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The Justice Department seized Megaupload.com, one of the world's most popular file-sharing sites, and several of its related sites on Thursday. Prosecutors charged seven employees of Megaupload with criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit racketeering and other charges. Each faces up to 55 years in prison.

Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. Experts in China scanned the brains of 17 young web addicts and found disruption in the way their brains were wired up. [...]

(Reuters) - The Obama administration cleared the way for states to legalize Internet poker and certain other online betting in a switch that may help them reap billions in tax revenue and spur web-based gambling. A Justice Department opinion dated September and made public on Friday reversed decades of previous policy that included civil and criminal charges against operators of some of the most popular online poker sites. Until now, the department held that online gambling in all forms was illegal under the Wire Act of 1961, which bars wagers via telecommunications that cross state lines or international borders.

32-year-old Luis Mijangos was sentenced to six year in prison this week by a U.S. District Court judge in California after pleading guilty to one count of computer hacking and one count of wiretapping in March 2011. Mijangos, a resident of Santa Ana, California, worked as a freelance web designer and developer earning about $52,000 a year, but also spent his days using malware to gain access to people’s computers and extorting up to $3,000 a day from his victims. FBI experts in computer forensics estimated that Mijangos infected more than 100 computers used by over 230 people, 20 percent...

A new crop of apps from Amazon, LinkedIn and Box.net are the latest to take advantage of HTML5. They also signal this young language already has business' blessing. Something in the last 18 months kicked the HTML5 adoption machine into overdrive. Maybe it was tech giants Apple and Microsoft joining hands and dubbing it the future of the web. Maybe it was Google's launch of the Chrome Web Store, with its focus on HTML5, last December. Maybe it was the HTML5-friendly iPad's meteoric sales. Whatever it was, a recent wave of consumer-facing web apps from Amazon, Box.net and LinkedIn confirm...

...August 6 marks the date the first-ever Web page went online, powered by the world's first-ever Web server, situated at http://info.cern.ch. Assembled by Sir Tim Berners-Lee using a NeXT computer, the browser was also an editor, enabling an interactive Web experience. Unfortunately, with the exception of NeXT machines, most computers just weren't capable of handling all these features, which is why a browse-only Web was born. Who ran NeXT? Steve Jobs. It was his next step project after losing a battle for control of Apple, all those years ago... It is interesting that Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer both as...

Who could have guessed that 4.3 billion Internet connections wouldn’t be enough? Certainly not Vint Cerf. In 1976, Mr. Cerf and his colleagues in the R.& D. office of the Defense Department had to make a judgment call: how much network address space should they allocate to an experiment connecting computers in an advanced data network? They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment...

Evgeny Morozov, a noted specialist on the use of new communications technologies to promote democratic values, has a new book titled "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom." In it, he argues that hype about "Twitter revolutions" and the enormous potential of the Internet to promote open societies and roll back authoritarianism is naive and overblown. What's more, Morozov warns, authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran have adapted quickly to devise new ways -- often modeled on commercial Internet-monitoring tools used by Western corporations -- to track and neutralize Internet activism.

Take a look - I was checking the BlackRock, Inc. homepage to gather some investment information, and what do I see? Their main "introduction" pane is displaying the words UPSIDE DOWN. Hmmmm.... struck me as so funny, I just HAD to share it! So the only question is, should I really invest? I mean, I don't think this was done on purpose, or am I wrong? I think they were hacked? hmmmm... BlackRock is suppose to be a providers of investment, advisory and risk management solutions. But can they even manage their own homepage? Ok, maybe this is on purpose,...

Wow, those Arabs are clever. So clever--or devious, or dangerous--that they've managed to rearrange continents, to rearrange computer domain names to suit their political/religious/financial objectives. In The Lawfare Project, Aaron Eitan Meyer explains this latest Arab attack. "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the entity responsible for assigning domain names on the Internet. (snip) ICANN works 'in particular to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems.'"[1] Formerly overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce, ICANN has been under "international and multilateral control" for over a year. And this has brought about...

According to the draft report, a state-owned Chinese telecommunications firm, China Telecom, "hijacked" massive volumes of Internet traffic during the 18-minute incident. It affected traffic to and from .gov and .mil websites in the United States, as well as websites for the Senate, all four military services, the office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and "many others," including websites for firms like Dell, Yahoo, IBM and Microsoft. "Although the Commission has no way to determine what, if anything, Chinese telecommunications firms did to the hijacked data, incidents of this nature could have a number...

Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it. We’re talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web.And it has a price.The overhead that’s already here There’s already plenty of redirect overhead in places where you don’t really think about...

