Interesting Snippets from 2012-06-20

• Free Speech for Computers? - NYTimes.com

  The argument that machines speak was first made in the context of Internet search. In 2003, in a civil suit brought by a firm dissatisfied with the ranking of Google’s search results, Google asserted that its search results were constitutionally protected speech. (In an unpublished opinion, the court ruled in Google’s favor.) And this year, facing increasing federal scrutiny, Google commissioned Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, to draft a much broader and more elaborate version of the same argument. As Professor Volokh declares in his paper: “Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines are speakers.”

• Mozilla Thimble

  Mozilla Thimble makes it ridiculously simple to make stuff on the web. Thimble lets you make your own real, fully functional web pages in minutes. Then host and share them with a single click. Sharpen your web skills along the way. Easy, huh?

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