Free Republic

...Kopelman presented a scenario for the rise of the "implicit" Internet. I'm simplifying, but he was referring to the vast web of personal data that until now has existed relatively undisturbed in different corners of the data world. For example, you may have made a reservation over the Internet one day, or bought a book from an online reseller on another. But that that data is going to get collected from heretofore separate "silos" as companies that figure out ways to break through the barriers and deliver information based on that implicit cyber data. That shouldn't strike anybody as a...

CBS (NYSE: CBS), in a bid to extend its online properties, announced today that it would purchase CNET Networks (NASDAQ: CNET) for $1.8 billion in cash, or $11.50 a share. Through the acquisition of the popular Internet network, whose properties include ZDNet, news.com and TechRepublic, CBS is looking to build out its online presence and become one of the most heavily trafficked brands on the Web. CBS, which largely sat out the cable channel buying boom in the early 1990s compared to its competition such as NBC, has been trying to leapfrog into the Web as a way to diversify...

NEW YORK (AP) — Terror leader Osama bin Laden will release a new Internet message dealing with Israel and the Palestinians, a terrorism monitoring group said Thursday. The announcement of the impending comments by the head of al-Qaida was posted on Web sites often used by terror groups, the SITE Intelligence Group said. Bin Laden's statement will be titled, "The Causes of Conflict on the 60th Anniversary of the Establishment of the State of Israeli Occupation" and will be addressed to the "Western peoples," SITE said. Al-Qaida messages usually follow within 72 hours of such announcements. The terror network has...

NEW YORK (AP) - Cox Communications appears to be interfering with file-sharing by its Internet subscribers in the same manner that has landed Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) in hot water with regulators, according to research obtained by The Associated Press. A study based on the participation of 8,175 Internet users around the world found conclusive signs of blocked file-sharing connections only at three Internet service providers: Comcast and Cox in the U.S. and StarHub in Singapore. Of the 788 Comcast subscribers who participated in the study, 491, or 62 percent, had their connections blocked. At Cox, 82 out of 151 subscribers,...

Converts from Islam to Christianity are increasingly concerned about a number of reports in recent months which have cited astounding statistics on conversion. It is true - and a matter for thankfulness to God - that more Muslims are now coming to Christ than at any other time in history. However, they are not converting on the vast scale alleged in some reports. These false reports, often initiated by non-Christians and then circulated by Christians, are a matter of grave concern, not just for those who love truth and accuracy, but also for the many individuals whose lives are being...

Charter Communications is sending letters to its customers informing them of an "enhanced online experience" that involves Charter monitoring its users' searches and the websites they visit, and inserting targeted third-party ads based on their web activity. Charter, which serves nearly six million customers, is requiring users who want to keep their activity private to submit their personal information to Charter via an unencrypted form and download a privacy cookie that must be downloaded again each time a user clears his web cache or uses a different browser... Deep packet inspection allows an ISP to monitor not only its users...

Yoani Sánchez was a student at the University of Havana when she did the unthinkable and wrote a thesis about dictatorships in Latin American literature. It wasn’t a direct criticism of Fidel Castro, but it was too close for comfort in a country where there’s so much that’s officially unthinkable. Ms. Sánchez eventually fled Cuba for Switzerland in 2002, with her son and husband soon joining her. Then she once again did the unthinkable and in 2004 moved back to Cuba when her husband couldn’t find employment in Europe. It’s not unheard of for people to return to Cuba to...

(CNSNews.com) - Using a video montage showing mass executions, bomb-making, and a promise to "slit the throats of Americans and Jews," two U.S. lawmakers unveiled a report that says homegrown violent Islamic extremism poses an increasing threat to the safety of the American people. (See Video) The bipartisan report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs was unveiled by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) at a press conference on Capitol Hill Thursday. Lieberman and Collins told reporters that al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups are using the Internet to recruit and train extremists...

