Friday round-up: Thought edition.
by the editorial team
A recent conference on open source in education at Seneca College generated interesting thoughts, published in Frank Hecker’s blog. (Hecker works for Mozilla.) This piece isn’t really about technology, but about how open source practices impact career and educational opportunities. A good read for big thinkers.
And the rest of today’s news? Not as good.
BitTorrent and the EFF vs. Comcast is back, and this time? There’s proof. It looks like Comcast has been selectively downgrading filesharing traffic. This is bad–and also very annoying. If you’re with Comcast, you might contact your local provider to let them know your feelings on the subject.
Now for some drama in a different genre: The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) have had their own internal dust-up over piracy. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing posted an update to the ongoing saga. It all began when a committee from the SFWA (or rather, the chair of that committee, Andrew Burt) sent cease-and-desist mail to Scribd, a text file-sharing site, requesting that a large list of supposedly-copyrighted works be removed. Unfortunately for Burt, that list included works that were not in need of policing, like copyfighter Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Madness ensued, and now even Charles Stross and John Scalzi have something to say about it. Stross and Scalzi were members of the committee that SFWA gathered to discuss the changes needed to create a new committee dealing with copyright at the SFWA. Does it occur to anyone but me that perhaps part of the problem is too many committees?