Free Republic

The Internet provides vast amounts of information but it can also spread vast amounts of misinformation, or even deliberately misleading disinformation. For more than two weeks, scarcely a day has gone by without e-mails pouring in to me, asking about columns that someone has written and brazenly spread around the Internet with my name on them. Most of these e-mails have come from regular readers who are savvy enough to recognize columns that have a different style and substance from my own columns. We usually think of "identity theft" as involving using someone else's name for economic fraud. But identity...

Broadway runs east of Seventh Avenue north of 45th Street. Donald Trump owns an office building on Sixth Avenue. Lee Brown, the early 1990s police commissioner who presided over the highest murder rate in the city's history, was a hero in the war against crime. In what otherwordly New York City can this be true? In the wacky world of Wikipedia, the engine of ignorance "compiled by volunteers" and masquerading as a legitimate reference work. Its unreliability is not exactly news - it's the bane of educators who must teach pupils not to trust it.

Can a city stop people from posting a link to its Web site? That’s the question at the center of a federal lawsuit brought by a Sheboygan woman against the mayor and other officials there, in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind case, according to an Internet law expert. Jennifer Reisinger says the Sheboygan city attorney ordered her to remove from her Web site a link to the city’s police department, in what she believes was retaliation for her support of recalling Mayor Juan Perez, according to the suit filed last week. The city went further, the lawsuit claims, launching...

Hello everyone. I just received word that my inlaws have their HughesNet Satellite internet up and running. They would now like to start videoconferencing with the family here. We are both running Windows XP on Intel platforms with highspeed connections. Any advice would be appreciated.

Internet provider's usage cap raises questions Friday August 22, 10:36 am ET By Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer Company's limit on Internet use upsets customers and portends new era in online service NEW YORK (AP) -- Three months ago, Guy Distaffen switched Internet providers, lured from his cable company to his phone company by a year of free service on a two-year contract. But soon the company quietly updated its policies to say it would limit his Internet activity each month. "We felt that were suckered," said Distaffen, who lives in the small village of Silver Springs in upstate New...

CHESAPEAKE, Va. – By the time Barack Obama is ready to announce his vice presidential pick, will anyone believe him? In recent days, as speculation and anticipation has mounted, so too have phony text messages declaring Obama’s supposed running mate – from Evan Bayh and Hillary Rodham Clinton to Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps. It’s a cruel twist in a prolonged game of guessing that has put political junkies and Democratic supporters on edge since the campaign announced last week that it would disclose Obama’s choice through text messaging, which is expected to happen by Saturday. In the absence of...

The World Is Watching by Jennifer Fulwiler 8/21/08 It was only a few years ago that I began exploring Christianity after a life of atheism. I'll never forget the time I was up late at night, feeling lost and slightly depressed as I searched around the Internet for arguments in favor of God's existence, and I stumbled across a series of heated debates between atheists and Christians. I eagerly followed their back-and-forth comments well into the night, and witnessing this debate would end up marking a turning point in my life. It was one of the events that kick-started the...

ASPEN, Colo.--Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States. A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out." "Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the...

Congratulate yourselves as being among the leading edge in Americans interested in the news. According to a recent Pew survey 37 percent of America's news consumers go to the Internet for their news. But it isn't all good news for our sources of news. For one thing, this survey also shows that many of us are logging on at work. This is the sort of thing that could be hurt if more and more businesses ban Internet use, as some have... Of course, there is more bad news for newspapers as well as TV viewers here, too. Read the rest...

About freeing the airwaves One of America's most valuable natural resources is our "white spaces" -- the radio airwaves, or spectrum, that have long carried analog TV signals. Three-fourths of the white spaces are completely unused today, and -- especially once TV is broadcast in digital only starting in 2009 -- could be used to kick-start a revolution in wireless technology, including universal wireless online access and numerous new products and services that can't even be imagined today. This fall, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will decide whether to make this spectrum available for anyone to use. At Google, we...

While Sen. John McCain's campaign has long been a less than enthusiastic supporter of Web 2.0 technologies than rival Sen. Barack Obama's, it has significantly boosted its efforts to make better use of the technology over the past few weeks. And his efforts seem to be paying off in at least one area - YouTube views. Propelled by the release last week of a new Fan Club videoFan Club video and another recent video comparing Obama's celebrity status to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, McCain's cumulative YouTube views jumped from 5.6 million on July 30 to 7.9 million on Aug....

