<>< Josh Rule : : 2008 MCPP Intern

A U.S. legal battle between Google and entertainment giant Viacom could have worldwide ramifications (but it probably won’t).  The court recently ruled that the Google-owned Youtube must release a log of of every video ever watched on the site.  Youtube has served billions of video views, and each time a user clicks on a video to watch it, an entry is recorded in Youtube’s digital log.  In it are recorded the username of the viewer if they are signed in, as well as the video watched, and the IP address from which the video is watched, among other information.  All this data will soon be provided to the court and to Viacom.  Viacom hopes to use the information to prove that users prefer to watch copyrighted material, illegally posted on Youtube, over the uncopyrighted material the site was designed to host.  Continue reading →

Hello everyone. Unlike most of the folks who will be writing on this blog, I have not majored in economics or political science. Actually, my majors are philosophy & computer science. So, you will probably see a number of posts about technology coming from me in the months ahead. In fact, in the next week or two I will be starting a series on the economics behind Open Source software. I hope you will find it as interesting as I do.

Right now, though, I want to talk about an article from BBC news. It’s about a study that used data from cell phone’s geographical monitoring capabilities to track people’s daily movements. The fact that they used cell phones really isn’t that surprising, since cell phones are able, in theory, to track location through signal triangulation. Apple uses it as a huge selling point that their mapping tools can pinpoint your location right from your iPhone, and many tools exist to allow consensual tracking by parents & friends.

Continue reading →