A global Internet oversight agency is reopening discussions about whether to create a ".xxx" domain name as an online red-light district where porn sites can set up shop away from the wandering eyes of children and teenagers.
Parents would be able to use the system to help block access to porn sites, though because its use would be voluntary, the ".xxx" suffix wouldn't keep such content entirely away from minors. Religious and other anti-porn groups worry that ".xxx" would legitimize porn sites, and the proposal has already been rejected three times since 2000.
But the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the allocation of Internet addresses globally, may revive ICM Registry's bid yet again as ICANN meets this week in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.
Last month, responding to complaints from ICM, an outside panel questioned ICANN's grounds for the latest rejection in 2007. As a result, board members have been weighing the matter ahead of formal consideration of the ".xxx" bid on Friday, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said in an interview.
Beckstrom said he was not able to give details of those discussions for legal reasons, and he could not say when ICANN may reach a decision.
Stuart Lawley, ICM's chief executive, said he has been the victim of a process that he considered far from open and nondiscriminatory.
ICM, which planned to charge $60 for a site to register a ".xxx" name, first proposed ".xxx" in 2000 as a way to help the online porn industry clean up its act. Those using the domain would have to abide by yet-to-be-written rules designed to bar such trickery as spamming and malicious scripts.
And parents could set up Internet software to automatically block any site ending in ".xxx," reducing the chances that minors and other Internet users would accidentally stumble on pornography online.
Given its voluntary nature, however, ".xxx" would unlikely have much effect on parents' ability to block porn sites. And because a domain name serves merely as an easy-to-remember moniker for a site's actual numeric Internet address, even if its use is required, a child could simply punch in the numeric address of any blocked ".xxx" name.
Anti-porn activists, meanwhile, worry that the creation of a virtual red-light district would serve as an endorsement of the adult-entertainment industry, as ".xxx" would be sitting alongside other suffixes such as ".com" for commercial sites and ".edu" for schools.
Skeptics note that porn sites would likely keep their existing ".com" storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new ".xxx" domain name, thereby expanding the number of porn sites on the Internet.
When ICANN last considered ".xxx," board members also expressed worries that the suffix would leave the agency in the business of regulating content, or the type of material that would find itself there.
The board also questioned whether ".xxx" had the support of the adult-entertainment industry, as many operators of porn sites were concerned that governments would later make the voluntary red-light district mandatory.
ICANN still wasn't swayed after ICM said that the content-regulation role would have been left solely with the company and that ICM would fend off efforts to mandate its use.
Lawley challenged ICANN's rejection before an independent review panel appointed by the International Centre for Dispute Resolution. That panel largely sided with him and concluded that ICANN's decision was "not consistent with the application of neutral, objective and fair documented policy."
The panel said that after ICANN gave the bid preliminary approval in 2005, it shouldn't have revisited some of the key issues already reviewed. Board members had used the new evaluations in deciding to reject the bid two years later, in 2007.
Although the panel's findings are nonbinding, ICANN's board was scheduled to discuss them Friday. It was not clear whether the board would vote on the matter or defer a decision for more discussion.
Lawley said the review panel was supposed to be ICANN's mechanism for accountability, and how the organization responds to the panel's findings "will provide great insight into the true accountability of this vital organization."
He said the process has so far cost his company about $8.5 million.
ICANN tabled and effectively rejected a similar proposal in 2000 out of fear the ".xxx" domain would force the body into content regulation.
ICM resubmitted its proposal in 2004, this time structuring it with a policy-setting organization to free ICANN of that task. But many board members worried that the language of a proposed contract was vague and could kick the task back to ICANN. The board rejected the 2004 proposal in 2006.
ICANN revived the proposal months later after ICM agreed to hire independent organizations to monitor porn sites' compliance with the new rules. But ICANN ultimately rejected that bid in what was to be its final consideration.
Last week Facebook rolled out a new version of their privacy settings to all users. Privacy settings are something that many Facebook users are regularly confused about. With the new settings rolled out, we thought that now would be a great time to update the guide with the latest changes. In this guide we present a thorough overview of the most important privacy settings which includes previous settings that are still relevant as well as new privacy settings that have been added by Facebook. The majority of the old privacy settings are still relevant, however there’s a chance that you may now be sharing much more information with the whole world. Make it through our new Facebook privacy guide and you’re guaranteed to be safe.