I live in an area which is not served by cable TV companies. That has limited the Internet access choices to either dial-up or sattelite. I currently have both, using dial-up on my MacOS9 and Hughesnet on the PCs. I have learned that DSL has suddenly been extended to my area by Verizon. Hughesnet is costing roughly $90.00/month for less than satisfactory service because of their "Fair Access Policy" and because towering thunderheads frequently block the sattelite signal. I could get Verizon DSL for about $30.00/month--and if the in-house networking goes right, I might even be able to ditch the...

Other than Time Warner's single-city foray into monthly data caps, consumption-based billing has mostly been little ISPs with little monopolies, and given the market, we thought it'd stay that way. Broadband Reports is, uh, reporting that now Comcast is mulling monthly caps (which Comcast's PR guy confirms, though not the details)—something like 250GB, and then $1.50 for every GB over that. According to their source, the idea has "a lot of momentum" and it'll start rolling out in the next two months. The other part is that they're going to start ramping up DMCA notices to pirate assholes, with a...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said there will be a vast shift in Internet technology over the next decade as he met Tuesday with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. "We're approaching the second decade of (the) digital age," the software mogul and philanthropist told Lee at the start of their meeting at the presidential Blue House, according to a media pool report. "The Internet has been operating now for 10 years," Gates said. "The second 10 years will be very different." Microsoft Corp., the South Korean government and South Korean companies are investing $313 million in...

WASHINGTON — Running out of high-dollar donors, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is stepping up its Internet appeals in hopes of attracting enough contributions to keep afloat financially in the last stretch of Democratic primaries, aides say. As the marathon money chase has strained the limits of traditional campaign fundraising, Clinton aides have sought increasingly to shadow rival Barack Obama's Internet juggernaut that has raised more than $112 million via the Web, Through March 31, Clinton had corralled 70 percent of her $148 million in individual primary donations in amounts over $200, including $82 million from those giving between $1,000 and...

AOL contacts Microsoft as Steve Ballmer walks away from Yahoo! bid AOL, the internet arm of Time Warner, has approached Microsoft about a possible tie-up as a deal between the software group and Yahoo! unravelled, The Times has learnt. The move emerged as Microsoft this weekend said it was walking away from Yahoo!, after the online search engine rejected a second, higher offer from the software group valuing Yahoo! at $47.5 billion (£24 billion). The news broke after a meeting in Seattle on Saturday at which Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, sought to persuade Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo,...

The first legalised home computers have gone on sale in Cuba, but a ban remains on internet access. This is the latest in a series of restrictions on daily life which President Raul Castro has lifted in recent weeks. Crowds formed at the Carlos III shopping centre in Havana, though most had come just to look. The desktop computers cost almost $800 (£400), in a country where the average wage is under $20 (£10) a month. But some Cubans do have access to extra income, much of it from money sent by relatives living abroad.

Spam turning 30 this month; no gifts, please Thu May 1, 2008 12:33PM EDT See Comments (131) Buzz up!on Yahoo! The date: May 3, 1978. The culprit: Gary Thuerk, a marketer for the old Digital Equipment Corporation. His crime: Sending a sales e-mail to 393 users on Arpanet (then a U.S. government computer network and the predecessor of today's Internet). Little did Thuerk know that he'd just become the world's first spammer. That first piece of junk e-mail (which wasn't called "spam" until about 15 years later) has been memorialized over at Brad Templeton's Web site (Templeton is a Net...

Japan has a population groaning under the threat of suicide. Not only are people committing suicide, but the new Internet fad of mixing detergent and bath lotion is threatening to kill or sicken people around them. Heads up on a new fad of the Internet, a new method of suicide. On Thurday, at least 350 people were evacuated in Northern Japan because of a suicide using the newest method of detergent and bath lotion. The fumes had escaped and was feared to harm neighbors.