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) would emphasize public-private research and development grants to encourage the government's application of technology and establish a nationwide public safety network for first responders by the end of his first term, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has said. In general, McCain would also make more government information available online. McCain announced his government information technology plans as part of his overall technology platform that was published on his campaign’s Web site Aug. 14. In addition to encouraging the government’s use of IT, much of the platform focuses on the premise that with lower taxes, freer trade,...

Under fire for being a technophobe, John McCain will unveil a technology agenda that bundles previously announced pro-business proposals with continued support for a hands-off approach to regulation. The plan, dubbed "John McCain and American Innovation," is set to be released Thursday on the Republican presidential candidate's campaign Web site. It will call for a 10% tax credit on wages paid to all research-and-development employees. At the same time, it will reiterate Sen. McCain's opposition to Internet taxes and new laws guaranteeing net neutrality, the idea that Internet providers must treat all legal Internet traffic equally.

Security researchers claim to have uncovered evidence pointing to a link between Russian state-run businesses and cyber-attacks against Georgia. Denial of service attacks against Georgian web-sites started a day before Georgian and Russian military units began fighting over the disputed region of South Ossetia. SecureWorks researcher Don Jackson said that logs showed that portions of the attack were run from command and control servers located on the networks of Russian state-operated firms Rostelecom and Comstar. These servers were not linked to previous botnet activity. "We know that the Russian government controls those servers theoretically, if they have not been 'pwned'...

Two teenage twins have been missing from their Southern California home since Sunday, and their parents fear their daughters met someone on the Internet and could be in danger. Mary and Morgan Corrodi, 16, were last seen outside their Malibu home getting into a car occupied by two women. Jack Corrodi said his daughters, who have IQs of 70 and attend special education classes at Malibu High School, recently spent "many hours" on the Internet and received multiple calls from unknown persons. "[A neighbor] saw the girls standing there, just kind of hanging around like they were waiting for somebody,...

Behind the attempt to regulate the Internet is an attempt at destroying our God given constitutionally guaranteed rights of free speech and an attempt to suppress the spread of opinions, news, and ideas. For the Multi-national corporations and it's leftist CEOs there is a need for greed and to limit our choices they way they do with Television. The chance to monopolize the Internet and the video games industry is met with the support of none other than RINOS as well as the far left. Hillary Clinton, John Mccain and to some extent even Obama have expressed support for regulating...

I looked in my spam inbox today, and noticed the following. Obviously it was tagged as spam because it is using a different domain as the from address. ATLEARNING.COM. Unfortunately, I use gmail, so most of the headers were stripped off and I can't trace it back to it's original IP address. Has anyone else seen the Obama Nation doing this? ==================================== message below ===== msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Obama set to win presidency MSNBC Breaking News Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 14:30 Reply-To: MSNBC Breaking News To: msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: Obama set to win presidency Find out more at...

""There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.” FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks. "

If the idea of the Fairness Doctrine bringing government control of broadcasted speech wasn't bad enough, there's also a possibility that its oversight powers could spill over onto the Internet and control Web content.

Soviet Internet Domain Survives – in Obscurity 13 August 2008 By Anna Yukhananov / Special to The Moscow Times In the culmination of a decades-long debate, the international community has finally recognized the Soviet Union — online, that is. The ISO, or International Organization for Standardization, voted this summer to grant the .su domain the status of exclusively reserved. Previously, all web sites ending in .su were to be phased out by 2042, at the latest. "The zone is stable, it lives, and it will always live," Vladimir Molchanov, deputy director of the nonprofit Foundation for Internet Development, told a...

Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature are entitled to grand pronouncements, or else what is it for? So Doris Lessing, last winter, anathematised the entire internet, declaring that it had “seduced a whole generation into its inanities”. According to Lessing, the web helped to create “'a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned, and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing of the world”. One might wonder how she knew this with such certainty. How many of these young men and women...

While U.S. broadband providers continue to boost speeds for their subscribers, they still are falling behind the broadband deployment efforts of many other nations, according to survey of 230,000 U.S. Internet users. The survey, conducted by the Communications Workers of America, indicates also that population density can be a factor in providing broadband " Rhode Island, the smallest state geographically in the union, has the fastest median download speed with 6.8 Mbps while Alaska, the largest, has the slowest at 0.8 Mbps. Internet users in the survey took the CWA's Speed Matters Speed Test. The median download speed in the...

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.” FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks. The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told...

<p>Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.</p> <p>Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: “win+love+in+Rusia.”</p>

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.” FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks. The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told...

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.” FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks. The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told...