Trouble may be brewing in cyberspace a year after the U.S. loosened its oversight over the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN manages the Web addressing system that enables computers to connect to each other as well as Web site domains. Ahead of the International Telecommunications Union’s Plenipotentiary Conference in Mexico next month, there’s concern that Geneva-based ITU may try to get more involved in Internet governance

Can't reach many West Coast Major servers /Backbone.. The "Big One" hit?

Bill seeks to make electronics accessible to blind, deaf By Cecilia Kang Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 17, 2010; A10 Blind and deaf consumers, who have fought to make home phones and television more accessible, say they are being left behind on the Web and many mobile devices. Touch-based smartphone screens confound blind people who rely on buttons and raised type. Web video means little to the deaf without captioning. But legislation is in the works to put pressure on consumer electronics companies that revolutionized an earlier generation of technology for the vision- and hearing-impaired. "Whether it's a Braille...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.justice.gov/usao/mow/news2010/harrison.ind.htm JULY 9, 2010 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE BLACK MARKET TRAVEL AGENTS 38 DEFENDANTS INDICTED IN MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR FRAUD LOCAL INVESTIGATION EXPOSES NATIONWIDE NETWORK THAT USED STOLEN IDENTITIES, CREDIT CARDS TO PURCHASE AIRLINE TICKETS KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Beth Phillips, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced today that 38 defendants from across the United States have been charged in a series of indictments that allege an extensive network of black market travel agents who used the stolen identities of thousands of victims as part of a multi-million dollar fraud scheme...

Internet porn sites may soon have the option to move off the ".com" main street of the Web to their very own adult-only domain: ".xxx." But industry experts say the adult world is divided over whether or not there is actually a need for a dedicated virtual red-light district. Internet domain names are expanding exponentially.The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international Internet oversight group, announced Friday that it would proceed with a proposal to register ".xxx," after rejecting the same application three years ago. Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN's board of directors, told ABCNews.com that...

Complete title: FCC Moves to Regulate Internet--Even Though the Law Calls for Internet to be 'Unfettered by Federal or State Regulation' (CNSNews.com) – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted on Thursday to begin the formal process of bringing the Internet under greater federal control – a move sought by both President Barack Obama and FCC Chairnman Julius Genachowski--even though federal law calls for an Internet "unfettered by Federal or State regulation." This step comes after the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in April rebuked the FCC in its attempt to enforce a controversial regulatory doctrine called Net Neutrality, which  would allow the government...

Hello everyone ! I'm an independent consultant, meaning I work at several different locations throughout the day, week or month. At some of these locations I have an office, or at least a server room with a console. I check Free Republic while at those consoles. One of my clients is an enemy of the american way. I am there now. So to keep this site off my "obvious" history and avoid questions, I'll browse to Free Republic via Google: Go to www.google.com In the search field I type "freerep". This will fill in the rest in the field below...

Microsoft’s Silverlight client may have finally reached critical mass, with installation on more than 60 percent of all Internet devices, according to one Microsoft exec. Brad Becker, director of product management for rich client platforms at Microsoft, told us in a phone interview that the rich Internet application plugin has seen strong momentum recently, with the percentage of Internet devices the Silverlight client has been installed on increasing by a third — to 60 percent from 45 percent — in just the last four months. The news that Silverlight has finally surpassed the 50 percent-mark comes on the heels of...

The European Union’s uber-bureaucracy spent most of the last decade prosecuting Microsoft for monopoly abuse. While the EU could have looked to the US’s decade of Microsoft prosecution to see how pointless regulating the swift moving technology industry is, the feisty Europeans had to make their point. The EU’s complaint settled on the fact that Microsoft bundles its web browser, IE, with every copy of Windows. Never mind that every other operating system comes with a web browser too, the EU reckoned that because of Windows’ popularity, Microsoft was abusing its power by forcing IE on consumers. The EU crusade...

Me and a friend have an idea for a website. I can not share the complete details of it here in a public forum but I do trust many of you and need assistance. The site idea has blown my mind and it is JUST want the conservative side needs... unity. And I think it will do that, as well as unite people on local issues state-by-state. Other than that, i can not get into the details of the site... yet. We are poor... well, rather our money is occupied in other things (My 2nd kid is on the way,...

KABUL, Feb. 1, 2010 – The International Security Assistance Force’s joint command announced a new Web site today to support the public affairs project, "30 Days Through Afghanistan." The Web-based project kicks off Feb. 8 and aims to bring the people, the mission and the experiences of ISAF's 44 participating nations to a worldwide audience through the eyes of military reporters U.S Air Force Tech. Sgts. Nathan Gallahan and Kenneth Raimondi. "The opportunity to show the world the ISAF counter-insurgency strategy in action through the eyes of two of our military journalists is unique," said Navy Capt. Jane Campbell, the...