If/when someone does, please post the link here... Thanks! (sorry for vanity)

The growing use of encryption software -- like Microsoft's own BitLocker -- by cyber criminals has led Microsoft to develop a set of tools that law enforcement agents can use to get around the software, executives at the company said...Microsoft first released the toolset, called the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE)...Microsoft gives the software to agents for free.

The WB brand, born as a broadcast network in 1995 and closed in 2006, will return as an online video Web site, combining short original series with classic shows, the Warner Brothers Television Group announced Monday. TheWB.com, and a complementary site for children called KidsWB.com, are part of a “digital destination” strategy by Warner Brothers, a subsidiary of Time Warner, to tailor Web sites to specific audiences. In trying to compete for consumers’ time, Warner and other media companies have sought new outlets for content, sometimes bypassing the traditional network structure and creating broadband Internet channels. “My 20-year-old daughter and...

Is there still money to be made from “Matlock”? Within the last few months, television distributors have opened up their libraries of classic content online, making thousands of episodes of programs like “The Twilight Zone” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” available free. On Monday, Warner Brothers is expected to add a new twist, announcing the rebirth of the WB broadcast network as an Internet destination and offering programs like “Everwood” online. In putting old episodes online, broadcasters are tapping into the “long tail” of niche content that the Internet has monetized. While executives are reticent about the costs involved,...

Congressmen are notoriously confused by technology issues. A few years ago, Sen. Ted Stevens took up the issue of net neutrality. Then the chairman of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, he explained to a no-doubt rapt Congressional audience that the Internet was 1) "not a big truck" but 2) was instead "a series of tubes." There are many things which legislators tend to understand -- taxing, spending, campaigning, trucks -- but the intricacies of modern technology are not always among them. So I cringed when I heard last year that NARAL, a hard-line pro-abortion group, had a text message blast...

Shortly after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decisive 10-point triumph in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary, her campaign won another key victory. By trumpeting a record $10 million fundraising haul in the 24 hours after the primary, the Clinton camp managed to silence speculation about whether she’ll be able to compete in the next round of states after emptying her coffers in Pennsylvania. Even as questions were being raised about the timing, number and type of donations that comprised the one-day windfall, the cash-strapped campaign managed a rare political feat. It not only amplified the significance of Clinton’s decisive win, it also achieved...

FORWARD OPERATING BASE DELTA — An initiative to connect Iraqi students and teachers with the rest of the world via Internet is underway in Wasit Province. The Wasit Provincial Reconstruction Team, in concert with the Wasit Director General of Education, started a yearlong initiative in March called Access to Information. The program will provide local schools and libraries with books and resources and open Internet centers to selected secondary schools, universities and municipal library headquarters in al-Hayy and al-Kut, said Vanessa Beary, the PRT public diplomacy officer. he program started with the opening of an Internet center at the al-Kut...

Doom-filled warnings arrive from AT&T this week. The company says that without substantial investment in network infrastructure, the Internet will essentially run out of bandwidth in just two short years. Blame broadband, says AT&T. Decades of dealing with the trickle of bandwidth consumed by voice and dialup modems left AT&T twiddling its thumbs. The massive rise of DSL and cable modem service in the 2000s has had AT&T facing a monstrous increase in the volume of data transmissions. And that's set to increase another 50 times between now and 2015. That's enough, says AT&T, to all but crash the system....

The FBI on Wednesday called for new legislation that would allow federal police to monitor the Internet for "illegal activity." The suggestion from FBI Director Robert Mueller, which came during a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, appears to go beyond a current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks. Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad "omnibus" authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well. The surveillance should include all Internet traffic, Mueller said, "whether it be .mil, .gov, .com--whichever network you're talking about." (See the transcript of the hearing.)

When economic stagnation gripped the country in the 1970s, I was an economics professor in my home state of Texas. Back then when I was teaching a class and needed a real-world example of how government overregulation harmed the economy and stifled innovation, I would point to any number of sectors in the economy. This was the era when making a long-distance call was a big deal. In the wake of the economic malaise of the 1970s, economists began to seriously look at deregulation as a way to enhance economic growth. Airlines, trucking, energy and telecommunications all were opened to...