1. Understand Your Friend Lists
Facebook friend lists are the cornerstone of privacy on Facebook. While you don’t need to take advantage of friend lists, understanding this feature will instantly turn you into a “Facebook power user”. Understand that friend lists can take time to configure so don’t expect to breeze through this step. The concept behind friend lists is simple: it’s a way of organizing your friends into various affiliation groups. If you aren’t clear with our explanation, here’s how Facebook describes friend lists:
Friend Lists provide organized groupings of your friends on Facebook. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can filter your view of each list’s stream of activity separately on the home page. Friend Lists are easy to manage and allow you to send messages and invites to these groups of people all at once.
As I previously wrote, there are a few key things to understand about friend lists:
You can add each friend to more than one Friend List
Friend Lists should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them
The most common lists that many privacy experts will refer to are “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional” however there’s a limitless combination of lists that you can create. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter how many friend lists you create, although I prefer to simplify things as much as possible. The key thing to understand is that your friends’ privacy settings will always default to the most restrictive friend list they’ve been placed in.
For example, let’s say your friend John is someone you met at work but continue to hang out with outside of work. You may have placed them in your “Work Contacts” Friend List and your “Local Friends” Friend List. If your “Work Contacts” cannot see photos you’ve been tagged in and your “Local Friends” can, John will not be able to see photos you’ve been tagged in.
You can configure your Friend Lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.
2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn’t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn’t want her middle school students to know what she’s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don’t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.
Within the new search privacy settings page, Facebook has made things extremely straight forward. There are now two settings: one for those people who can find you when searching on Facebook, and one for those searching within search engines (which the next section describes). In order to prevent others from finding you in Facebook’s search results, it’s two quick steps:
Next to “Facebook Search Results” select the “Only Friends” privacy setting.
Strangely enough, Facebook doesn’t require you to click on “Save Changes” anymore, however these new settings should now be set.
3. Remove Yourself From Google
Facebook continues to receive A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. As was the case in our previous Facebook Privacy guide, the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, and a list of up to approximately 20 Facebook Pages that you have become a fan of.
As many users have found out, your friend information is available in your public listings. To block that information from being publicly accessible you can remove yourself from Google’s index and other search engines. Some people enjoy having their information displayed in search engines, as it makes them easy to find. For those that prefer to err on the side of privacy though, it’s often a good idea to remove yourself from the search engines.
To remove yourself from the search engines, visit the search privacy settings page and simply uncheck the box next to “Public Search Results” which says “Allow Indexing”. You’ll need to wait for Google and other search engines to remove your information from their cache, so don’t be surprised if you still show up in the search engines for a few weeks.
4. Avoid The Infamous Photo Tag Mistake
Many users are getting smarter about their privacy settings, however I continue to hear horror stories of users who have their relationships damaged as a result of photos they’ve been tagged in. More than just having their relationships damaged, some users get fired as a result of photos they’ve been tagged in. There are a number of ways to work around this problem. One of the ways is described later in this guide, however there is an extremely easy way to avoid having compromising photos show up to friends.
Head over to the profile privacy settings page and go to the section which says “Photos and Videos of Me”. Then click on the drop down selector, and click on the “Custom” option. You can then select “Only Me” as displayed in the image below. Keep in mind that this will block all people from seeing any images or videos that you’ve been tagged in. Many users want their friends to see photos they’ve been tagged in though.
So how do you work around this issue without putting your job or relationships at risk? The best way is to take advantage of the friend lists that you previously created (in the first setting) and limit specific people from seeing the images and videos you’ve been tagged in. For example, it’s probably not the best idea to have your professional contacts see the images you’ve been tagged in. If you have a professional list, you can simply enter that friend list under “Hide this from” in the custom privacy dialog box which is shown below.
5. Protect Your Albums
One of the greatest risks on Facebook is that you get tagged in a compromising photo. However it’s important to consider who you really want to have viewing your photo albums. Given Facebook’s custom privacy settings you are able to get as granular as you’d like with the visibility of each album. Thanks to the new publisher privacy settings, you can even get granular with every photo that you post if you really want to have complete control.
