Christopher Leger

Lafayette, LA has done more to make its city competitive in the 21st century than almost every other city in the US. After years of legal battles, Lafayette has their telecommunications utility up and running. Because the utility has, as its core business model, the interest of its customer first, already outperformed, in both speed [...]

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Ars Technica alerted me to a very heartening story about a Harvard Law class defending a Boston University student against an RIAA filesharing lawsuit. These students are the future of the legal profession, and they themselves understand how technology can impact the law, regardless of the tactics the RIAA use in the future. The two [...]

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Google, the New America Foundation, and the PlanetLab Consortium have put together a new toolkit to help you keep an eye on your ISP. Until and unless the federal government requires ISPs to conform to Network Neutrality, it is up to consumers to keep their ISPs honest. Tools like this are invaluable as a method [...]

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It looks like Comcast and AT&T are the first ISPs to fall to the coercive RIAA. The RIAA has finally realized that suing thousands of their customers is bad for business, and has decided to change their tactics. They now want to pay ISPs to be the cops of the internet, taking people offline who [...]

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With another Obama administration official coming straight from the Biden/RIAA wing of the Democratic party, it appears less and less likely that the Obama administration will be anywhere near as consumer friendly as even the Bush administration was. I think that the odds are better than average that we may look back at Kevin Martin’s [...]

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Just like the debacle with the Scorpion’s album cover on Wikipedia, a controversial image has made the entire Internet archive unavailable to the UK. The heavy handed approach that the UK appears to be becoming more and more comfortable using is looking more and more like the great Chinese firewall, with zero regard for personal [...]

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It is refreshing to see academic studies about things “everybody knows.” a new study details the threat to children online from adult predators is roughly equal to the threat that exists in the real world. The same study concluded that online bullying is a substantially larger risk for children online – again, the same as [...]

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According to this New York Times article an unnamed telecommunications company challenged the constitutionality of the warrantless wiretapping program in a secret FISA claim and refused to comply with the order until the court ruled on the constitutional questions. Very few times do I think that telecommunication companies have their customer’s best interest at heart, [...]

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The perversion of justice that was the conviction of teacher Julie Amero has finally been resolved. The resolution is not the full vindication that many have called for, but it is a partial victory for reasonable and measured justice. Two things about this case scare me: 1. The absolute resolution that permeates prosecutors to obtain [...]

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Will technology finally get used properly in all federal agencies? Washington DC is not known for rapid change, but having technology at the forefront of the changeover to the Obama administration gives me hope that agencies will become more open and responsive.

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