THE best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of characters for their passwords — and replace them with other random strings every couple of months. Then there’s the rest of us, selecting the short, the familiar and the easiest to remember. And holding onto it forever. I once felt ashamed about failing to follow best practices for password selection — but no more. Computer security experts say that choosing hard-to-guess passwords ultimately brings little security protection. Passwords won’t keep...

Google's e-mail service Gmail is offline for many users right now. Those wondering if they are alone in experiencing the outage can find comfort on Twitter, which is up and sizzling with Gmail down alerts. To track the spread of the outage (and to find out when it is corrected), take a look Twitter Search, which is posting dozens of items a second about the outage.

Russian researcher claims vulnerabilities can be exploited in less than a day, but others disagree... Patches meant to fix a flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) don't completely protect the Web's traffic cop from attack, a Russian research claimed Friday. The head of the non-profit that maintains the most commonly used DNS software, however, said there was little to worry about. In a blog post , Russian researcher Evgeniy Polyakov said he had created an exploit able to insert bogus routing information into systems running the most-up-to-date version of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the popular open-source software...

See comments below.

Barack Obama has outspent John McCain in overall campaign advertising, but in at least one overlooked area of ad spending, McCain enjoys a dramatic lead. Despite the Obama campaign's image as the more tech-savvy of the two, it's McCain who has invested much more heavily in search engine advertising, according to analysis from Nielsen Online released Friday. For two consecutive months, McCain beat Obama in the number of impressions purchased on search engines such as Google, paying to ensure that Web users see links to JohnMcCain.com along with their search results. Statistics for June show McCain bought 7 million impressions,...

scribbles89 sends in a story that originally ran in SearchSecurity; it sounds like it could be a game-changer. "While this may seem like any standard security hole, other researchers say that the work is a major breakthrough and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems. These attacks work differently than other security exploits, as they aren't based on any new Windows vulnerabilities, but instead take advantage of the way Microsoft chose to guard Vista's fundamental architecture. According to Dino Dai Zovi..., 'the genius of this is that it's completely reusable. They have attacks that let...

Republican presidential candidate John McCain's brutal yet entertaining attack ads and Web videos mocking the press and Democratic presidential opponent Barack Obama has become a huge hit on YouTube. McCain has beat Obama's channel for seven straight days and 11 of the past 14 days, in a signal he intends to compete for the votes on the video sharing site vote. "I want to know who he hired. They went from recycling their TV ads to like putting out these witty shorts," The Washington Times quoted David Burch, marketing manager for TubeMogul, as saying. The McCain campaign said it was...

Sen. John McCain's campaign is urging supporters to spam blogs and forums with official talking points, according to the Washington Post. If you do a good job, you can even win prizes. "That, in essence, is the McCain campaign's pitch to supporters to join its new online effort, one that combines the features of 'AstroTurf' campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper." "People who sign up for McCain's program receive reward points each time they place a favorable comment on one of the listed Web sites (subject to verification...

A criminal gang is using software tools normally reserved for computer network administrators to infect thousands of PCs in corporate and government networks with programs that steal passwords and other information, a security researcher has found. The new form of attack indicates that little progress has been made in defusing the threat of botnets, networks of infected computers that criminals use to send spam, steal passwords and do other forms of damage, according to computer security investigators. Several security experts say that although attacks against network administrators are not new, the systematic use of administrative software to spread malicious software...

With media stocks plummeting, a noisy army of pundits is predicting the imminent extinction of print newspapers and magazines. I hope they're wrong--for two reasons. The obvious reason is self-interest: If freebie blogs and news aggregators kill off the National Post and its ilk, then I'm going to have to go back to my high school job, manning the drive-thru at McDonald's. But I have a more noble reason, too: a genuine, altruistic desire for an educated citizenry. Not to be old-fashioned, but there are certain kinds of important stories that simply cannot be covered, except by deep-pocketed traditional media...

WASHINGTON – The Internet is where we spend more and more of our time. But for a growing number of people, it’s an out-of-control habit instead of a necessary part of life. Internet addiction -- an online-related compulsive behavior that interferes with normal living and causes severe stress on family, friends, loved ones and work -- is a psychological and behavioral problem that is spreading around the world, experts say. Kimberly Young, clinical director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery and author of the book “Caught in the Net,” said that about 5 percent to 10 percent of Americans...

As some of you may know, Obama supporters have been going around censoring blogs critical of Obama by marking them as Spam. Several blog hosts have recieved a slew of complaints from Bloggers and their supporters over the shut downs and have begun to investigate. I got word from the host of my blog that they have been correcting problems concerning blogs shut down due to being incorrectly marked as spam. I haven't had that problem since most of my blog has to do with Maine and exposing liberal corruption but they're getting the message. People need to continue to...

