Two different ways to reconsider the role of your iPhone or iPod Touch: via Wired’s Gadgets blog, a great mashup of a Moleskin notebook and said device, and in the print edition of MacFormat magazine (Summer 2008), deputy editor Chris Plin argues that the iPhone is in fact the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with the cleaning cloth playing the role of the towel.

My alma mater, PhD venue and current employer, Trinity College Dublin, joined the world of iTunes U this month. As has the Open University, the only other institution that I have a qualification from. I love them both, but am particularly happy to see the TCD contribution, as I know some of the people involved in the project, both on the tech as well as the open-access-evangelising side, who have been plugging away at this for years. In particular, I can remember the reaction in some quarters when, in relation to a project I work for in the institution, we asked about putting podcasts on the server for internal use. We wouldn’t have got anywhere with that mini-project without their support, and their vision is coming to fruition with this announcement.

Thoughts from Karlin Lillington here and John Naughton here.

TCD on iTunes
OU on iTunes

The Berkman Center invited me to write an essay for its Publius project (”Essays and conversations about constitutional moments on the Net collected by the Berkman Center“), responding to a very interesting piece by the great Lewis Hyde, who called his contribution “Freedom of Listening: An 18th-century root for net neutrality“. My piece, “The Right To Communicate“, is available on the Publius website. Comments and responses very welcome.

Lewis Hyde’s thoughtful essay on network neutrality and the trials of 18th-century preachers-without-pulpits is a timely reminder that the issue of net neutrality is not one that should be the sole business of a small group of Internet activists and lobbyists. It’s about time to acknowledge that, while increasingly vehement disagreements between economists on how to stimulate the development of broadband in the US are undoubtedly fun to watch, a broader conversation on the cultural and political impact of new technologies is slowly emerging from the confusion that is net neutrality.

…continued at publius.cc…

Tags: berkman

The possible (mis)use of US federal law designed to deal with hacking for the purpose of the (admittedly tragic) Megan Meier/Lori Drew case is scary. In short, after a high-profile situation where a young person committed suicide after what appears to be a pattern of harassment conducted via MySpace, it emerged that the mother of a ‘friend’ of the deceased had written many of the messages. Charges didn’t follow in the first instance (state law), but after some time, charges were brought under federal law, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) as amended, which in effect makes it illegal to access any computer ‘without authorization’; the logic goes that because MySpace requires you to give correct information and not be abusive, not following the conditions means that you aren’t authorised.

The idea that violation of the terms of use of a website is in itself a crime raises all sorts of possibilities that are almost too far-reaching to speculate about without seeming a little unhinged! It’s similar to, yet even more threatening than, the development of knee-jerk “criminal trespass” laws that blur the line between conduct in public places and private places and have been used against peaceful protesters with abandon. I find some tragic humour in the fact that private censorship by hosts, no matter how irrational, is seemingly beyond the scope of the courts (being a private matter supposedly for contract alone) yet when you ‘break’ that ‘contract’, it’s such an offence against the public that the criminal law should be involved. (Never mind the fact that a lot of those now criminal-law-carrying terms are beyond boilerplate!)

We’ve talked about the weasel words (or misuse of words!) of authorised computer access on these pages before - in the context of wifi sharing. I have a bad feeling about all of this.

More from Eric Goldman, Susan Crawford, Wired and Peter Black.