Free Republic

There is an internet site called WatchMojo.com. It has numerous top ten videos - top 10 Queen songs, top 10 nominated actors who never won an oscar , top ten Marvel movies, etc. I like going there to see various top 10 lists and such. Yesterday while browsing through it, they had a Top 10 U.S. Presidents. I watched it to see if I would be disappointed and to no surprise, I was. Why? Two things. One - President Reagan was not in their top 10. They had one term James Polk in there - #8 I believe - but...

The average computer user with an Internet connection has access to an amazing wealth of information. But there's also an entire world that's invisible to your standard Web browser. These parts of the Internet are known as the Deep Web. The tools to get to there are just a few clicks away, and more and more people who want to browse the Web anonymously are signing on. Fans of the series House of Cards might recall the Deep Web being worked into the plot of latest season. The character Lucas, a newspaper editor who was trying find a hacker, gets...

In the early days of the internet, there was much talk of how the web would connect us all, thereby furthering knowledge and fostering community. Yet for all its advocates’ and early adopters’ optimism about its potential to enable us to organise, think and influence one another, freed from institutional supervision or what the newcomers frequently described as “mainstream media bias”, one thing has remained consistently problematic: comments posted under articles or blogs (or “below the line” in internet-speak). ~snip~ One of the great questions for the future of the net is: to what extent this extraordinary freedom will be...

The horrendous rollout of Obamacare last Oct. 1 was even worse than the administration has revealed, with just one person able to enroll on healthcare.gov, according to new documents uncovered by a public watchdog group. A 106-page document obtained May 1 by Judicial Watch from the Department of Health and Human Services also showed that a top official was so happy that she thought a second person had succeeded in signing up on day one that she sent out a celebratory email. “On October 1, 2013, at the end of the first day (4:30), the Senior Advisor at Center for...

Federal spending on the Obamacare website healthcare.gov, a source of tremendous frustration for the public and embarrassment for the White House, will soon cross the $1 billion mark as the administration continues to fix glitches and make it an IT gem, according to congressional testimony. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, nominated to replace outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, said in answers to questions from Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., that spending has already reached $834 million and another $200 million has been budgeted for fiscal 2015. Asked by Alexander, the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP)...

Surprising nobody, data from Maplight shows that the Republican and Democrat lawmakers opposing both Title II ISP reclassification and net neutrality rules receive 2.3 times more campaign contributions from the cable industry than average. Twenty-nine members of Congress own stock in Comcast, making Comcast the 25th most held stock among members of Congress. Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) owns more Comcast stock than any other member. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology has received more money from the cable industry than any other member of the House of Representatives: $109,250 over the last...

Cisco CEO John Chambers has sent a letter to President Obama calling for rules ensuring that both needs of national security and product integrity are met, according to reports. The Financial Times and Re/code are reporting that Chambers sent a letter dated May 15 to Obama, warning that confidence in an open Internet is being "eroded by revelations of governments' surveillance" and asking him to create new standards of conduct about how the government collects data. "Absent a new approach where industry plays a role, but in which you, Mr. President, can lead, we are concerned that our country's global...

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.