Free Republic

Beginning in the 1960s, shortly after the Russians shocked the world by launching Sputnik, America launched its drive to put a man on the moon. While we were racing towards the moon, we were also developing the Internet. It started out as a military project, but transitioned to academic use and then to public use. By the earlier 1990s, we began to see the Internet that we now know as the world’s largest and most accessible source for information — the world's mega-library. You’ve likely heard that the Obama Administration plans to surrender US control of the Internet to...

Obama’s Internet ID Plot Being Tested in Two States A plot by the Obama administration to impose Internet IDs on Americans is now officially being rolled out, with pilot programs for the controversial online “driver’s license” scheme already beginning in both Michigan and Pennsylvania. According to the White House, the virtual “Identity Ecosystem” being funded and pushed by the federal government is supposed to make the Internet more “secure” and “convenient.” Critics across the political spectrum, however, are warning that the Orwellian scheme only makes it more convenient for the feds to spy on people, control the public, and suppress...

<p>Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler laid out the bright line on his proposed net neutrality rules during the Thursday meeting: "If a network operator slowed the speed of service below that which the consumer bought, it would be commercially unreasonable and therefore prohibited.</p>

The FCC has published its full net neutrality proposal, a document that could very well change the Internet as we know it. See also: FCC Advances Controversial Proposal on Net Neutrality On Thursday, the FCC approved the proposal with a 3-2 vote, opening a period of 120 days of public comments in which anyone, from stakeholders like broadband providers and net neutrality advocates to the average netizen, can weigh in and propose changes to the document. After this period, the FCC will write a final set of rules and vote on them. The entire proposal is embedded below and the...

....Here at Twitchy, we’ve seen a lot of disturbing stuff. But we’re not sure anything could’ve prepared us for this: We … we can’t even.

The Federal Communications Commission thinks the Internet in the United States can be run at two speeds. Backtracking from an earlier proposal, the FCC now believes it will be just fine to let Internet service providers (ISPs) control what you access online, with a few exceptions that the FCC would police. While this new proposal might not kill the Internet, as it exists now, it would certainly cripple it – at least for American consumers and businesses. Multiple leaks about FCC chairman Tom Wheeler's proposal to the commission, which will be presented on Thursday, indicate that the agency would not...

http://imgur.com/gallery/kouJX

The U.S. Department of Justice wants new authority to hack and search remote computers during investigations, saying the new rules are needed because of complex criminal schemes sometimes using millions of machines spread across the country. Digital rights groups say the request from the DOJ for authority to search computers outside the district where an investigation is based raises concerns about Internet security and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. “By expanding federal law enforcement’s power to secretly exploit ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities in software and Internet platforms, the proposal threatens to weaken Internet security for all of us,” Nathan...

It’s nice to have someone looking out for you, even if you didn’t know that you had a guardian angel on your shoulder. For the majority of you, since you’re using some form of internet access to read this, you’ve been protected for the last fifteen years by the Internet Tax Freedom Act. It prevents most state and local governments from taxing your internet access fees. But unless Congress figures out something in the near future, that could all be coming to an end on November 1st. Millions of Americans could be threatened with new state taxes on their Internet...

So how can numbers coming from the Obama admin be reliable?That was the testimony today from insurance company executives, on the “back end” of the Obamacare website. That’s the part of the website which transmits data to and from insurance companies. It’s the part the public never sees, but it is critical to the operation of the system as to payments, enrollments, and other data. Via Capitol Cities Project: During a hearing on Capitol Hill today, insurance companies unanimously said that the Obamacare website is still not fixed. “One final question for all the panelists: Is the website fixed?,” asks...

In the Gilded Age, wrenching economic and technological change hardened life for the vast majority of Americans while an elite few prospered. Innovators like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt disrupted old industries, creating news ones, and cemented their fortunes via government-approved monopolies. The most pernicious of these were railroad trusts. In our times, wrenching economic and technological change hardens life for the vast majority of Americans while an elite few prosper. Innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg disrupt old industries, create news ones and ….

Russia has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said Tuesday would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online. Mr. Putin’s action on Monday, just weeks after he disparaged the Internet as “a special C.I.A. project,” borrowed a page from the restrictive Internet playbooks of many governments around the world that have been steadily smothering online freedoms they once tolerated.

Internet application and content companies, what some refer to as “edge providers,” are increasingly concerned by the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) newfound ability to regulate the Internet, and rightfully so.

Given how hard antivirus software makers push you to sign up, you'd think that business was booming. Far from it, according to Symantec’s Brian Dye. He tells the Wall Street Journal that antivirus tools like his company’s Norton suite are effectively “dead.” The utilities now catch less than half of all attacks, according to the executive—to him, the focus is on minimizing the damage whenever there’s a successful hack or infection. …

If you’re the customer of a major American internet provider, you might have been noticing it’s not very reliable lately. If so, there’s a pretty good chance that a graph like this is the reason:These graphs comes from Level 3, one of the world’s largest providers of “transit,” or long-distance internet connectivity. The graph on the left shows the level of congestion between Level 3 and a large American ISP in the Dallas area. In the middle of the night, the connection is less than half-full and everything works fine. But during peak hours, the connection is saturated. That produces...

Local reporters have infiltrated a covert organization that hired young people as “Internet operators” near St. Petersburg and discovered that the employees are being paid to write pro-Kremlin postings and comments on the Internet, smearing opposition leader Alexei Navalny and U.S. politics and culture. [....] According to Lvova, each commenter was to write no less than 100 comments a day, while people in the other room were to write four postings a day, which then went to the other employees whose job was to post them on social networks as widely as possible. Employees at the company, located at 131...

Wayfair is an e-commerce site selling home furnishings. But with 1,600 employees, its physical presence is rapidly outgrowing its space in an obelisklike skyscraper in Boston’s Back Bay–which happens to be a former hub of the Christian Science church. Long gone are the white shag carpets, wood paneling and executive-floor elevators that once allowed church higher-ups to avoid hoi polloi. Flat-panel TVs on each of 12 floors beam not messages of faith healing but maps of the U.S. and Europe that light up whenever there’s a sale. Within seconds Katherine from Decatur, Tex. buys a $49 tungsten wedding ring, Jen...

A year after announcing a world record for crowdfunding for journalism, the editor-in-chief and publisher of De Correspondent shared their thoughts and lessons on start-up journalism.Last April, Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth raised $1.7 million in crowdfunding for De Correspondent, a new, online-only publication The idea was to go from 'the news' to 'the new'," said Wijnberg, De Correspondent's editor-in-chief, who was previously editor-in-chief of nrc.next. He and Pfauth, publisher of De Correspondent and former online editor of nrc.next, said they had tried to change the direction of their previous publication and failed. Instead, they took the ideas they had...

At first glance, the Twitter account @MyTurnOns looks like it belongs to a stereotypical teenage girl. “Why do parents always ruin your day and then act like they didn’t ruin your day and wonder why you’re in a bad mood?” asked one recent tweet, in all caps and with no punctuation. “Being called babe is such a good feeling,” said another. But the account is actually run by Josh Quisenberry, the 23-year-old CEO of the Texas-based Dynamic Media Group. And in between messages about relationships, boys and parents come the tweets that are the account’s true reason for being: posts...

Democrats and Republicans both say they want keep the Internet free and open for all. They disagree about who should guard the guards House Republicans advanced legislation Thursday that they say will keep the Internet open and free from government censorship. Every Democrat on the panel considering the measure opposed it in service, they say, of the same goal. At issue is a question with profound implications for the future of global communications that delves into the deepest bowels of the Internet, and a version of the age-old question: Who guards the guards?