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WASHINGTON — A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.

I have a question regarding the modem on my PC. My OS is Windows Vista and my IP is NetZero. When someone tries to call on my phone, it won't disconnect my Internet dial-up service. Instead, callers listen to my line ringing and ringing. How can I fix my modem software so that incoming calls will get through (IOW, my phone will ring)? I went to the control panel and can't figure it out. Than you!

A Canadian actress and playwright has been charged with holding a technical support member hostage after losing her internet connection. Carol Sinclair lost her connection with ISP Aliant and, by her own account, spent days trying to get the line fixed. "I was polite the first 20 times I talked to them. But each one gave me the same routine: 'Is the modem connected? Are the lights blipping?'," she told The Globe and Mail. "And then each one would say: 'It should be working. The problem must be with your computer.' I was a little stressed. I had six days...

HD Moore has been owned. That's hacker talk, meaning that Moore, the creator of the popular Metasploit hacking toolkit, has become the victim of a computer attack. It happened on Tuesday morning, when Moore's company, BreakingPoint, had some of its Internet traffic redirected to a fake Google page that was being run by a scammer. According to Moore, the hacker was able to do this by launching what's known as a cache poisoning attack on a DNS server on AT&T's network that was serving the Austin, Texas, area. One of BreakingPoint's servers was forwarding DNS traffic to the AT&T server,...

SAN FRANCISCO, US - DEFENDANTS and plaintiffs in two related copyright infringement lawsuits against YouTube have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers during evidence discovery, a spokesman for Google Inc said on Monday. Earlier in July, a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom Inc and other plaintiffs to help them to prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site. Google said it had agreed to provide plaintiffs' attorneys for Viacom and a class action group led by the...

So who cares if my Internet service provider tracks my Web surfing behavior or e-mailing to better target advertising? After all, won't that result in a more relevant user experience? Well, not exactly and here's why. The lines between content, context and advertising are becoming increasingly blurred, and as a result the consumer is caught dead in the middle with increasingly less and less control over the Internet's most prized commodity: his own information. I'm referring to the growing reality that a process called deep packet inspection (DPI) is being used to build revenue streams based on your discreet —...

The Illinois State Police are using vans with cameras and radar guns to photograph motorists and other drivers who speed through highway construction zones, and are enforcing strict penalties for alleged offenders. Citations for a first offense are $375, and a second offense can cost $1,000 and a 90-day suspension of driver’s license. State Police officials said four white vans, which are equipped with radar guns, cameras and a monitor to show drivers their speed, have been deployed at different construction zones in the state. As of Thursday, June 5, those vans are deployed at the widening project on the...

Utah Internet service providers could earn a state-approved "G-rating" for filtering content and insuring that users could not access pornography under provisions in a bill heard by a House committee on Monday.

Paul McGuinness, long-time manager of rock band U2, on Monday launched a verbal attack against illegal music downloaders, as well as internet service providers, device makers, Silicon Valley and even hippies in a speech at a conference in France. McGuinness blamed these forces for "destroying the recorded music industry," with illegal downloading through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks the single biggest reason for why the business is in decline. ISPs have for years profited from that illegal downloading, which occurs on their networks, and their arguments that it isn't their job to police the internet are no longer valid, he said. The...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Increasingly worried over Internet providers' behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering. The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover "data discrimination" - efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services - in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources. "People have all sorts of problems, and they don't know whether to attribute that to some sort of misconfiguration, or deliberate behavior...

ISPs in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire. TeliaSonera, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. "Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable," said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman. The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said. The company...

Rudy Giuliani quit an elite Iraq study panel last spring after he failed to show up for a single official group meeting, citing "previous time commitments” – a speaking tour that brought in $11.4 million in 14 months. The 10-member panel, known as the Baker-Hamilton commission, was chartered by Congress and encouraged by President Bush to explore U.S. policy in Iraq. On May 18, 2006, when the panel gathered in Washington, Giuliani gave a $100,000 speech on leadership at a business awards breakfast in Atlanta, Newsday reports. The month before, he skipped another panel session to deliver the keynote speech...

SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) -- A court in San Francisco ruled that a roommate-matching Web site may be held accountable for what users say about their preferences. A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court ruled in favor of two California fair housing groups that brought the complaint against Roommate.com, saying the Web site violates the Fair Housing Act by allowing users to specify roommate preferences based on sex, race, religion and sexual orientation, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The ruling took away the main argument of the defense: that a 1996 ruling granting immunity to Internet service providers that...

I have posted several times in the past about this topic, this is just an update for you techheads who might be interesetd...oh, and anyone who uses the internet... which is...everyone. Most people have no idea what CALEA is. It is a law to assist law enforcement's ability to intercept phone calls. It was written and passed and signed into law in 1994 by Congress. It mandated that digital switching equipment technology be required to have certain specific capabilities which would make tapping a person's phone calls, and making the call history easier to get. Congress ante'd up millions to...

Test your internet connection speed and post it here, for fun, bragging rights and to see if you are getting the speed you really pay for.

SAN FRANCISCO — Cellular subscribers are paying hundreds of millions of dollars each year to subsidize landline telephone service, enriching big telecommunications companies while providing little or no benefit to cell phone users. The subsidies are intended to reimburse the companies for providing traditional phone service in rough terrain and rural areas where stringing lines can be costly. But rampant development has transformed some of these backwaters into booming subdivisions, with no real adjustment to the distribution formula; others, like the oceanfront celebrity playground of Malibu, are receiving subsidies simply because of their difficult topography. Outdated formulas for tabulating the...

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday called on Internet service providers to record their customers' online activities, a move that anticipates a fierce debate over privacy and law enforcement in Washington next year. "Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms," Mueller said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Boston. "All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims,"...

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday called on Internet service providers to record their customers' online activities, a move that anticipates a fierce debate over privacy and law enforcement in Washington next year. "Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms," Mueller said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Boston. "All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims,"...

I've searched extensively online for a new ISP. No luck. I think I'll have better luck with recommendations from my FReeper FRiends. Requirements: 1) It must be cheap. No more than $140-$180 a year ($15 a month max) or not much higher. 2)It must be faster than 46.6 kbps. (That's the fastest speed I can log on at now.) Would prefer 50.6 kbps or higher. Thank you for any recommendations.

In a radical departure from earlier statements, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said that requiring Internet service providers to save records of their customers' online activities is necessary in the fight against terrorism, CNET News.com has learned. Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller privately met with representatives of AOL, Comcast, Google, Microsoft and Verizon last week and said that Internet providers--and perhaps search engines--must retain data for two years to aid in anti-terrorism prosecutions, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity on Tuesday. "We want this for terrorism," Gonzales said, according to one...