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Lost my Cable and internet for two whole days -due to a regional outage. Finally a technician shows up and fixes everything in 15 minutes. I had no idea how miserable it could be to have no news and weather updates - but worse - I could not log on to FReeRepublic or get emails. Not a crisis, like floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires or hurricanes - but it made me realize how fortunate I am to live on this Earth in this country. right now. God Bless sod

In recent closed meetings the government’s Election Assistance Commission (EAC) eliminated the requirement that banned voting machines from connecting to the Internet. The AP reported (emphasis added): Key elements of the first federal technology standards for voting equipment in 15 years should be scrapped because language that would have banned the devices from connecting to the internet was dropped after private meetings held with manufacturers, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday. The lawsuit against the U.S. Election Assistance Commission [EAC], filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., claims those meetings should have been open and that changes to...

Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer credited with having invented the World Wide Web in 1989, has released an ambitious plan detailing steps for better online governance, addressing problems like misinformation, data surveillance and censorship. The Contract for the Web was created by Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation in cooperation with representatives from governments, companies and civil society to “keep knowledge freely available,” while strengthening laws, regulations and companies “to ensure pursuit of profit is not at the expense of human rights and democracy.” The plan is backed by more than 150 organizations, including internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Facebook,...

For more than two hours on Friday morning, much of the web seemed to grind to a halt—or at least slow to dial-up speed—for many users in the United States. More than a dozen major websites experienced outages and other technical problems, according to user reports and the web-tracking site downdetector.com. They included The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, EA, the Playstation network, and others. How was it possible to take down all those sites at once?

A major step was taken Thursday in the U.S. government's plan to hand off oversight of the Internet domain name system. A nonprofit international group approved a plan and forwarded it to the Obama administration Thursday for review and approval. The group, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has historically been contracted out to manage the behind-the-scenes workings of the Internet that pair up numerical IP addresses with their familiar Web addresses. A few years ago, the group was tasked with transitioning fully from U.S. government oversight to an international multistakeholder model. The Commerce Department will have...

Tina Fey is sick of apologizing, and she's also tired of the Internet. "Steer clear of the Internet and you'll live forever," Fey told Net-a-Porter magazine in a wide ranging interview. "We did an 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' episode and the Internet was in a whirlwind, calling it 'racist,' but my new goal is not to explain jokes."

Speaking at a gathering of digital advertisers in New York City last night, Mr Schmidt refused to forecast when internet video would displace television, instead declaring: "That's already happened." "It's not a replacement for something that we know," he added. "It's a new thing that we have to think about, to program, to curate and build new platforms." YouTube recently surpassed the milestone of a billion unique users a month. Only the Google search engine and social network Facebook are frequented more often by those browsing the internet worldwide. However, the video site lags behind traditional television in the UK,...

China’s new communist leaders are increasing already tight controls on Internet use and electronic publishing following a spate of embarrassing online reports about official abuses. The measures suggest China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, and others who took power in November share their predecessors’ anxiety about the Internet’s potential to spread opposition to one-party rule and their insistence on controlling information despite promises of more economic reforms. … This week, China’s legislature took up a measure to require Internet users to register their real names, a move that would curtail the Web’s status as a freewheeling forum to complain, often anonymously,...