There have been proposals to revise CDA 230 that would keep civil immunity for smaller sites. The NTIA site has no such carveout, as all three of the experts I consulted pointed out to me.

FWIW, I see it as something more like the opposite of censorship--a way to ensure that insightful/informative/interesting/funny conversations happen less often, because the absence of effective moderation lets trolls and spammers overrun the forums where those discussions used to happen. See also, what happened to Usenet.

(Yes, I wrote that post. Thanks for the opportunity to dust off this account!)

I could do one of those old-fashioned, non-video, 10-questions /. interviews sometime. How do we go about that?

Well, maybe not this deep in the thread, where people won't see it. And maybe not this week, when I look to be running in circles on a few stories all due at about the same time. But I'd be happy to do some sort of extended Q&A here.

(I'm not cool enough to do an AMA on Reddit, right? :)

I didn't mention that because I don't buy that as a cause. For one thing, if you think the Post is that much of a liberal hangout, try asking around, say, Daily Kos about Post editorials and op-eds--or how the paper covered the prelude and start of the war in Iraq a decade ago.

For another, have you looked at the political demographics of the Washington area? I don't think tilting to the left would lose you that many readers here.

Thanks, man! I was only able to get that address because nobody else was using the twp.com domain for anything--and the alternative was using the Notes system the Post only managed to put down earlier this year.

Says who? If VLC were using any licensed DVD playback code, it wouldn't have the option of ignoring region codes (granted, newer drives make it harder to defeat that) or doing any of the other things that authorized DVD apps can't do. Further, I can assure you that I didn't compile libdvdcss on my Mac to get VLC to play any DVDs.

I don't think it's illegal myself (IANAL, but who in this thread is?), even subject to DMCA logic. It's not “primarily designed or produced” to play DVDs and has more than "limited commercially significant purpose” besides playing DVDs. But I would not be remotely surprised if somebody in the entertainment industry tried to bring a case against it anyway. Like I wrote in the linked article: If a printer manufacturer can try to use the DMCA to put a manufacturer of ink cartridges out of business, why wouldn't a movie studio try to nail VLC as a DVD-cracking tool?

I honestly don't know why nobody has.

My take was that they were trying to pull an Apple--they invited only a select few people to a splashy launch event in the hope they'd get some advance buzz, but then they forget that Apple product-launch events also generally include prices, ship dates, and the chance to do a hands-on inspection of the product. That did not go over well.

(FWIW, they didn't send me a review unit either, but I was hardly alone in being shut out. I wound up buying one at a Microsoft Store to write my review, then returning it two weeks later.)

To any tech journalists upset that Apple isn't spoon-feeding them product news: Get out. Just leave the business. Please?

Seriously, if you don't know to do your own digging for a story or don't want to, you're in the wrong line of work. And there are plenty of other people who would gladly take your place.

You should know soon enough--although the administration doesn't want the recipients of NSLs getting too specific, the FBI has to cough up a yearly total. It provided a count for 2011 (16,511 NSLs, covering 7,201 people) on April 30 of last year, so if they stick to that timing we should get last year's total in another month or so.

Some smaller newspapers have switched to Facebook-only commenting (here's one example, the Fort Meyers News-Press) because their old systems allowed anonymity without accountability, and they felt it easier to hand the job over to Facebook than develop something better in-house. I think that's a mistake--if you want to outsource your comments system, you could use Disqus or other services that police spam but permit persistent pseudonyms--but it's a real trend, or at least a trendlet.

The original purpose of Facebook, AIUI, was to help Harvard students hook up. Its business model does, indeed, providing a large and defined audience to potential advertisers--but people's names are the least of it. To a marketer, somebody's name is less useful than their address, their household income, the car in the driveway, the phone in the pocket, etc.

As for G+, I think its real purpose at the moment is to peel people away from Facebook.

I spent about 17 years at the Post, not 10. But thanks for spelling my last name right. As for the rest... I've read your comment twice, and I still don't know what point you're trying to make. Maybe those IR classes fogged up my brain too badly.

- RP