Public must fight to maintain net neutrality, Lawrence Lessig.
Now, however, the Internet's unprecedented openness is in jeopardy.
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have been lobbying to kill net neutrality. They say they won't build an information superhighway if they can't build it as a closed system. No other industrialized country has made that devil's bargain, and neither should we. Without net neutrality, online innovation is vulnerable to the whims of cable and phone companies, which control 99 percent of the household market for high-speed Internet access. And Silicon Valley venture capitalists are unlikely to bet the farm on a whim.
Network owners say the threat of abuse is hypothetical. But actions speak louder than words. Last fall, Comcast was caught secretly blocking popular technologies that can bring HDTV to your laptop - used by everyone from the Hollywood studios to NASA. It was no coincidence: Comcast is targeting a growing competitor to its cable TV service.
Blogger garners fame after 'Bittergate', Washington Times.
She first reported Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's unflattering remarks about small-town folks after recording his speech during a San Francisco fundraiser April 6, then posted both transcript and audio four days later to Off the Bus, a free citizen-journalist Web site published by the Huffington Post.
"This situation clearly illuminates the fact that in the citizen blogger, amateur journalism world, the rules that govern the relationship between traditional journalists and their sources are not present. A traditional newsroom would not have allowed someone who was a campaign donor to cover that candidate," said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
"Mayhill Fowler had access to that fundraiser because they thought she was a supporter, not a journalist. This situation suggests that people who care about blogging and its accuracy and credibility need to think about the rules that define the line between citizen and journalist," he said.
Google `Gamed' Airwave Sale, Republican Lawmakers Say, Bloomberg.
The so-called open-access requirements, also backed by consumer groups, may have shortchanged taxpayers by discouraging more companies from bidding, Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, said today at a hearing.
``Google was successful in gaming the system,'' Upton said. The rules were a ``social engineering'' experiment by the Federal Communications Commission that prevented the spectrum swath, known as the C-block, from raising billions of dollars more, he said.
U.C. Berkeley student's Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt, Mercury News.
Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.
The next day, he walked out a free man with an Egyptian attorney hired by UC Berkeley at his side and the U.S. Embassy on the phone.
Facebook Applications Analysis - Part 2, Bivings Report.
The first aspect that I wanted to analyze was the sheer amount of applications contained within profiles. To make the count simpler, I narrowed the selections down to five categories: 0, 1-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9+. Only 3rd-party (i.e. not official) applications were counted. Of the 300 profiles researched, 64 contained 0 applications, 84 contained 1 or 2 applications, and 84 contained 3, 4, or 5 applications. On the higher side, 41 profiles contained 6, 7, or 8 applications, and 27 contained 9 or more. Below is a pie chart with a summary of the collected information.
