Free Republic

Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap by Peter Burrows The Associated Press unleashed a firestorm in the blogosphere earlier this month when it demanded that a political site take down AP content it said violated copyrights. Bloggers, including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com and Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, cried foul, saying the AP's move threatened the free flow of information over the Web. The furor abated a few days later when the AP tempered its demands. But the dustup between the AP and bloggers...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's demand for immunity for telephone companies that participated in his warrantless domestic spying program won an initial victory on Monday in the U.S. Senate. On a vote of 76-10, far more than the 60 needed, the Democratic-led Senate cleared a procedural hurdle and began considering a bill to increase congressional and judicial oversight of electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists. It includes a provision to grant retroactive immunity to any telecommunications company that took part in Bush's spying program -- surveillance without court warrants of e-mails and telephone calls of people in the United...

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...

Web giant thought to be readying 'GDrive' – an online home for consumer's digital data Google is set to extend its online storage services in a bid to become a central repository for the public’s digital data. The web giant is understood to be readying a new data storage service – thought to be dubbed “GDrive” – that would allow users to store digital files such as music tracks on the internet and access them via a web browser. A spokesman for Google refused to comment directly on speculation that the company will launch the service in a matter of...

SAN FRANCISCO--Is the "Semantic Web" the new Internet, or a complex technology in search of a problem to solve? That's a question that advocates attending the Semantic Technology Conference here this week hope to put to rest. Standards advocates, venture capitalists, computer scientists and technology executives are meeting at the three-day conference to discuss enterprise applications for the Semantic Web--the World Wide Web Consortium's growing collection of protocols designed to make a wealth of new information accessible and reusable through the Web. Attempting to quell widespread skepticism, standards advocates say recent implementations of Semantic Web protocols by large technology companies...