August 24, 2003
The Wine Wars
NY Times: A look at the insane quilt of regulations and laws that makes direct shipment of wine to consumers a felony in more than half the states. Among the issues: state's rights, free trade and how in the heck Kenneth Starr, of all people, has become a spokesperson for the wine retailers.
The surveillance camera watch
Carnegie Mellon's Data Privacy Lab has launched SOS Camera Watch. Snippets of video surveillance are listed in New York, Washington and Pittsburgh. One participants writes on the Interesting People list:
The Camera Watch project is part of our new Surveillance of Surveillances ( SOS) effort. We are constructing a repository of links to publicly available on-line webcams, where the webcams of interest are those that observe the public in public spaces. At present, we estimate there are about 10,000 such cameras displaying public places in the United States. Our goals are to assess the number and nature of such cameras, explore potential uses, and analyze and propose related policies and best practices.blockquote>
The blogger on the bus
Looks like my bud David Weinberger has become the first blogger ever to travel in a presidential candidate's press bus. Check out David's dispatches from Howard Dean's Sleepless Summer tour.
Visit Machu Picchu virtually
I don't buy many CD-ROMs, but I'm tempted to get this one:
Today's Mercury News has a review of Digital Technology Frontier's The Ancient City of Machu Picchu, part of their Virtual Vacations series.
File sharing, copyright, and compromise
From today's MIT The Tech:
To all new students: Welcome to MIT. When you move into your new rooms and set up your computers, make sure your lawyer is on speed dial. ...There can be only one true solution to the widespread problem of copyright violation: a compromise that respects the rights of artists to their work and of consumers not to be raked with bloated costs. ...
Cruz leading Arnold
In a Los Angeles Times poll released today on the California recall, Cruz Bustamante leads Arnold Schwarzenegger 35-22 percent, with no one else close.
Former dot-commers adjust, painfully
NY Times: Chapter 2 of the Great Dot-Com Bust of 2000 has begun, the part in which former employees of Internet start-ups try to re-acclimate to the corporate world. While they were gone, they tasted what it was like to introduce products without multilayered approvals, to set their own hours, to party hard as well as work hard, and often, to own a sizable stake in the company. And they have seen what the Internet can and cannot do.
