YouTube is working to perfect technology to allow for automatic filtering of copyrighted clips on its website. Interesting allegation mentioned in the article that YouTube purposefully turned a blind eye to copyright infringement in order to build its audience and enhance its acquisition price. That strategy may have worked. Google paid $1.76 billion to acquire YouTube 11 months ago.
Disturbing news from Burma, where the government is managing internet connectivity during the ongoing political turmoil. (Hat tip: Sree).
As if to prove my point (in a sense), the USA Today published a news article today describing how police officers in various locales are using volunteer citizens to help enforce speed limit bans.
Obviously, this kind of assistance helps enforce speed limits, and may help save lives. However, that technology is allowing for more perfect law enforcement and an enforcement rate far higher than conceivable when speed limits were passed. Such perfect enforcement distorts the original balance of enforcement rates, mortality rates, economic impacts, and convenience considered when the speed limits were passed. Perhaps maximum speed limits need to be reconsidered as a result.
More importantly, if such practices give private citizens the notion that helping police in something mundane like highway safety is their duty, then their prying into the lives of their neighbors is a modest natural progression of that mindset, eating away at our notions of privacy.
