Free Republic

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...