Networks. Threats to the Internet. After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracking program. Hours after the Senate balked at reauthorizing the bulk collection of U.S. telephone records, the National Security Agency began shutting down a controversial program Saturday that senior intelligence and law enforcement officials say is vital to track terrorists in the United States.
US Companies Are Throwing a Fit Because They're Losing Control Over the Internet. Control over the internet is slipping away from the US government and American corporations in favour of a more global approach, and the corporations don’t like how they’re being treated so far.
In a US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing today, representatives from the International Trademark Association, Amazon, and other US-based internet commerce organizations testified about how they’ve been treated unfairly by the International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit corporation charged with managing new domain names. ICANN, founded in the US in the late 1990s, will officially cut its ties with the American government this year in a move expected to further internationalize internet governance with input from foreign companies and governments. In April, ICANN deferred investigation into the issue to the US Federal Trade Commission and its Canadian equivalent. "The internet is inherently international, and trademarks are legally national"
Verizon's Just the Latest Big Evil Media Conglomerate Waiting to Happen. Pro/Con: Why Google's Fi Could Be Awesome and Terrible. IsThisTheRealLife comments on Google threatened to remove Yelp and TripAdvisor from search results if they didn't let Google use their reviews in Google Places. FCC approves plan to allow for paid priority on Internet : technology. FCC net neutrality controversy: Wheeler pretends to back down. Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan to let ISPs charge content providers more money to make sure that their traffic gets delivered more quickly is probably not the most popular idea.
The FCC’s new net neutrality proposal is already ruining the Internet : technology. FCC net neutrality plan: Mozilla says ISPs should be common carriers. Mozilla might not be as big as Google or Netflix in most consumers’ minds but as the maker of the popular Firefox browser, it does have some clout.
That’s why it’s noteworthy that Mozilla on Monday recommended that the Federal Communications Commission use the “nuclear option” against Internet service providers by reclassifying them as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Title II regulations were designed to regulate old telephone networks as part of the 1934 Communications Act, which was most recently overhauled to include updated rules in 1996. Why Comcast Will Be Allowed to Buy Time Warner Cable and Kill Net Neutrality. For the past three years, Comcast's Senior VP of Governmental Affairs has been Meredith Baker.
Baker's last job was the Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, where she signed off on the controversial NBCUniversal sale to Comcast in 2009. Now we know that Baker, the former FCC Commissioner and a public official, was around to help make sure net neutrality died so Internet costs could soar, and that Time Warner Cable would be allowed to fold into Comcast, despite claims that the new megacorp might violate antitrust laws. Neither the new net neutrality rules nor a Time Warner Cable sale to Comcast could possibly benefit an average consumer or a small business.
Why Comcast Will Be Allowed to Kill Net Neutrality: "Comcast's Senior VP of Governmental Affairs Meredith Baker, the former FCC Commissioner, was around to help make sure net neutrality died so Internet costs could soar, and that Time Warner Cable would b. Because Of DRM, The Entire Copyright Monopoly Legislation Is A Lie. Would you consider it reasonable if the copyright monopoly legislation ended with the words "but if publishers think this law is too permissive, they can rewrite it as they like, and we'll enforce that instead"?
Because that's exactly what the law looks like. Cory Doctorow had a brilliant column in The Guardian, which was very long and went into quite a bit of legislative history, but the key takeaway hit the nail right on the head. The entire copyright legislation is a lie, a façade, a mirage. The DMCA: How It Works and How It's Abused. Democrats Introduce Open Internet Preservation Act To Restore Net Neutrality. Democrats in the House and Senate today introduced the Open Internet Preservation Act, a bill that would reinstate now-defunct net neutrality rules that were shot down last month.
Net neutrality, in its most basic form, is the idea that ISPs must treat all Internet data the same. Under its regime, ISPs are not allowed to selectively speed up or slow down information requested by their customers due to their selective gatekeeping of the services impacted. 10 Reasons Our Shallow Fresh Water Supply is in Deep Trouble. Jeffrey GreenActivist Post Fresh clean water is essential to all life forms.