What privacy settings you choose for your albums is completely up to you, but if you do want to limit access to your albums, I recommend visiting the photos privacy settings page and limiting the access of each of your albums to “Only Friends” at the least. Unless you are a professional photographer, there probably isn’t much of a reason for making your albums visible so that the whole world can see them.
6. Avoid The Post-Breakup Facebook Effect
Strangely enough, there is a new mating ritual which has evolved on Facebook and often relationship status changes are part of that process. Often times after a female changes her relationship status to “Single”, a whole slew of new “potential suitors” start commenting on the relationship status change and write posts on her wall. Honestly, I see nothing wrong with this process and find it quite entertaining, however it probably is something that you don’t want all of your contacts to know about, especially your professional contacts.
While I’ve chosen to avoid relationship statuses altogether, some users still want to have them displayed. While many people like to let the world know that they are in a relationship, you can avoid having a relationship status change becoming the talk of the town. While Facebook has now removed the feature which lets users control which actions generate news feed stories, you can still protect the visibility of your relationship status.
Simply go to your profile privacy settings page and change the “Family and Relationship” setting to “Only Me”. While it would be great to make that information public, it’s currently impossible to control whether or not a relationship status change creates a news feed story. As such, I believe it’s better to play things safe and block users from seeing your relationship status.
7. Control What Information Applications Can Access
The risk of having applications publish stories without your approval, which we covered in the last Facebook privacy guide, is being eliminated completely. However it’s important to understand what information applications can access. As Facebook writes, when you visit applications, they “may access any information you have made visible to Everyone as well as your publicly available information.” Publicly available information “includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages.”
The more restrictive you make your profile settings, the less information that’s available to applications. While applications must follow your existing privacy settings, your friends can also share information about you within applications. An example would be a greeting card application which uses your birthday to prompt your friend to send a card. Facebook allows users to control the types of information that applications can access when your friends use an application that you have not previously installed.
You can control that information (as pictured to the right) by visiting this page.
8. Make Contact Information Private
I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. Once I began approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built strong relationships with, I immediately limited the visibility of my contact information so that only close friends could view things like my email and phone number.
If you post any of your personally identifiable information (phone number, email, or address) on your profile, it makes sense to limit who can see it. There are two ways to limit who can see your contact information. The first is to visit the contact privacy settings page. From there you can customize the contact settings as much as you’d like. As I previously wrote, for each contact item that you have in your profile, you should set custom privacy settings so that contacts who you aren’t close to don’t have access to your email and phone number.
The second way to customize your contact privacy settings is directly from your profile. Click on the “Info” tab in your profile and scroll down to the contact information section. Once you mouse over the contact area, you’ll have the option of editing the content. If you click on “Edit” you will notice little lock icons next to each piece of information (as pictured below). If you click on the lock you will be prompted with a box which says “Who can see this?” from which you can completely customize who your information is visible to.
9. Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts
While you may have enjoyed getting wasted with your friends at the holiday party last night, it’s probably not something that you want everybody to know about. Your friends may not use Facebook for connecting with professional contacts, and as a result they don’t think twice about casually posting something that should be kept more private. As such, it makes sense to control what’s visible to others. There are two places where you can configure your wall privacy settings: directly from your profile page and from the profile privacy page.
In order to edit the privacy settings from your profile page, click on the “Options” link directly under the publisher. The image below shows how to control your settings in three easy steps. The most dramatic modification that you can make is unchecking the box which says “Friends may post to my wall”. Most users want to be able to communicate via the wall so disabling this functionality will prevent anyone from communicating publicly with you.
If you don’t want to take the most extreme step by blocking users from writing on your wall, you can customize who can view wall posts made by your friends by clicking on the drop down directly next to “Who can see posts made by my friends?” I recommend preventing all professional contacts from being able to view posts made by your friends.
10. Keep Friendships Private
Yes, I understand that you want the whole world to know that you are popular and have lots of friends! However, not all users want everybody knowing who their friends are and there are clear justifications for blocking others from seeing your Facebook friends. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.
