, there is only one choice for fast Internet - Comcast. And Comcast gives customers two choices: residential cable Internet for around $60/month, or business Internet for $1500/month. But residential cable has a secret bandwidth limit, and as Consumer Affairs reports, if customers exceed the limit, Comcast cuts them off. Want to pay more for twice the download capacity, like you can on with cell phone minutes? Too bad, no.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Justice believes that everything is peachy keen in Internet land. Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge debunks the DOJ, comparing the range of broadband Internet choices in the U.S. (for most people, that's just one, and for lucky people, two) with the huge array in the UK. The Consumerist arranges it into a nice side by side comparison chart.

Why can't we have a real market with real competition, instead of ideologues like those at the DOJ using "free market" rhetoric to actually stifle the development of an actual free market? Sounds like the people at the DOJ didn't get past the first chapter in their economics textbooks, to the part where it explains how barriers to entry are one of the primary impediments to a healthy market.

The cereal art is now hanging at Google Headquarters, where Danny Sullivan saw it on a recent visit and wrote an article which made the rounds online, leading a few friends and former coworkers to notice the cereal box second from the left on the second row.