All Tech Considered posts about Policy
by NPR Staff
Is it naive to believe that improved Internet access can help open up truly autocratic regimes like North Korea? Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, authors of The New Digital Age, say the power of information is underrated.
by Steve Henn
Social networks now hold tremendous power to regulate online speech. Their rules for allowable comments, art and video govern billions of posts worldwide each day. And while Twitter users enjoy a great deal of freedom, Facebook has relatively tight restrictions on what users can say and see.
by Steve Henn
Few of us own the music we listen or the movies we watch in exactly the same way we did a decade ago. And today if you buy a smartphone from a cellphone company, what you can legally do with it — how and where you can use it — may be proscribed even if that phone is fully bought and paid for.
©2013 NPR
by Laura Sydell
Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, has landed in North Korea. His trip there is a bit of a mystery. North Korea's young leader, Kim Jong Un, recently set out a series of policy goals that included expanding science and technology as a way to improve the North Korean economy in 2013.
NHPRSmartphones and tablets can be a big distraction to students, but some schools are embracing these Internet-ready mobile devices as tools for learning. Bring-your-own-device policies have benefits in the classroom, but there are drawbacks, too.
The corporation that regulates the Internet plans to increase the number of "top level" domains from the current 22 to 1,000 domains starting in early 2013. The proposed domains offer a cross-section of the Internet — what we use it for, and where the money is.
by Laura Sydell
As we increasingly use wireless devices to stream movies and video, it is going to strain the current wireless infrastructure.
by Laura Sydell
An Independent filmmaker finds no sympathy for her quest to make a living from making art when she engages with an online advocate for the end of the current copyright system.
by Wright Bryan
India has prototyped a $35 Linux-powered tablet that it hopes to distribute to millions of students. Despite the ever-decreasing cost of computing power and components, the announcement last week raised some skeptical eyebrows.
by Randy Lilleston
Controlling the flow of online information is like trying to win at Whack-A-Mole. That's, essentially, the game that Google and China are playing with each other over the filtering of search results.
by Wright Bryan
Is a merger of man and machine in the cards for the human race? Some very smart people think so and they are working toward that goal right now.
by Laura Sydell
times they are a changing right? Now, we can broadcast to whatever we want over the Internet. Well, not if you happen to be using an iPhone or iPad.
by Laura Sydell
And it's not just the percentage of people with broadband access. The quality of science education and even cell phone subscriptions are lagging behind countries like Sweden.
by Meg Biallas
We look at what others are saying about Facebook's new privacy settings.
by Andy Carvin
Eric Dane of Grey's Anatomy and his wife Rebecca Gayheart are suing Gawker after the blog published scenes from a naughty home video. But is it a case of fair use? The PBS blog MediaShift thinks it very well might.