***NEW CNN POLICY REGARDING PERSONAL WRITINGS ONLINE*** We’ve gotten a number of questions from CNN staff wanting clarification of CNN policy on communicating publicly about our work, or on news or public affairs -- on the internet. In Blogs. In Chatrooms. On video sharing sites. On social networking sites. Below are some of the typical questions -- and our answers. We hope this is helpful to everyone, After reading -- please don’t hesitate to call or email anyone at Standards and Practices if you have further questions. (See contact info below). MOST IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER: UNLESS GIVEN PERMISSION BY CNN...

A new feature on the Google Internet site allows anyone with a computer and Internet access to look at street-level views of towns and cities throughout the world. Although it's a useful tool for drivers planning car trips and curious folks who want to explore the globe, at least one lawsuit has been filed from a couple who said their privacy was violated after Google's cameras took a picture of their home as the company mapped the United States. Google offers the map service free of charge for people with access to a computer. After the company's Google Earth program...

Web loggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama's presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen. On Thursday, hours after publishing a post about an online petition demanding that Mr. Obama publicly produce his birth certificate, an associate professor of business administration at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, found that he could no longer access his Web log.

George Ledin teaches students how to write viruses, and it makes computer-security software firms sick.In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers—they're students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. And their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus...

A large swath of the sprawling Navajo Nation could lose access to the Internet today, in a dispute that threatens services from personal e-mail to police radio communications on the 27,000-square-mile reservation. The Navajos' problem stems from a funding battle over whether an arm of the Federal Communications Commission will continue to pay grant money to the tribe's Internet provider. ( ... ) The tribe of about 250,000 people already has lost Internet service to libraries and community centers known as "chapter houses," and has little access to cellphone service on a reservation that stretches across parts of Arizona, New...

Along with the Internet's "information overload" has come the vastly expanded ability of people to contact other people. Now, anyone can email anyone in the world. And with email signatures containing contact information, or by asking someone to call you, more and more people are getting your phone number and calling you.Email is very democratic; it doesn't distinguish between your mom, your employer, or a random press release sent from some organization 3,000 miles away. Sure there are ways to filter emails, but they all come to you in some capacity. There isn't yet a sophisticated way to filter out...

... In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.” Today the Internet...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

While on a recent vacation, a reader sent me this message: If this makes sense, write an article on why it's stupid to use dictionaries in hardcore religion debates (I remember Dictionary.com was used in a "faith" argument I was in). I see people refute concepts of omnipotence and faith by using dictionaries. I'm sick of it, and I would like it if you would write about this issue. I received this message while at a public library in North Carolina, and somewhat ironically, saw as I exited a cover story for Atlantic Monthly that fit right in with this...

Were There More? Did DBKP@Blogger's Shutdown Come from Same IPs? Click on image to enlarge. At least one of the attacks in the latest wave of blog shutdowns this past week came from IPs assigned to barackobama.com. We have reported twice in the last two weeks about the attacks on anti-Obama websites. ["Google, Blogger, Obama: Obamanation Shut Down My Blog!"]] & [BabbaZee's "Anti-Obama Blogs Shut Down by Google, Obamabots"] Speculation on who was behind the attacks has ranged from "Obama supporters" to "it's no one, just a glitch" "to "it's a browser problem". [Site Meter causing Internet Explorer failure ]....

Last week, we published Babba Zee's Anti-Obama Blogs Shut Down by Google, Obamabots. Thurday, Blogger locked our original (and still quite robust) site, DBKP at Blogger for being a spam blog. One would think Blogger would have a system in place before shutting down blogs with any kind of Google Page Rank. After all, your average spam site doesn't acquire much of a page rank. But, apparently, one would be wrong. Our original site is PR-5. Were Obama supporters behind this latest round of blog shutdowns, as they were last month? In Obama's Netroots Supporters Continue "Blog Burning", Confederate Yankee...

SHANGHAI -- A man who posted pictures on the Internet of schools that collapsed in May's massive earthquake in southwest China has been sent to a labor camp for a year, a human-rights group said, as Chinese authorities move to stifle allegations that shoddy construction exacerbated the disaster's death toll. The man, a local school employee named Liu Shaokun, was detained in late June for allegedly "seriously disturbing social order" and disrupting post-quake reconstruction efforts, according to a report in a local government-run newspaper. Human Rights in China, a New York-based advocacy group, said Mr. Liu's wife was told last...