Gigabit is almost 150 times as fast as the average national broadband speed, giving communities an opportunity to develop a thriving culture of innovation.
The tragic death of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old coder and social activist, has shined a light on the sad truth about America’s misguided computer crime law, the breadth of discretion given to overzealous prosecutors and the unjust results that can occur when these two things work together.
When the iPhone 5 launched last year, Apple announced that FaceTime, its video calling application, would now work over mobile networks.
This was great news, especially for people who depend on video calling to communicate. But then AT&T blocked its customers from using FaceTime over its network.
It is entirely reasonable to suggest that the man who initiated what we today understand as a national media reform movement is Dr. Everett C. Parker, the amazing activist who successfully challenged media complicity with the Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.
America’s biggest media companies are on a roll this month.
Usually fancy new gadgets — not old-school media giants — are the focus of the Consumer Electronics Show. But this year the talk at CES was all about CBS.
On the last day of the big electronics trade show, the technology site CNET was ready to announce its best-of-show awards. The winning gadget was a new digital video recorder (DVR) made by the satellite company DISH.
On Monday night, the Atlantic presented a Church of Scientology ad dressed up as a news article. Within hours the piece had been removed and replaced with a note from the editors promising to “review their sponsored content guidelines.”
Last week at Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show — better known as CES — tech engineers, journalists, bloggers and fanboys did their usual thing, i.e., they fixated on new toys and gadgets.
Meanwhile, the men behind the curtain — including the chief executives at AT&T and Verizon — were busy making plans for the future of the Internet.
This weekend, the Internet lost one of its biggest champions.
Aaron Swartz, age 26, died on Friday. The cause was suicide. The loss to his friends, colleagues, fellow activists and the Internet at large is enormous.
Here’s a fun experiment:
Grab the next person you see and tell her you’re about to talk about tech policy (you know, to prepare her). If she hasn’t screamed, pulled out all of her hair or fled the room, tell her you’re about to take a voyage to strange lands where laws exist that make it harder for people to access the Internet.
