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* 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>

BBC News (09/15/08) Ghosh, Pallab Sir Tim Berners-Lee is helping to create the World Wide Web Foundation, a new organization that will certify Web sites it finds to be trustworthy and a reliable source of information. Berners-Lee says there needs to be a new system that will give Web sites a label for trustworthiness once they have proven to be a reliable source. “On the Web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable,” he says. “A...

Excerpt - Google have announced plans to take on Microsoft and Firefox with their own open-source browser, codenamed Chrome, by releasing a specially drawn comic by Scott McCloud explaining the app. Based on the existing Webkit rendering engine, Chrome will integrate not only tab-based browsing but Google Gears and a newly integrated search and address system called Omnibox. ~ snip ~

Excerpt - The organization that oversees Internet addresses is expected Thursday to approve a proposal to create an unlimited number of so-called top-level domains -- the familiar suffixes like ".com" at the end of Web addresses. Under the plan, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will allow organizations to apply for any top-level domain. Businesses, for example, could use brand names such as ".ibm" or ".ebay" in their Web addresses. Cities could sign up for names like ".nyc" or ".berlin." It will also be possible to apply to use more general terms, such as ".news" or ".sports," to...

Excerpt - Soon, Netscape Navigator - the first highly successful graphical web browser (yeah, yeah, I know Mosaic came before Netscape, but I don't remember seeing Mosaic floppy-disks bundled with my PC World and Macworld magazines in 1995, at least not under the name "Mosaic") - will be nothing more than a footnote in Internet history. Let's take a moment of silence for the big N. OK, that was long enough. AOL, the parent company of this blog and Netscape, has announced that they will cease support for the current version of Netscape as of February 1, 2008. Netscape, which...

Former Senator Fred Thompson topped the presidential campaign site traffic charts in September, surpassing all other presidential candidate sites. The TV star pushed Congressman Ron Paul out of the number one position held by his site among Republican candidates since May, while longtime site traffic leader Barack Obama maintained his top ranking among Democratic presidential hopefuls. Notably, according to exclusive information provided to ClickZ News by Hitwise, while Yahoo and Google drove about a third of the traffic to the top Republican and Democratic candidate sites, some site traffic to RonPaul2008.com actually arrived from the site of his opponent, Mitt...

Excerpt - We've now learned more about the outage at 365 Main's San Francisco datacenter that knocked some of the Web's most popular sites offline. The latest theory: An employee, reportedly drunk, hit the emergency-power-off switch in 365 Main's Colo 4 room. Other sites located in other rooms were unaffected. This isn't the first time 365 Main has suffered an EPO-induced outage; a major one still remembered by customers occurred back in April 2005, and another took place last year. After the jump, a gallery of the carnage caused, and a roundup of reactions. Some of the affected websites --...

6 back-to-back power outages hit the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco Tuesday afternoon causing major havoc with popular web services. 365 Main is down, along with craigslist, Netflix, Technorati, Yelp, AdBrite and SixApart. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is currently working on the issue. It is now estimated that over PG&E 51,000 customers are with out power. So the big question, where is the backup power at the data centers used by these services? UPDATE 1: Digg is still up UPDATE 2: Some services, like Technorati are starting to come back online.

Anyone over 40 can remember a time when you could count the available TV channels on the fingers of one hand. Now they come in the hundreds. But that's nothing compared to the Internet, with its millions - is it billions yet? - of sites that can do just about anything but wash the dinner dishes. Online, you can find any fact you need, and any lie you'd prefer to believe is true. You can make new friends and keep up with your old ones. You can buy and sell anything, make phone calls, import and export photos and movies,...

Pulitzer Prize winning Dana Priest is married to William Goodfellow. William Goodfellow is the Executive Director of the the Center for International Policy (CIP).Here is what Discover The Networks has to say about the Center For International Policy: Dana Priest on left.America’s Red ArmyOne of the most sophisticated of Fenton’s anti-war projects is the co-mingling of Win Without War and the Center for International Policy (CIP). Before 9/11, CIP, a Fenton Communications client, mainly acted as Fidel Castro’s greatest “think tank” ally. Much of its million-dollar budget was spent lobbying to end economic sanctions and travel restrictions against Cuba.Now, it...