Sorry to post a vanity. I want to post a press release. I am familiar with some of the players like PR NEws and others. Anyone know a simple and cheap or free PR news service tool?

In a fast-paced world, life can sometimes be daunting. Fortunately, the state of Michigan has online advice for almost every aspect of life, from shopping to gardening, eating to driving. Sure, some of it may be painfully obvious, nitpicky or bizarre, but just remember: The state knows what's best for you.

SOUTHEAST Queenslanders should be on the lookout for large black funnel-web spiders as big as an adult hand. As the hot, humid weather arrives, the potentially deadly spiders are on the move, with the first reports of the season this week. Queensland Museum senior curator Robert Raven said yesterday sightings of male funnel-webs had been confirmed at Mt Tamborine in the Gold Coast hinterland and Mt Glorious, west of Brisbane. With summer temperatures and rain, male funnel-webs would be active until at least March or April. Males often wandered at night searching for females, especially during rain. They are black,...

As social media become more popular, it is inevitable that enterprising politicians will use it promote themselves, connect with constituents, and garner votes. The White House has a blog, several Senators and House members tweet, and elected officials and candidates at all levels of government are using social media to get out their messages. But just as use of social media by voters is coming into conflict with existing election laws, some politicians are discovering that their use of social media may clash — or at least create possible problems — with existing campaign and government disclosure laws. Last summer,...

I need some Freeper help...Usually I'm asking advice about guns or stuff. But I need a different kind of help...a techie solution. A gadget. A CHEAP gadget. I'm setting up a video-conferencing solution for my company. What we'll be able to do is participate in each other's sales meetings, via the web, via webcam and microphone. It's not a static environment, but one where the leader is moving around, from place to place in the room; sometimes at the whiteboard...other times at another place in the room. I've kinda got the camera thing figured out. But what I need is...

Flu-wary telecommuters may clog Web networks, GAO says By Cecilia Kang Wednesday, October 28, 2009 As the spread of the H1N1 flu keeps more Americans away from work and school, a federal report warns that all those people logging on to the Web from home could overwhelm Internet networks. The Government Accountability Office reported earlier this week that if the flu reaches a pandemic, a surge in telecommuting and children accessing video files and games at home could bog down local networks. And if that were to happen, it is not clear whether the federal government is prepared to deal...

The wild, wild Web, where anything goes, could become less wild this year if federal regulators have their way. The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results. Under the new rules, which take effect Dec. 1, writers on the Web must clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products. Testimonials will have to spell out what consumers should expect to experience with their products. Until now, companies just included disclaimers...

WASHINGTON — There’s no kill switch for the Internet, no secret on-off button in an Oval Office drawer. Yet when a Senate committee was exploring ways to secure computer networks, a provision to give the president the power to shut down Internet traffic to compromised Web sites in an emergency set off alarms. Corporate leaders and privacy advocates quickly objected, saying the government must not seize control of the Internet.

I spend much of my time trying to read news articles and visit various web sites that have these new (expanding) advertisements. Some have click out boxes others do not. I spend a lot of time trying various techniques to get rid of those ads so that I can read the articles I am researching. Is there some technique to make them disappear? Better yet - Is there someone who one can complain to to get rid of that style of ad? Many are subscription only and I see no reason to subscribe just to complain that I can't read...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Sept. 14 (UPI) -- Forty-three percent of young Swedes interviewed for a national study said they believe getting paid for sex is acceptable, authorities in Sweden said. The study from the Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs also suggested an estimated 20,000 Swedes between the ages of 16 and 25 have sold sex, primarily through connections made on the Internet, The Local reported Monday. Young people interested in selling sex often suffer serious emotional problems, board spokeswoman Inger Ashing said. "There is a higher instance of problems with family relationships and many show other signs that they don't...

BOSTON (AP) -- When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message... ...Mao thought the error -- just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China -- was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based Web site that tracks online censorship... ...Zittrain started Herdict in February -- a month before China's block began -- to aggregate reports of online inaccessibility and help users detect government censorship on the Web as soon as it happens. Having tracked...

Governments and companies should limit the snooping they do on web users. So said Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, who said that growing oversight of browsing could have a pernicious effect. A greater part of the value of the web lay in the lack of constraints on what people could do with it. He also warned that attempts to censor what people could say or what they could do online were ultimately doomed to failure. Open triumph "When you use the internet it is important that the medium should not be set up with constraints," he...