CAIRO, Egypt - Osama bin Laden's chief deputy warns that al-Qaida still has plans to target Western countries involved in the Iraq war in a new audiotape released Tuesday to answer questions posed by followers. The voice in the lengthy file posted on an Islamic Web site, could not be immediately confirmed as al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri's. But it sounded like past audiotapes from the terror leader. The tape is billed as the second installment of al-Zawahri's answers to more than 900 questions submitted on extremist Internet sites by al-Qaida supporters, critics and journalists in December. Asked by one...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — A man claiming to be the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq vowed in an audiotape released Saturday to launch a monthlong offensive against U.S. troops. There was no independent confirmation that the voice belonged to Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, but it sounded exactly like the one heard on previous audiotapes. Al-Muhajir has been the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq since his predecessor Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike northeast of Baghdad in 2006. "We call on our beloved ones ... that each unit should present the head of...

Rescued from digital doom, Soviet Union's Internet domain name evokes nostalgia, controversy MOSCOW (AP) -- The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising -- registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost. Russian nostalgia for the Soviet empire is part of the story. Nashi, or "Ours," is...

Washington -- Barack Obama's Web site is by most accounts the best in his business. It is critical to the campaign's record-breaking fund-raising, nimble grass-roots organizing and image as a broad-based, participatory force for change. But the very virtues of this wiki-world carry peril. For the first time in the history of presidential politics, outside observers -- including journalists and political enemies -- have real-time access, complete with search engine, to the thinking, debating and strategizing of the vast cadre that embodies a campaign without being under the campaign's effective control. MyBO, as the my.barackobama.com site is called, has more...

The Democrats are reaching new heights in raising money, recruiting volunteers, hiring staff, buying TV ads, contacting voters, and generating turnout. In scope and sweep, tactics and scale, the marathon struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton has triggered such a vast evolutionary leap in the way candidates pursue the presidency that it is likely to be remembered as the first true 21st-century campaign. On virtually every front, the two candidates’ efforts dwarf those of all previous primary contenders—not to mention presumptive GOP nominee John McCain. It’s easy to miss the magnitude of the change amid the ferocity of...

There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. Its being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being 3rd world by international broadband standards, to top of the charts and exemplary. Make this change and Net Neutrality becomes a non issue. There is plenty of bandwidth for everyone. What is the dirty little secret ? That your cable company still delivers basic cable networks in analog. Why is this such an important issue ? Because each of those cable networks takes up...

CAIRO, Egypt - Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader claimed in an audiotape released Friday that five years of U.S. involvement in Iraq brought only defeat, and said President Bush will be forced to pass the problem to his successor. Ayman al-Zawahri alleged that by heeding advice of his top commanders in Iraq and guaranteeing a heavy American military presence after July, Bush was "covering up for the failure" of his Iraq policies. "If the American forces leave, they will lose everything. And if they stay, they will bleed to death," he argued. The authenticity of the 16-minute recording, posted on a...

For days, Lobsang Gendun has been staying in a hotel, avoiding his telephone and trying to duck an Olympic firestorm that he had no part in creating. Since last week, when his name was mistakenly linked to a protester in Paris who tried to snatch the Olympic torch from an athlete in a wheelchair, Gendun has been inundated with blistering and sometimes threatening phone calls and e-mails. Internet sites posted his name, address, phone number and even a map of his neighborhood along with inflammatory comments. His employer has been accused of keeping a "terrorist" on the payroll. It's true...

