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Archives for 2002

I don’t speak about it much

August 28, 2002 by Michael Boyle

I don’t speak about it much

, but since I was laid off from my dot-com job in January 2001 I have worked for a Large Global Corporation as a sort of internal e-business consultant. Well, not a sort of – that’s what I do.

Anyhow, having never worked for a Large Corporation, I never realized how secretive people – companies – think they can be, and worse, think they must try to be about things. Doc Searls looked into this today and did a pretty good job of it. I tell my boss all the time: if someone can duplicate what we intend to do after hearing just a bare-bones description, we have bigger problems than secrecy. Not exactly Doc’s point, but up the same alley.

Furthermore, if we think that our competition wouldn’t come up with the very same ideas we have if they were in our place, we’re almost certainly drastically underestimating them, which suggests that we’re probably already in big trouble. Secrecy has its moments – but these are limited and rare.

Tags: Business

Even a month ago

August 28, 2002 by Michael Boyle

Even a month ago

it would have been difficult to fathom how completely Bush and the executive branch could have lost the public relations effort surrounding a possible strike on Iraq, as pointed out in this article: US Threats to Iraq Contested by Friend and Foe. Bush et al. have thrown up so many trial balloons I can’t even see the sun.

Tags: International Affairs

Now hear this!

August 28, 2002 by Michael Boyle

Now hear this!

If you’re using OS X and you’re NOT using the release version of Mozilla 1.1, you should be. Quite simply it rocks. Very clean Quartz text rendering, fast, tabbed browsing… it’s very good.

News.com

August 28, 2002 by Michael Boyle

News.com

is running an excellent interview with Sarah Deutsch, general counsel at Verizon, by Declan McCullagh. At the end of the article, she says, “It’s been an interesting time to be on the same side as groups like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We find ourselves with shared interests in making sure that fair use is preserved, that users’ expectation in new digital services are fulfilled, and that copyright is ultimately a law that involves balancing the interests of many parties. We have a 300-pound gorilla on one side of the scale. Many of us are joining together on the other, to reach that necessary balance. ”

Tags: ALA

Yet another story

August 27, 2002 by Michael Boyle

Yet another story

about DNA evidence overturning a murder conviction. It’s commonplace now, it’s not even a surprise any more to learn that a person who has been serving time did not commit the crime. As usual, there is some indication that the police made the conviction happen through, umm, creative interrogation techniques. I’m not interested in the basic story however. We know that innocent people are convicted all the time. What’s disturbing is this seeming throwaway line in the story: “Most of the police files had disappeared…” The files always seem to have disappeared, no? I wonder if anyone is responsible for that part of things – I mean really responsible, with at least civil if not criminal penalties for losing the files. Information is power – in some cases, the power to save a falsely-convicted killer’s life. If the files that could exonerate him (or her) are lost, that would seem to me to be a big problem.

Tags: US Politics

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