The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

1/

If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

1/

Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

2/

Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

3/

Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

4/

(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.

1/

Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.

2/

In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.

3/

This isn't law as we know it, it's Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn't completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.

4/

Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

5/

One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.

1/

It turns out that there are DISeconomies of scale, what Brandeis called "the curse of bigness" and really, the Universal-NBC-Comcast octopus is a poster child for that

Comcast has just informed its subscribers that they are at risk of losing access to "Bravo, CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Olympic Channel, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo, Universal Kids, NBC Universo, USA Network and NBC Sports

That is, Comcast has warned its customers that Comcast might not license its channels to Comcast anymore.

This is a "carriage dispute" - a dispute over how much the cable operator will pay the broadcaster. It's a common dispute to have.

4/

But in this case, Comcast's dispute is over the accounting fiction of how much one division of a vertical monopolist will nominally charge another to access its products.

5/

One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

1/

Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

2/

Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

4/

For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

5/

Been working on something..

Follow the missing letters from @LLinWood

Thread practice 1

2

7

8

9