Tag archive: government

Introduced within the House of Representatives today, a bill that would give the U.S. Attorney General power to order search engines and Internet service providers to block sites with pirated content was announced by a group of U.S. Representatives. Titled the Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill also gives copyright holders the ability to issue notifications to payment providers like Paypal when a site is selling copyrighted material. They will… Read More

In a move eerily reminiscent of Bioshock's Rapture building business tycoon Andrew Ryan, Billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has donated $1.25 million to a project to design laissez-faire floating city-states. According to a Details magazine profile, Thiel is looking for the new frontier. He believes he has found that frontier in the Seasteading Institute, an initiative headed by former Google engineer Patri… Read More

Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Calpers (D-DE) introduce a revised version of their cybersecurity bill this week, entitled the “Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act,” which they say prohibits any possibility of an Internet 'kill switch” — they swear. Like the original bill, which was introduced last month, this version is intended to establish an office within the Executive branch that… Read More

WikiLeaks is all over the news lately. After releasing 250,000 U.S. State Dept. cables (emails), the organization and its founder, Julian Assange, has come under assault. Though it has not been formally accused of any crime, members of the U.S. Gov't are calling for companies to stop supporting the rogue organization. In the last week, WikiLeaks has suffered rounds of Ddos hack attacks, Amazon stopped hosting its files, EveryDNS canceled… Read More

Over the weekend, the U.S. government's war on piracy took an Orwellian turn. Without any notice, the Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement office seized nearly 80 domains for copyright and trademark violations including Torrent-Finder.com, a well known BitTorrent aggregator. The websites now all display the graphic below. Unfortunately, though the government has seized these domains, a majority of the sites… Read More

And the idiot award of the day goes to: the General Services Administration! While the GSA was created to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies, it doesn't seem to be functioning well itself. On Sept. 16, one GSA worker mistakenly sent the full names and Social Security numbers of every employee (12,000) to a private email account, reports The Washington Post. Workers learned of the security breach in an… Read More

Parents should be responsible for determining whether children can buy or rent violent video games, says a new survey by Gallup. The U.S. Supreme court is hearing arguments today over a 2005 California law that prohibited the sale of violent games to anyone under the age of 18. Though the law never took effect, it has been bouncing around the courts for five years. Gallup surveyed a random sample of 1,033 adults living in the United States on… Read More

It's smart to watch what you say, and smarter to watch what you say online, because you never know who might read it. In response to a Freedom of Information request (FOIA), the government released documents revealing that social networking sites are being heavily monitored. According to the report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, social sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr were targeted, as well as Wikipedia,… Read More

Before James Bond heads out on a mission, he has to stop in Q's laboratory for custom-made gadgets such as an exploding watch. Life wasn't so dashing for the suspected Russian spies arrested this week: They allegedly relied heavily on off-the-shelf consumer electronics. “In the old days, they'd have special KGB-type equipment. Now they use normal computers, normal laptops,” said Sujeet Shenoi, professor of computer… Read More

The White House has announced that former Google and Microsoft executive Howard A. Schmidt will become the U.S. government's cybersecurity coordinator, responsible for leading the effort to lock down U.S. government computer networks and information systems, and coordinate security and privacy issues with the private companies that operate and maintain the vast majority of those systems. “Howard is one of the world's… Read More

On July 1, millions of computers in China could remain switched off if a boycott being organized there is successful. The protest is against the mandatory Youth Escort Green Dam filtering software the government has said must be installed on all new machines sold from that date. Reuters says that the boycott is being proposed by government critic and architect Ai Weiwei, who sees it as a way of voicing protest without the risk of… Read More

The Great Firewall of China looks to be making a move on individual computer users' hard drives: according to reports by Reuters and the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the Chinese government has informed PC makers that all new PCs sold in the country as of July 1 must be pre-equipped with the free “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software to block access to particular Web sites. According to reports, the… Read More

In 1989, pro-democracy students, intellectuals, and activists began staging protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, culminating on June when the Chinese government sent in tanks to break up the protests…an action which led to photographer Jeff Widener's world-famous "Tank Man" image of an unknown, unarmed man halting a column of four tanks simply by standing in front of them and refusing to move. The number of… Read More

Could the New Zealand government be going open source? That seems eminently possible after it failed to renew a software agreement with Microsoft for Windows. Talks between the company and the NZ State Services Commission ground to a halt once the Commission realized that "a formal agreement with Microsoft is no longer appropriate." The company couldn’t offer what government negotiators required in price, features, or… Read More

The interim Digital Britain report was finally released yesterday, four days later than planned, outlining plans for the UK’s digital feature. The man behind it, Lord Carter, the communications minister, set out a platform that includes broadband for all by the time Britain hosts the Olympic Games in 2012. The broadband speeds would be “up to” two megabits per second, fast enough to watch or download a movie, and will… Read More