timothy lee

Mike Arrington offers some unsolicited advice to Amazon about how to expand the market for the Kindle.

In a nutshell, he thinks Amazon should aggressively license the Kindle hardware specs to third parties, and allow authorized vendors to use the Kindle brand.

Amazon would require licensees to use the Kindle store, and would share the associated revenues. There's a lot to be said for a plan like this.

You regularly see people in the newspaper business, as well as some professional media critics, complaining about the terrible consequences of falling advertising revenues in the mainstream media.

There seems to be a worry that as the Internet makes the news business more competitive, traditional media organizations won't be able to afford to do "real" reporting any more.

It's not a crazy argument, but more often, the opposite seems to be true. Take the recently-completed Democratic Party convention.

Ben Adida points to an interesting hack that takes advantage of a bug/feature (depending on your perspective) of modern browsers.

When a webpage is rendered, the browser will typically display links that have been previously visited in a different color.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the Cato Institute's new series on the Future of Copyright, with a wonderful first post about just how broken copyright has become, written by Rasmus Fleischer.

Our own Timothy Lee has now penned the second piece in the series, wondering if a middle ground would be to just focus copyright laws on commercial use, and allow people to make use of copyrighted content for personal use.

ReadWriteWeb has an article claiming that the way to beat Google is by having a better ad platform (via Matt Asay).

It says that "the company that can corner the mobile web ad market is going to be able to go toe-to-toe with Google." This is getting things completely backwards.

Google doesn't dominate the search engine market because it has the best advertising platform.

Good news for consumers as Yahoo announces (via Rob Pegoraro) that it's dropping those annoying ads it appended to Yahoo Mail customers' outgoing emails.

The move brings it into parity with GMail, with Hotmail and AOL now looking like laggards.

A bunch of ISPs have been experimenting with systems such as Phorm and NebuAd that monitor their users' online behavior and create profiles that help third parties create more targeted advertisements.

Back in March we noted that behavioral advertising may be illegal under UK law. And last week we reported that Congress was asking some tough questions about the plans.

Apparently, last year's "cyber attacks" against Estonia have caused NATO to set up a "cyber warfare" center that will coordinate responses to online security threats.

This is silly.

When I started reading CNet's write-up of Roku's new Netflix set-top box, I was beginning to think that the movie industry might finally be getting its act together.

The price ($99) seemed reasonable, and the subscription rate (as little as $8.99/month) seemed about right.

After years of missteps, I thought, maybe they were finally starting to figure out this Internet thing.

Support for DRM in the recording industry is in freefall. On Tuesday, Napster released a new version of its music store offering 6 million DRM-free tracks.