New South Park episode tonight on Comedy Central - Over Logging - live thread! The citizens of South Park wake up one morning and find the internet is gone, in an all-new episode of "South Park," entitled "Over Logging," premiering TONIGHT, Wednesday, April 16 at 10:00 p.m. (ET/PT) on COMEDY CENTRAL. No one in South Park has internet access and there’s no telling when, or even if, it will come back. Desperation sets in as the fear of the unknown spreads rapidly across the country. When Randy hears there still may be some internet out in California, he packs up...

ALBANY (1010 WINS/AP) -- The state Assembly has given final approval to legislation intended to protect teenagers who use social-networking sites from online predators. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo introduced the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act in January. It requires registered sex offenders to provide online screen names to state officials. They would share the identities with Web hangouts like MySpace.com and Facebook.com, who are authorized to prescreen or remove offenders. It also restricts use of the Internet by certain sex offenders on probation and parole. The Assembly also passed legislation that would increase criminal penalties for using...

A BusinessWeek probe of rising attacks on America's most sensitive computer networks uncovers startling security gaps The e-mail message addressed to a Booz Allen Hamilton executive was mundane—a shopping list sent over by the Pentagon of weaponry India wanted to buy. But the missive turned out to be a brilliant fake. Lurking beneath the description of aircraft, engines, and radar equipment was an insidious piece of computer code known as "Poison Ivy" designed to suck sensitive data out of the $4 billion consulting firm's computer network. The Pentagon hadn't sent the e-mail at all. Its origin is unknown, but the...

EARLY on the afternoon of March 26, two young men visited Heritage Auto Sales, a specialty dealership in Calgary, Alberta. They asked to test-drive a dark gray 1991 Nissan Skyline GT-R, a performance model made primarily for the Japanese market and rarely seen in North America. ... One of the men had been to the dealership a week earlier for a ride, but he and Mr. Ironside didn’t get far. The car, with an engine modified for extra horsepower, began to act up. When the man returned with a friend for another try, Mr. Ironside was juggling two customers, so...

You're pounding the keyboard, double-clicking away, sighing and grumbling, but to no avail: That devilish little hourglass icon refuses to give way to the Web site you're trying to reach. Most Internet users have encountered trouble reaching online destinations, but they often attribute the problem to their wireless network cutting out or a server momentarily going down. Sometimes, though, the problem is more mysterious. At any given moment, messages throughout the world are lost to cyber black holes, according to new computer science research. Ethan Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor,...

Kathleen Seidel is a New Hampshire mother of two. She runs a blog, Neurodiversity.com, about autism--a topic of special interest to her as one of her children had an "autistic spectrum diagnosis." There is a theory that thimerosal, a preservative formerly used in vaccines, causes autism. Seidel has written skeptically of that theory, and of the trial lawyers who have sought to cash in on it. Last month one of those lawyers, Clifford Shoemaker, had Seidel served with a subpoena demanding that she report for a deposition and produce a voluminous collection of documents, described in her motion to quash...

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES April 3, 2008 Mr. Hensarling (for himself, Mr. Akin, Mr. Barrett of South Carolina, Mr. Bartlett of Maryland, Mr. Bishop of Utah, Mrs. Blackburn, Mr. Brady of Texas, Mr. Broun of Georgia, Mr. Campbell of California, Mr. Cannon, Mr. Cantor, Mr. David Davis of Tennessee, Ms. Fallin, Mr. Feeney, Mr. Flake, Mr. Fortuno, Ms. Foxx, Mr. Franks of Arizona, Mr. Gingrey, Mr. Hoekstra, Mr. Kline of Minnesota, Mr. Lamborn, Mr. Marchant, Mr. McCarthy of California, Mrs. Musgrave, Mr. Neugebauer, Mr. Paul, Mr. Pence, Mr. Ryan of Wisconsin, Mr. Sessions, Mr. Shadegg, Mr. Tancredo, Mr. Walberg,...

