Jonathan Zittrain

Apparently the US milk cartel, the ones who bring us the “Got Milk?” campaigns, is trying a new approach in advertising: paying places to smell like cookies. Scented adhesives are being placed in bus shelters to make people crave milk.   

Olfactory advertising is crossing a line. It’s one thing for restaurants to waft out the smells [...]

Tom King sent me a link to Engadget, which points out that FON has now focused its attention on Starbucks.
The idea is for people with broadband who live near a Starbucks to get a FON router –
A savvy patron of your Starbucks need only pay $2 a day for your WiFi. They’d have to be a [...]

Last night I became a Fonero. I received one of the free Fon access points advertised on the site and attached it to my home network. The idea is that one then offers wifi to others. Foneros can open their access points as Linuses, in which case they allow fellow Linuses to use their access [...]

Wired just published a short Q&A about my forthcoming book.  I thought I’d share a little bit more of the argument in the meantime, since it’s awfully hard to get across a book’s worth of argument in just a few hundred words of a Q&A — which, of course, was much longer before it was [...]

The New York Times has a story today about creationists who pursue PhDs in scientific fields — and write theses completely at odds with their personal beliefs as “young Earth” creationists.
The first example is Marcus Ross, a PhD student at the University of Rhode Island who wrote what his supervisors called an impeccable thesis — [...]

The English do like their rules, and woe betide the student at St Antony’s College who used up the last brain cycles of the day on work before heading for a simple meal in Hall:
Without parentheses, the menu is susceptible to at least six readings.

Wow, it’s hard to count the number of inaccuracies in this Reuters story on UK copyright term extension. The story makes it sound as if the Rolling Stones and the Beatles are about to lose their copyrights, because a 50 year term will not be extended to 95 years. But the 50 year term [...]

The Sheriff’s Office of Anderson County, Tennessee, has what may be the only live jailcam in the US, covering the little area in the jail where jailors sit and keep an eye on things. Maricopa County, Arizona, shut its camera down after losing a lawsuit by inmates.
The Anderson County cam is very Web 2.0: there’s [...]

Champions of openness say: no security through obscurity.  Better to have a system’s blueprints open and available, which will enable good outsiders to find and fix any flaws, and which will prevent the system’s designers from using others’ supposed ignorance of its working as a crutch or substitute for real security.
But: Google’s pagerank algorithm for [...]

A Bank of America manager created a very painful derivative to U2’s One and performed it at a company meeting to celebrate a merger. From the quality of the video and the number of angles it looks like it was professionally taped — not a cellphone recording here — and then distributed within the company. It’s [...]