NEW YORK — Google and Facebook have rushed out services in Farsi. Twitter users have changed their home cities to Tehran to provide cover for Internet users there. Others have configured their computers to serve as relay points to bypass Iranian censorship. In the aftermath of the disputed Iranian election, Internet companies and individuals around the world have stepped in to help Iranians Twitter delayed a scheduled maintenance shutdown so that people could continue to access the microblogging site while scores of Americans set up remote proxy servers so Iranians could access blocked Web sites from inside their country. All...

Don't look now, but the web is rescuing Western Civ. That being the college course that once was meant to teach kids about their inheritance -- about Socrates, the Bible, the Renaissance, Mozart, Shakespeare and all that. When the Boomer Left decided in its egomaniacal arrogance to abolish Western civilization it stopped teaching all those treasures of past and present in favor of All The Things We've Done Wrong -- anti-Western Civ, so to speak. So kids (like B. H. Obama) come out of college convinced they have to Save the Planet from the Evil Western Civ White Guys. The...

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) published last month a detailed 268-page dossier disclosing the addresses and specifications of hundreds of U.S. nuclear-weapons-related facilities, laboratories, reactors and research activities. The document, which was removed from the Web on Tuesday, is a draft declaration of facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog, required under agreements that the United States signed in 2004. It is considered highly sensitive though technically not classified. The vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Republican, said the disclosure revealed "a virtual treasure map for terrorists."

REXBURG, Idaho — Obtaining a physical body is an essential part of earth life, Elder Bednar stated, and it gives God's children the chance to have experiences that otherwise would not be possible. He said, "Our relationships with other people, our capacity to recognize and act in accordance with truth, and our ability to obey the principles and ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ are amplified through our physical bodies." He noted that Lucifer, who because of his rebellion against God, does not have a body, "attempts to influence us both to misuse our physical bodies and to minimize...

Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself. This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview. His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address,...

Taking aim at the way news is spread across the Internet, The Associated Press said on Monday that it will demand that Web sites obtain permission to use the work of The A.P. or its member newspapers, and share revenue with the news organizations, and that it will take legal action those that do not.

Yasser Arafat's official Web site posted pictures Monday that it said showed the late Palestinian leader's modest bedroom, offering a glimpse into the way he lived under Israeli siege during the final two years of his life. The spartan room included a single bed, a lamp and a narrow closet containing Arafat's iconic wardrobe: five military-style suits and four checkered black-and-white Palestinian scarfs.

* Governments, corporations snooping on website visits... * Next big thing on Web is linked data...* Berners-Lee says future of Web is on mobile phones Surfers on the Internet are at increasing risk from governments and corporations tracking the sites they visit to build up a picture of their activities, the founder of the World Wide Web said on Friday. Tim Berners-Lee, whose proposal for an information management system at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research CERN 20 years ago led eventually to the World Wide Web, said tracking website visits in this way could build an incredibly detailed profile...

<p>It all began 20 years ago today with a frustrated 29-year-old programmer who had a passion for order.</p> <p>Tim Berners-Lee, now famous as the founder of the World Wide Web, was working as an obscure consultant at Cern, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in the suburbs of Geneva. Berners-Lee loved the laboratory. It was full of stimulating projects and creative people, but his work, and the work of his colleagues, was stymied by the lack of institutional knowledge.</p>

Have not used my web-site in four or five years. It was developed using MS Frontpage. It worked for a non-techie like me. I have not kept up with website software changes over the years. Is there better software out there? Can the whole design be ported over?

<excerpt>In the middle of last week I tipped over from a state of mild fearfulness about the global economy to one of wild panic over what is to become of us. On Wednesday, I became host to all sorts of crazy worries – big, unmanageable ones as well as little, stupid ones. I worried about there being anarchy on the streets of London – while at the same time fretting over whether I should have painted the boxroom cream rather than white. This is the sort of mixed-up mental state I am familiar with from bouts of wakefulness at three...

Just by reading this online story, you are part of a groundbreaking trend. According to a new study from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released last week, the Internet has passed newspapers as the most popular source for news. Only television surpassed the Net, with about 70 percent of Americans saying they get most of their national and international news from the ubiquitous box. About 40 percent say they get most of their news from the Net, an increase of 16 percent from September 2007. Newspapers are the main source for about 35 percent. This...

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic...

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as...

License Plates for the Internet - The Blueprints for Obama's Assault on the Internet The report's recommendations emphasize taking away cybersecurity from DHS in order to create a special department to oversee cybersecurity. It recommends ending the division between civilian and national security systems. And calls for establishing "international norms" when it comes to the internet. And it focuses a good deal on identity verification, not just for Federal employees, but for ordinary Americans as well. The report urges a move away from passwords, and toward physical identity verification, via a device that would verify an individual's identity. And calls...