What’s New with Wu

Testimonial:  I bought and unlocked an iPhone in September and loved it.  A jailbroken unlocked iPhone is hands down the greatest wireless device going right about now.

But then, being myself, I left that iPhone in a DC taxi.  I bought a new one, only to find that Apple had beefed up their protection.  I began to think that the age of the unlocked iPhone was just going to be a few months.

Those days are over. I don’t know who wrote it, but ZIPHONE is a bloody miracle.  It unlocks and jailbreaks a store-bought iPhone in about 5 minutes.   In September, the same thing took me about 2-3 hours.

I repeat: ZIPHONE is a miracle.

Well the word is out, so let’s hear it for Lessig for Congress!

Yes he’d be facing tough competition in the primary, but this happens to be a good year for hope and inspiration against experience.

Carl Malamud, his team at Public.Resource.org, with the support of Larry Lessig made a deal with Fastcase - and the consequence is more free federal caselaw than ever before.

We’re putting these new materials on Altlaw.org — and I should add that Altlaw is undergoing some big improvements over the next month or so.

Altlaw is now facing two direct quasi-commercial competitors, which makes everything so much more interesting !

I use Paul Krugman’s international economics textbook, and I generally liked some of his criticisms of the Bush adminstration during the first term. But he’s gone, as far as I can tell, completely bonkers.

In his latest column, his theory is that Obama’s supporters are bringing the politics of Richard Nixon into the Democratic primary. His main example is that they made a big deal out of Hilary Clinton’s lionization of LBJ. His other examples are all about media bias against Clinton.

The media may like Obama - hey, he’s likable. But to accuse Obama supporters of Nixon-like tactics is so off base it reaches the level of crazy. So far in this campaign, the only really scary manuvers have come from Bill Clinton — even the Republicans have been running relatively clean. The best he has is that Obama’s supporters harped too much on the LJB comparison. That’s dirty politics?

As an academic or at least a former academic, Krugman has at least some vague duty to try to be analytically coherent. But he has fallen into the habit of creating categories (fine) and then desperately trying to shoehorn available data into them. Trying to fit Obama’s supporters into the categories of Nixonities may be his worst effort yet.

I am in Colorado for Phil Weiser’s annual telecom conference, Silicon Flatirons.

Made it to Steamboat Springs to visit a friend of mine.   In some places on the ski hill, nearly 10 ft of snow.

This is something I have been wondering as I write my book.  I have always felt that the problem with libertarianism isn’t that it values freedom; it is that it takes a strange and almost willfully blind view of what incursions of freedom look like.