http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
Related: Internet : Freedom in danger ?FCC net neutrality decision sets up court battle, say experts The US Federal Communications Commission's recent vote to impose net neutrality rules on broadband providers will lead to lengthy court battles, as well as efforts in Congress to repeal the rules, a group of Internet law experts said Wednesday. Even supporters of the FCC's Dec. 21 vote predicted that multiple court challenges are likely as soon as the FCC officially publishes the new rules in the Federal Register. Court challenges to the rules are "inevitable," said Colin Crowell, former senior counselor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski . Multiple lawsuits in courts across the US are likely, with some questioning the FCC's authority to make rules affecting Internet service providers and other groups suggesting the rules are arbitrary, added Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition and a supporter of the rules. The new rules prohibit service providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic.
How the Internet Gets Inside Us When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. The Computer as a Communication Device This landmark 1968 essay foresaw many future computer applications and advances in communication technology, such as distributed information resources and online interactive communities that are commonplace today as Internet chat rooms and peer-to-peer applications. Originally published in Science and Technology, April 1968. Published on KurzweilAI.net November 9, 2001. In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.
Wikileaks, The Pirate Party, And The Future Of The Internet How to save Julian Assange's movement from itself. American diplomacy seems to have survived Wikileaks’s “attack on the international community,” as Hillary Clinton so dramatically characterized it, unscathed. Save for a few diplomatic reshuffles, Foggy Bottom doesn’t seem to be deeply affected by what happened. Certainly, the U.S. government at large has not been paralyzed by the leaks—contrary to what Julian Assange had envisioned in one of his cryptic-cum-visionary essays, penned in 2006. In a fit of technological romanticism, Assange may have underestimated the indispensability of American power to the international system, the amount of cynicism that already permeates much of Washington’s political establishment, and the glaring lack of interest in foreign policy particulars outside the Beltway.
If you build it, they won’t come (unless…) (Editor’s note: Jason Cohen is an angel investor and the founder of Smart Bear Software. This story originally appeared on his blog.) Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he’ll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun. Then he’ll describe his cutting-edge platform — cloud-based, scalable, distributed version control, continuous integration, one-click-deploy. Maybe you’ll even get a wobbly demo.”Great,” I always exclaim, sharing the thrill of modern software development, “so how will people find out about this brilliant website?”
Douglas Rushkoff The Next Net The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network - its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation - is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them - that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere. Of course the Internet was never truly free, bottom-up, decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been designed with many nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack, but it has always been absolutely controlled by central authorities.
Electronic negotiation An electronic communication network (ECN) is a financial term for a type of computer system that facilitates trading of financial products outside of stock exchanges. An ECN is generally an electronic system that widely disseminates orders entered by market makers to third parties and permits the orders to be executed against in whole or in part.The primary products that are traded on ECNs are stocks and currencies. ECNs are generally passive computer-driven networks that internally match limit orders and charge a very small per share transaction fee (often a fraction of a cent per share).[1] The first ECN, Instinet, was created in 1969. ECNs increase competition among trading firms by lowering transaction costs, giving clients full access to their order books, and offering order matching outside of traditional exchange hours.
Net Neutrality: Save the Internet from Corporate Censorship! By Sarah Aird, member of Amnesty International USA’s Board of Directors Amnesty International activists know how important the Internet is for sharing news, information, and strategy about human rights abuses around the world. From satellite images of Darfur to Amnesty reports documenting Shell Oil’s involvement in human rights abuses in the Niger Delta, from correspondence among Amnesty’s country specialists to online urgent actions in support of Aung Sun Suu Kyi, the Internet is critical to our work. Linking the Real World to the Web: 3 Emerging Technologies Compared Hamilton Chan is CEO of Paperlinks and Paperspring. Through its iPhone app (previously featured as the #1 New & Noteworthy free app in the iTunes store) and QR web platform, Paperlinks makes context sensitive marketing plug-and-play for small, medium and large businesses. No longer tied to a desktop browser, we now demand access to a broad range of information anytime and anywhere via our smartphones.