Voyeurism is a key component of Facebook and one of the most frequent activities of users is to browse through other users’ friends. Whatever the reason is, just know that users are doing it. While your friendships can show up in search engines, we’ve already highlighted how to make your profile invisible to search engines in number 3 above. If you want to take things one step further and prevent others from viewing your friends, you can follow these steps:
Go to your profile page
Click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of your “Friends” box
Uncheck the box which says “Show my friends on my profile”
Now you’ve successfully hidden others from viewing your friends. Keep in mind that your friends list is accessible to any Facebook applications you use. It’s also possible for users to view your friends list if they have access to your username (Mark Zuckerberg’s friends list for example). My guess is that Facebook will eventually provide functionality to block users from seeing your friends completely.
Understand The New Privacy Settings
The New Publisher Settings
Yes, last night’s holiday party was a lot of fun but when you post on your friends walls (or your own) you can limit the visibility to just your friends. Configuring your privacy settings effectively is important, but even more important is the ability to use Facebook’s features in a way which avoids any negative repercussions. One of the most important features to roll out with the new privacy settings is the ability to publish content which is only visible to specific friends.
Rather than posting a status update that everybody can view, limit those friends who can access your information. The new content visibility settings are as follows: Everyone, Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Only Friends, and Customize. Understanding the new publisher settings is key to protecting your privacy on Facebook.
Note that the image below doesn’t include “Friends and Networks” as not all users have this option. You must be a member of a university or professional network in order to see the “Friends and Networks” setting.
Everyone Literally Means Everyone In The World
Yes, when you select “Everyone” on content that you publish, anybody on the internet will be able to view that content. When Facebook released the new privacy transition tool, the purpose was to get you to share more information with Facebook users, primarily the status updates and links that you are posting. If you are like most users, then you probably just accepted Facebook’s recommendations without thinking about it (if you didn’t accept, congratulations as you clearly understand Facebook privacy). The result of blindly going through the new privacy transition tool is that your status updates and other information is now publicly accessible by everyone on the internet.
If you don’t mind having your content published to everyone in the world by default, then you don’t need to worry about changing anything. I have a feeling that most users don’t prefer to have all their information publicly shared by default however. Instead, users want complete control over their privacy and they want to start their Facebook experience in a protected environment. While it’s possible to debate Facebook’s privacy philosophy, reading through this guide should help ensure that you continue to feel protected while using Facebook.
Update We’ve also included a video below to help you understand Facebook’s new privacy settings.
For the last few years, policy makers and netizens have been battling over net neutrality — the idea that the net is and should remain an open, fair platform where packets flow freely and web services just work, everywhere and without favoritism. And they’re trying to find the best way to guarantee that.
The problem is hardly new. ICANN, the little-understood, policy-setting body that’s in charge of the net’s address system, has grappled with it, mostly successfully, for years. Now the agency — and its energetic new leader, Rod Beckstrom — is gearing up for some of its biggest challenges yet, as new powers such as China come online in force, and the U.S. cedes some of its historical control.
“Some governments seem to think that ICANN should be engaged in regulating what kind of content is on the net,” said David Johnson, a senior fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “The whole point of ICANN was to keep the domain name system from being used in that way.”
Net neutrality is most commonly framed in terms of a commercial threat from service providers hoping to profit by privileging certain services and content over others. But an equal, if less discussed, neutrality problem is quickly rising to the fore in the form of governments seeking to control information inside their borders.
ICANN’s most epic battle started in 2003, when Verisign, which has the ICANN contract to run the business of selling and administering .com and .net, decided it would re-route users who typed in non-existent .com domain names to a search engine page with ads. The move was rightly criticized as a security threat and a violation of net protocols, and ICANN ordered Verisign to remove the “feature,” though Verisign later filed a federal lawsuit over it.
That battle cemented ICANN’s role as the defender of the net’s inner architecture from self-serving mega-corporations. Now, the group’s biggest challenge is trying to keep the internet, and all the countries that connect to it, united.
That responsibility now rests on the shoulders of Beckstrom.
Beckstrom might seem like just another a blond-haired, charming Silicon Valley entrepreneur who rides his bike to his office in Palo Alto, but his job isn’t to make millions for himself and venture capitalists. At least not anymore.
He’s now the guy who keeps the internet from forking into a collection of squabbling intranets. Asked what his job is, Beckstrom’s answer is concise: “We want to keep the internet global.”