STOCKHOLM (AFP) - The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular websites for the illegal downloading of films through filesharing, has said it wanted to buy its own island in a bid to avoid copyright laws. ADVERTISEMENT "It's not only about Pirate Bay, it's more about having a nation with no copyright laws,"

Norfolk-based sailor uses Web to channel opposition to war By LOUIS HANSEN, The Virginian-Pilot © November 5, 2006 NORFOLK - Jonathan Hutto graduated from Howard University with a degree in political science and a résumé of social activism. He worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International after college. He whipped up grass-roots protests against police departments and college administrators. One day in 2003, broke and seeking direction, Hutto enlisted in the Navy. The Navy couldn't have known it then, but they know it now: They had signed up a sailor strongly opposed to the Iraq war. Seaman...

Placing bets over the Internet was effectively criminalized by the federal government yesterday, as lawmakers work to eliminate an activity enjoyed by as many as 23 million Americans who wagered an estimated $6 billion last year. Attached to a port-security bill signed by President Bush yesterday was the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibits online gamblers from using credit cards, checks and electronic fund transfers to place and settle bets. The law puts enforcement on the shoulders of banks and other U.S. financial institutions, some of which fought the legislation. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), said...

"Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind." — Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web Last week, Playboy Enterprises, Inc. teamed with a Toronto-based specialist in gambling software to announce the launch later this year of the first Playboy-branded online poker website. CryptoLogic Inc.'s president, Lewis Rose, lauded Playboy as "one of the world's premier entertainment brands." And Christie Hefner, CEO of Playboy, blew an air kiss Rose's way, heaping praise on his firm's "technical and industry strength." In the United...

For some, the Internet it has become an addiction, adversely affecting their lives and their family's lives. While not yet defined as a true addiction, many people are suffering the consequences of obsession with the online world, warns Dr. Diane M. Wieland, who treats patients with computer addiction in her practice in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. For some people, the Internet may promote addictive behaviors and pseudo-intimate interpersonal relationships, reports Wieland in the journal, Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. "Such cyberspace contacts may result in cyber disorders such as virtual relationships that evolve into online marital infidelity (cybersex) or online sexually compulsive behaviors,"...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- BellSouth Corp. confirmed Monday that it is pursuing discussions with Internet content companies to levy charges to reliably and speedily deliver their content and services. Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth (BLS: BellSouth Corporation, justified content charging companies by saying they are using the telco's network without paying for it. "Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover," he said in a telephone interview. He suggested that Apple Computer might be asked to pay a nickel or a dime to insure the complete and rapid transmission of a song via the...

NEW YORK - World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog just in time for the 15th anniversary of his invention. In his first entry, Berners-Lee remarked on how the Web took off as a publishing medium rather than one in which visitors not only read but also contributed information. "WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship," he wrote. That has changed lately with the growing popularity of blogs, which are online diaries that often let visitors submit comments, and wikis, which are sites...

US endorses Internet Governance Forum The US has inked a broad agreement at WSIS but that does not mean it relinquishes its influence over Internet operations The Bush administration and its critics at a United Nations summit at Tunis in Tunisia have inked a broad agreement on global Internet management that will preclude any dramatic showdown this week. By signing the statement, the Bush administration formally endorsed the creation of an "Internet Governance Forum" that will meet for the first time in 2006 under the auspices of the UN. The forum is meant to be a central point for global...

Efforts to replace U.S. oversight of the Internet with an international committee were defeated yesterday during U.N.-sponsored meetings. Hundreds of government, nonprofit and industry delegates meeting at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia, agreed to establish a new international forum to discuss Internet issues, but it would not have any policy-making power. "No new organizations were created," said David Gross, the State Department's Internet policy chief and head of the U.S. delegation. "No oversight mechanisms were established by anyone over anyone. There was also no change in the U.S. government's role in relation to the Internet,...