Interminable copyrights and the (future) history of journalism

Over on Techdirt, I wrote a short piece about how uncertainty surrounding ridiculously long copyright terms is likely keeping newspapers from the 1920s onward out of major archives. We’re very likely in the midst of a sea change in journalism, but future generations may not be able to study what we’re producing and exploring as likely business shifts make the copyright question even thornier. From the article:

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Limiting Javascript to secure origins in Firefox

I’m a Firefox user, but I was very interested to read Chris Palmer’s guide to privacy and security settings in Chrome. One thing he did that really intrigued me was enabling Javascript only on secure sites. It ends up being a pretty good default not just because it prevents attacks that rely on Javascript injection—like the ads that Comcast and AT&T have inserted into pages accessed on their hotspots, or the massive man-on-the-side attack the government of China apparently conducted against Github—but also because a site going through the effort to authenticate itself is also a reasonable proxy for the kind of stuff I’d allow anyway.

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Misogyny on Mars

Even though The Martian was only officially released last year, I felt like it sat in my to-read pile for way too long before I finally got to it this week. And while I really enjoyed the book, I was disappointed by the lonely protagonist’s occasional sexist comments, which were unnecessary, a little cheap, and (one hopes) out of place in an era where humans are making repeat visits to Mars.

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