That’s a tough mandate as countries that feel threatened by the internet continually make moves toward breaking it apart. Witness Iran banning Gmail in favor of a state-run service, or China’s firewall blocking of sites like Facebook.
The next logical step in that progression is deciding to break with the protocols that unite the net and turn, for example, China’s internet into a massive intranet.
ICANN is nominally in charge of the internet’s policy around site names and addresses. It sets the rules on who can sell domain names, what language domain names are in, whether a domain name violates someone’s trademark and how people find their way from those names to the numerically addressed servers that host them online. In a system that works by connecting the world’s computers together, ICANN is oddly both powerful and powerless.
Beckstrom is in many ways the online equivalent of the mayor of Switzerland, with an arsenal of peacekeeping tools pretty much limited to his reputation.
The agency was chartered as an independent corporation by the U.S. government in 1998, when it wrested the net’s root file from net pioneer Jon Postel. And the Commerce Department has kept close (some say too close) a watch over it ever since.
Beckstrom became a known quantity in D.C. after a year stint running the National Cyber Security Center in the Department of Homeland Security. He was hired as ICANN chief in July 2009, in no small part for his D.C. connections, which ICANN hoped would convince Washington to trust it.
That plan paid off on September 30, just months after his tenure started, when ICANN and the Commerce Department inked a new operating agreement that declared that “ICANN is independent and is not controlled by any one entity” and that reviews of its performance will be done by the global internet community, not just the Department of Commerce.
Until then, the agency was closely controlled by the U.S. government, to the point that it required daily federal sign-off on changes to the internet’s root file, which tells the world’s computers where to look to find authoritative addresses.
If Beckstrom has been instrumental in convincing the U.S. that ICANN won’t go rogue, he now needs to convince the rest of the world’s governments that the newly freed ICANN is a neutral body that makes decisions independently and fairly.
But CDT’s Johnson says Beckstrom’s challenge goes beyond proving ICANN’s independence.
“The need to convince governments that it is not an arm of the U.S. government is pretty well understood,” Johnson said. “His greater challenge is to keep it from being under the control of governments generally.”
In an interview with Wired.com, Beckstrom described the internet’s history as an arc — starting as a U.S. military research project to a decentralized, global network whose size and complexity can only be guessed at.
ICANN needs to follow the same path, according to Beckstrom.
It also needs to start becoming more innovative, he said. ICANN has moved glacially to approve new top-level domains, such as .aero, .post and .travel — something that Beckstom argues is holding the net back.
“One of the least innovative spaces in the internet is the global top-level domains,” Beckstrom said. “It’s an anomaly. When the internet opens up, then there is innovation.”
Beckstrom is moving to make the approval process for new TLDs faster. The idea is not without controversy — the Bush Administration threatened to block .XXX from entering the net’s root file after ICANN’s approval of a .XXX domain for pornographic sites led to a backlash from religious groups like Focus on the Family. ICANN subsequently canceled the application, giving in to the political pressure. That proposal is now likely to come back up for approval, after an independent review ruled in February that ICANN violated its own policies when it revoked the approval of .XXX.
While opening up new domains is sure to create other controversies, Beckstrom argues that a flowering of new TLDs will lead to innovations that we can’t predict.
That’s not a sentiment that’s universally shared. Some say there’s plenty of domains to choose from, given that every country has its own, in addition to the more commonly used .net, .com, .info. Domain names have also grown considerably cheaper and can be gotten for less than $10 a year.
“I don’t think that creates innovation,” said David Farber, a distinguished professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who has been closely watching ICANN since its creation. “I think that creates rapid confusion.”
Farber also said that ICANN needs to counter its reputation for holding meetings in fancy places, where members live the high life on fees paid to ICANN through domain registrations.
Some see echoes of that reputation in Beckstrom’s salary.
His leadership has not come cheaply to ICANN, which signed him to a three-part contract that pays him $750,000 a year, with the possibility of a bonus up to $195,000 annually. Beckstrom, an author and entrepreneur, agreed to set aside any conflicts of interest and forego lucrative speaking gigs related to his management book, The Starfish and the Spider.
So far however, ICANN’s progress has largely kept attention away from Beckstrom’s salary.
