Free Republic

Could Mean New 'Harmonized' Approach to Telcos, ISPs The Federal Communications Commission said Monday (March 30) it will huddle with broadband stakeholders next month to try to figure out the best way to protect broadband Internet service provider customers' online privacy now that the agency is applying Title II-based Sec. 222 consumer protections to broadband service. The FCC's Wireline Competition and Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau has scheduled an April 28 workshop to help determine the Sec. 222 duty on telecommunications carriers, which ISPs are now considered per the Feb. 26 title II order, to impose "on every telecommunications carrier...

Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States will soon launch new programs to police their networks in an effort to catch digital pirates and stop illegal file-sharing. Major ISPs announced last summer that they had agreed to take new measures in an effort to prevent subscribers from illegally downloading copyrighted material, but the specifics surrounding the imminent antipiracy measures were not made available. Now, RIAA chief executive Cary Sherman has said that ISPs are ready to begin their efforts to curtail illegal movie, music and software downloads on July 12.

On Thursday, the US House of Representatives approved an internet snooping bill that requires internet service providers (ISPs) to keep records of customer activity for a year so police can review them as needed. Here's what this bill means for you and what you can do about it. What Is This Internet Snooping Bill, Exactly, and Why Is It Bad? The lovingly titled Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCFIPA of 2011) requires ISPs to retain customer names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and dynamic IP addresses. It's a record of your personal information...

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET. A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses,...

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 for H.R. 1981, a data-retention bill that will require your ISP to spy on everything you do online and save records of it for 12 months. California Rep Zoe Lofgren, one of the Democrats who opposed the bill, called it a “data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.”

DOJ to Congress: Make ISPs keep tabs on users By: Tony Romm May 10, 2011 12:05 PM EDT As a new Senate privacy panel considers the data collected by iPhones, Androids and BlackBerrys, the Department of Justice is reminding lawmakers that it needs Internet providers to store more data about their users to help with federal investigations. Current law doesn't require those Internet service providers to "retain any data for any particular length of time," although some already do, said Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ's Criminal Division. And many wireless companies — which must collect some...

I have noticed that a lot of times, certain articles are censored out by internet filters. keywords such as fascism, liberalnazis, stormfront and nambla are censored even though they are articles about nambla or describing fascism. To me it sounds like a good way to block the public from viewing the similarities of Liberal Democrat's and Hitler's Nazis. I think it might be a good idea to remove certain keywords so that there is no confusion between websites advocating fascism and those like this one that refute and expose it. the mods might want to do that and anyone here...

US Senator Dianne Feinstein hopes to update President Barack Obama's $838bn economic stimulus package so that American ISPs can deter child pornography, copyright infringement, and other unlawful activity by way of "reasonable network management." Clearly, a lobbyist whispering in Feinstein's ear has taken Comcast's now famous euphemism even further into the realm of nonsense. According to Public Knowledge, Feinstein's network management amendment did not find a home in the stimulus bill that landed on the Senate floor. But lobbyists speaking with the Washington DC-based internet watchdog said that California's senior Senator is now hoping to insert this language via conference...

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...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Online forums where thousands of child-porn images have been posted have been stricken from three Internet providers, including two of the nation's five largest, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday. Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint agreed with Cuomo to block access to child pornography disseminated through newsgroups and user groups, a hard-to-regulate sector of the Internet designed to bring together users with like interests. With the agreement announced Tuesday, Cuomo skipped over the untold number of individual users accessing child porn and went to the portals that, unwittingly they all say, provided the...

Excerpts - ... 1. Make ISPs (and all organizations providing computer access to more than 100 people) responsible for filtering scan and attack traffic across their networks. ... 2. Make ISPs (and all organizations providing computer access to more than 100 people) responsible for knocking customer PCs off their network if they become bots. ... 3. Make end users liable if losses are incurred because of outdated security software. ... 4. Write some kind of law concerning efficient security software. ...

In August of 2005, America Online settled with the office of NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer over complaints about how arduous AOL made it to cancel service. In addition to a $1.25 million fine, AOL agreed to streamline the cancellation process and submit all calls for third-party review. On June 13, 2006, Vincent Ferrari posted a recording he made of his attempt to leave America Online. It shot to national TV and revealed AOL hadn't learned the error of its ways. For "John," the call center employee heard on the tape, to deploy the kind of mental warfare heard on...

This has been bothering me since the first hostage was kidnapped in the Middle East and shown on "their" or Al Jasira [sp?] website. As a website owner and operator in order to still continue to have my ISP Host to still allow my website to be on the Internet, I have to agree to their Terms of Service agreement. Most of these ISP's TOS rules have been similar to these: 7. Using a #@%^&.com hosted domain that, in our sole opinion, has been used for the following (but not limited to) activities: a. Transmitting Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). b....

FBI adds to wiretap wish list Last modified: March 12, 2004, 1:05 PM PST By Declan McCullagh and Ben Charny Staff Writer, CNET News.com A far-reaching proposal from the FBI, made public Friday, would require all broadband Internet providers, including cable modem and DSL companies, to rewire their networks to support easy wiretapping by police. News.contextWhat's new: A far-reaching FBI proposal would require all broadband Net providers, including cable modem and DSL companies, to rewire their networks to support easy wiretapping by police. Bottom line: If approved as drafted, the proposal could dramatically expand the scope of the agency's wiretap...

The Recording Industry Association of America wants to go after the companies that provide you with your Internet access. Here are some of the printable reactions since RIAA chief Hilary Rosen presented the proposal last weekend, during which she said Internet service providers would soon "be held accountable" for money the music industry has lost due to file-swapping services: It's stupid. Unethical. Illegal. Insane. "Blaming ISPs for giving these hardened criminals the bandwidth for perpetrating their heinous file-sharing acts is akin to blaming the highway department for creating roads that are used by dope smugglers," said security consultant Robert Ferrell....