Category Archives: Commentary

FTC Reviews Behavioral Targeting Practices

An article today on the Washington Post site—FTC Wants to Know What Big Brother Knows About You–discusses the United States Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing review of behavioral targeting practices among companies such as Yahoo! And Microsoft. While many ad-supported websites have used content-specific advertising—displaying ads for dog food when a user performs a search for […]

Gaming as Immigration Rights Project

Breakthrough, an organization that does human rights work in both the United States and India, has released a game, ICED (I Can End Deportation) to help players learn the ins and outs of immigration policy and rights. The game, which targets youth, is intended to teach players how unfair U.S. immigration policy is.
The game […]

Citizen Journalism on Trial

It might behoove the ACLU, or some organization devoted to civil liberties, to devote some resources to figuring out how to defend speech that is inconvenient to plaintiffs lawyers.
Sandy Szwarc of the excellent blog Junkfood Science has a lengthy and interesting post about a subpoena delivered to the author of Neurodiversity, a website (and blog) […]

Uwe Boll vs. the Web

There is a petition to convince director Uwe Boll to stop making movies. Boll has apparently said if the petition gets a million signatures, he’ll quit [story]. Now, the director has proven a bit quirky — challenging film critics to boxing matches, which Boll won, and featured in Postal — but, there is something of […]

Second Skins and Tiny Lives

BoingBoingTV presents the above short piece about the movie Second Skin, which premiered at SXSW. The film explores the impact of massively multiplayer online games on the people who play — including one self-identified gaming addict.
The documentary looks like it may be covering some of the same territory explored in Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life […]

the “social media generation” at the polls

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they […]