Free Republic

Rush is quoting posters from DU again. They're server crashed! He was quoting about how posters thought Bush was more of a danger than Saddam!

GENEVA — Worried over U.S. domination, a group of developing nations wants to put control of the Internet into the hands of the United Nations, an issue that likely will overshadow a summit on information technology opening today. Key decisions on Internet issues, such as domain names and addresses, now reside in a private agency spun off from the U.S. government — and the United States wants to keep it that way. But if countries do not think their concerns are adequately heard by the Internet's key decision-makers, a U.N. official warned yesterday, they may create conflicting national policies and...

An attempt by developing countries to put management of the internet under United Nations auspices is likely to be shelved at next month's world information summit in Geneva - but the issue is now firmly on the international agenda, summit sources say. It will be one of the main bones of contention this week as government negotiators and non-governmental organisations descend on Geneva for the final round of preparatory talks on the draft declaration and plan of action due to be endorsed by heads of state and government at the summit on December 10-12. However, UN officials say they see...

<p>Council of Europe has adopted a measure that would criminalize Internet hate speech, including hyperlinks to pages that contain offensive content.</p> <p>Specifically, the amendment bans "any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors."</p>

ATLANTA (Reuters) - A growing number of gay and bisexual men in the United States are engaging in risky sex with partners they meet on the Internet, raising fears that the AIDS virus could be poised for a major comeback in the group hardest hit by the epidemic. Online chatrooms and Web sites are replacing gay bathhouses and sex clubs as the most popular meeting point to arrange high-risk sex, according to two new studies presented on Tuesday at the 2003 National HIV (news - web sites) Prevention Conference. The findings come amid growing evidence of an apparent resurgence of...

KASSEL - Prosecutors Thursday said they have filed a murder indictment against one of two gay men who met in an Internet chat room, where it allegedly was agreed that one of them would kill and devour the other. And in a stunning new development, prosecutors in Kassel said they are broadening the investigation to include some 430 other persons believed to have been involved in the Internet gay cannibalism chat room that led to the death of a 42-year-old man in March 2001. Prosecutors are convinced that the victim, a computer analyst from Berlin, agreed to be killed and...

Ooops. No picture. Sorry.

<p>NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- A Tennessee middle school allowed security cameras to film children undressing in locker rooms and then stored the images on a computer accessible through the Internet, according to a lawsuit filed by a group of angry parents.</p>

<p>Web-search company LookSmart has ambitious plans to do for Web searching what SETI@Home did for the hunt for E.T.</p> <p>Last week, LookSmart released a screensaver that harnesses the spare computing power of volunteers whose machines are indexing the Web.</p> <p>Like SETI@Home, LookSmart's Grub screensaver runs in the background or when the computer is idle. But instead of searching for signs of intelligent aliens, Grub crawls the Net to build an index for Web searches.</p>

GALVESTON, Texas -- Galveston residents are still trying to figure out what caused the skies over their coastal city to literally be filled on Friday with floating strands of wads that looked like spider webs. The webs were visible in the air for five hours, and poles were left wrapped with the sticky strands and fuzzy wads. "It blew my mind. I have never seen anything like it before," said Lorenzo DeLacerta, who saw the webs about noon when he delivered building material to a site a mile east of the San Louis Pass Bridge. DeLacerta said he called...

PRIVACY Cartoons by Chris Slane!

Google, the popular Internet search engine, has excluded more than 100 Web sites from the French and German versions of its index under pressure from those nations' governments, a new study has found. The sites include many devoted to white supremacist philosophy and Nazism, with names like Jew Watch. Ben Edelman, who did the research, said "they are mostly pretty terrible pages." Mr. Edelman wrote the study with Jonathan Zittrain, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. They said that the issue of Internet blocking and filtering raised questions about the ability of...

CAIRO (Reuters) - When Thomas from the United States wanted to know what the Muslim world had to say one year after the Sept. 11 attacks, he turned to IslamOnline.net. His request was courteous, unlike some angry questions sent in the past year to the Web site which offers online Islamic fatwas -- or religious edicts -- as well as news and advice to Muslims and others interested in the Islamic world. But regardless of the questioner's sympathies, IslamOnline aims to offer authoritative statements from scholars on Islam, reflecting differing views from various schools of thought. "Today we have broken...

Mouse clicking your way to martyrdom. Are you an Islamicist with a computer and some spare time? Do you want to contribute to the jihad against the Crusaders but can’t quite make the commitment to fly into buildings or strap on a bomb? Do you “solemnly swear to use your talents only to destroy the Jews with God as your witness?” Then you are just the kind of person being sought to join the “Arab Electronic Jihad Team” (AEJT), a recently announced terrorist initiative preparing to bring the Web to its knees. The AEJT seeks to bring down all Web...

At first glance, the official Web site of the ELN, an underground group in Colombia, looks like it's owned and operated by a respectable think tank. At second glance, as well. Unthreatening links to "the peace process," "human rights," "ideas and debate" and "drugs and corruption" lead to pages with well-written essays that analyze the crimes of the Colombia government against its citizenry. There are illustrations reminiscent of Amnesty International's, pictures of children and drawings of a peace dove with an olive branch in its beak. Nowhere does the site mention the hundreds of people the ELN kidnaps every year,...

After years of pretty good service with what is now VeriSign, I switched to GoDaddy.Com for my domain name registration. Mainly because GoDaddy.Com charged $6.95 per year for 10 years registration when (at that time) the current company was $35 per year. Since I own several domain names, the cost is somewhat significant. While checking my accounts, I noticed the above posted warning but didn't give it much thought. Until yesterday. That's when I received a "warning" in the U.S. Mail that 3 of my domain names were about to expire and to give my credit card number to the...

CORRECTED: NY Judge Narrows Terms in BT Internet Patent Case Fri Mar 15,10:43 AM ET By Eric Auchard NEW YORK (Reuters) - An initial ruling by a U.S. judge has narrowed what British Telecom can say to prove its claim to have invented hyperlinking, in a high-profile case that could give BT rights to demand royalties on Internet use. U.S. Federal Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Colleen McMahon issued an opinion from her White Plains, N.Y. court late on Wednesday that only partially accepted the wording of BT arguments that its 1970s patent should cover modern...