Richard "The Boy Named Sue" Warman has finally filed his statement of claim. Canada's busiest litigant, serial "human rights" complainant and -- the guy Mark Steyn has called "Canada’s most sensitive man" -- Richard Warman is now suing his most vocal critics -- including me. The suit names: • Ezra Levant (famous for his stirring YouTube video of his confrontation with the Canadian Human Rights tribunal after he published the “Mohammed Cartoons”) • FreeDominion.ca (Canada’s answer to FreeRepublic.com) • Kate McMillan of SmallDeadAnimals.com • Jonathan Kay of the National Post daily newspaper and its in-house blog • and me, Kathy...

Hackers have a lot of fancy names for the technical exploits they use to gain access to a company's networks: cross-site scripting, buffer overflows or the particularly evil-sounding SQL injection, to name a few. But Johnny Long prefers a simpler entry point for data theft: the emergency exit door. "By law, employees have to be able to leave a building without showing credentials," Long says. "So the way out is often the easiest way in." Case in point: Tasked with stealing data from an ultra-secure building outfitted with proximity card readers, Long opted for an old-fashioned approach. Instead of looking...

Afghanistan to Ask NATO for Bigger Army Afghan officials will go to the NATO summit in Romania Thursday with a request: pay to increase our national Army by 40 percent. A bigger Army, Afghan officials argue, will allow the US and other coalition members to scale back in the coming years. This appeal comes amid pleas from the US and Canada for other NATO members to commit more to the Afghanistan mission, which many analysts say has floundered over the past year for lack of resources and a coherent strategy. France is expected to contribute another 1,000 forces and...

Mug shots taken of suspected shoplifters and then posted online has spurred debate over the rights of people who may or may not have committed a crime. Avondale has joined the list of cities posting mugshots over the Internet. The photos show adults arrested and accused of shoplifting, even if they haven't been convicted of a crime. Avondale police officials said it's a way of helping merchants by cracking down on shoplifting, which peaked at 94 reports in October. The American Civil Liberties Union along with defense attorneys question whether the practice infringes on citizens' rights. "I think we have...

MIDLOTHIAN, Va. - On the screen at the front of the classroom, Virginia assistant attorney general Gene Fishel flashed an online social-networking profile of "hotlilflgirl," a 15-year-old who says she enjoys being around boys and wants to meet new people.The next image revealed the real "hotlilflgirl" - a mugshot of a 31-year-old man convicted of sexually abusing 11 children he met online and sentenced to a 45-year prison term on charges including child pornography and forcible sodomy."Not little, not fly and not a girl," said Fishel, in warning teens about the dangers of sharing personal information on the Internet and...

A New York City cabbie who operates an extremist Islamic anti-American Web site that features violent images — including mocking the deaths of GIs in Iraq — says he’s doing the country a service by “exposing the truth.” Yousef al-Khattab, who runs RevolutionMuslim.com from his home in Queens, told FOX News that he also wants the U.S. to embrace Islam and Sharia Law, which prohibits alcohol and can include stoning to death or severe flogging for pre-marital sex and adultery. On any given day, log on to al-Khattab's site and a host of startling images appear: — The Statue of...

Web could collapse as video demand soars By Lewis Carter Last Updated: 2:52am BST 07/04/2008 The internet could grind to a halt within two years under the pressure of booming demand for online video, experts have warned. Last year it was said that YouTube consumed as much capacity as the entire internet took up in 2000 Soaring visitor numbers to video websites such as YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer are putting the copper wires, which underpin parts of the internet, under severe strain. Experts warn that unless billions of pounds is spent on upgrading the web's infrastructure, it could slow...

The British government wants to ban convicted pedophiles from using social networking Web sites such as Facebook, the Home Office said Friday. The plan involves forcing sex offenders to give any e-mail address they use to police, who will then ask the Web sites to block their access, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said. Smith said the proposal is aimed at sending out the message that the Internet is ''not a no-go area when it comes to law enforcement.'' ''We are changing the law ... so that we have got better control over the way in which child sex offenders are...

SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home. A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment. Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create...