It seems that a resource so vital should not be corralled, controlled, or corrupted by any corporation or government. However, with fresh water supplies under assault on multiple fronts, governments seek to further clamp down on individual human usage, while doing very little to reduce the reasons for the contamination. At the same time, corporations that repackage water and sell it back to the public enjoy financial benefits from the scarcity of their "product.
" Upon review, water scarcity is an alarming prospect indeed; especially in areas of the world where clean water was limited to begin with. Keeping Conflict Minerals Out of Your Cell Phone. Muddy trails extending for hundreds of miles into the subtropical wilderness of the Democratic Republic of the Congo end at shallow, exposed mines full of one of the most valuable mineral deposits on earth: tantalum ore.
Crack open your cell phone and you’d find a refined version of it in the thumbnail-size part that helps power the device. In the DRC’s Katanga province, the bush trails also lead to an interesting experiment in coping with government regulation. A tale of two supply chains (click to enlarge) Net neutrality clone. Will net neutrality ruling make Web like cable TV? Internet service providers are no longer required to treat all kinds of Web activity equally, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a decision that could dramatically reshape online access.
The decision overturns key parts of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality regulations, which barred Internet providers from restricting speeds or even blocking visits to different sites. Read this if you want the internet to live. S Content ID System SUCKS. White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts. Google wins book-scanning case: judge finds “fair use,” cites many benefits. The Ninth Circuit Library. "Citations are the cornerstone upon which judicial opinions and law review articles stand....The ability to check citations and verify that citations to the original sources are accurate is integral to ensuring accurate characterizations of sources and determining where a researcher found information.
However, accurate citations do not always mean that a future researcher will be able to find the exact same information as the original researcher. Citations to disappearing websites cause problems for legal researchers. " Raizel Liebler & June Liebert, Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: The Life Span of a United States Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link (1996-2010), 15 YALE J.L. & TECH. 273, 275 (2013), available at. In Supreme Court Opinions, Web Links to Nowhere. The libraries that governments will burn in the future.
We're About to Lose Net Neutrality — And the Internet as We Know It. Image: moodboard/Getty Net neutrality is a dead man walking. The execution date isn’t set, but it could be days, or months (at best). And since net neutrality is the principle forbidding huge telecommunications companies from treating users, websites, or apps differently — say, by letting some work better than others over their pipes — the dead man walking isn’t some abstract or far-removed principle just for wonks: It affects the internet as we all know it.
Once upon a time, companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and others declared a war on the internet’s foundational principle: that its networks should be “neutral” and users don’t need anyone’s permission to invent, create, communicate, broadcast, or share online. WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks. News leak publishing organization WikiLeaks has drawn criticism for its absence of whistleblowing on or criticism of Russia, and for criticising the Panama Papers' exposé of businesses and individuals with offshore bank accounts.[38][39] The organisation has additionally been criticised for inadequately curating its content and violating the personal privacy of individuals.
WikiLeaks has, for instance, revealed Social Security numbers, medical information, credit card numbers and details of suicide attempts.[40][41][42][43] History Staff, name and founding Julian Assange was one of the early members of the WikiLeaks staff and is credited as the website's founder. Manning Found Not Guilty Of Aiding The Enemy. Icelanders approve their crowdsourced constitution — European technology news.
Brazil looks to break from US-centric Internet (Update 2) Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S. -centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments. President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company's network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.
Comms giant pushes anti-spy network. Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013. By Jeffrey Beall Released December 4, 2012. Facebook Now Knows What You're Buying at Drug Stores. Protests follow Google 'endorsed advert' change. 14 October 2013Last updated at 06:35 ET. Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government. United Nations report: Internet access is a human right. Internet access is a human right, according to a United Nations report released on Friday. "Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states," said the report from Frank La Rue, a special rapporteur to the United Nations, who wrote the document "on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.
" La Rue said in his report that access to the Internet is particularly important during times of political unrest, as demonstrated by the recent "Arab Spring" uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, among other countries. Fast Internet access becomes a legal right in Finland.