In October, ICANN announced it was finally going to allow top-level domains (e.g. .gov, .com, .uk) in non-Latin characters, so that domain names can be registered in languages that use characters other than A to Z. Such domain names will have to use the same character set (e.g. http://allgreekcharacters.greektopleveldomian, not cocacola.greektopleveldomain) for the full name. That ban on hybrid names should prevent most trademark owners from having to register “theircompanyname.everynewdomain”.
Officially, the move was intended to make it easier for people who speak Greek or one of India’s 22 officially recognized languages to get online. But just as critically, the move was meant to deaden the argument that ICANN is biased in favor of countries such as the United States, whose languages use Latin characters.
“It was a psychic move,” Beckstrom said. “It is offensive to be told you have to change your language to use the internet.”
Beckstrom belittles arguments that the net will Balkanize with the new names. As long as DNS and search engines continue to work, people will still be able to traverse the net — no matter what languages the URLs are in, he said.
Moreover, internationalized domains could help to preserve local cultures, even as it promotes global interconnection, Beckstrom argued. He pointed to the example of the top-level domain for speakers of Catalan. The domain name has created a cultural space for speakers to converge in and helped re-invigorate a culture that is geographically dispersed.
Beckstrom points to examples like that to explain why he’s pushing ICANN to radically open the process of introducing new gTLDs — essentially allowing .anything that anyone is willing to pay to sponsor. The logical new ones? Pretty much any of the top 100 internet destinations: .wikipedia, .google, .microsoft, .facebook.
That would mean you’d be able to type in just Google into your browser and be taken there immediately, or have a Facebook page at JoanSmith.facebook
There are other possibilities, too — think .paris and .nyc, where you could have smithsbakery.paris and smithsbakery.nyc owned by different businesses. Or you could have a .gay or a .news TLD.
The proposal has trademark owners howling that they will have to spend too much to buy domain names in each of the new TLDs.
But Beckstrom says ICANN has worked hard to craft protections and even build notifications for trademark users into the domain name system. Beyond that, it’s not ICANN’s job to pre-emptively police trademarks — which are fraught with jurisdictional issues.
“Go enforce your trademarks in court,” Beckstrom said.
Beckstrom points to the new .post TLD, controlled by the United Postal Union that’s intended to create a trusted home for postal services around the globe — and eventually as a possible way for people to create email addresses whose owners are verified by their local post office — e.g. john.citizen@marseille.french.post is only given out after John Citizen goes to his local post office and shows appropriate identity documents.
The equation is simple for the Silicon Valley-trained Beckstrom.
“Adding more gTLDs will add innovation,” Beckstrom said.
CDT’s Johnson warns of other “innovation” that Beckstrom has to be sure not to create.
“I think ICANN has to be the conscience of the global community and resist the temptation to go beyond its core mission,” Johnson said. “It’s not just about them making governments happy. It’s about making sure they don’t get too happy.”
The Obama administration's stimulus package includes $7.2 billion to extend broadband Internet access to parts of the country where it's not widely available. The government has given out just a fraction of that money so far — and some applicants for the funding say major telecom companies are trying to block those projects.
One of the first grants to be awarded is going to a project known as the "Three Ring Binder" — basically three large fiber-optic rings that cover the entire state of Maine. GWI, an Internet and phone company in Biddeford, Maine, was lead sponsor on the application.
GWI President Fletcher Kittredge says the project will extend what's called "middle mile" infrastructure, bringing high-speed Internet access to rural parts of the state that currently don't have any.
"It's kind of the Maine turnpike of the telecommunications network," Kittredge says.
Kittredge's company was part of a coalition that applied for — and received — $25 million in federal money to build the project. The group includes the University of Maine and other local Internet companies. But it doesn't include the state's biggest Internet provider, FairPoint. In fact, the company helped write a state bill aimed at blocking parts of the plan. State Rep. Stacey Fitts introduced the bill, which would prevent the university from offering broadband to private customers.
"We have entities supported by the state like the university that are potentially in direct competition with people trying to eke out a living in the private sector," says Fitts, a Republican from Pittsfield.
FairPoint, which declined to comment for this story, is in bankruptcy. But Kittredge says rather than trying to fight the project, FairPoint could use the new fiber-optic lines to deliver broadband to more people.
"It doesn't have to be a threat," Kittredge says. "If they involved themselves in it, and fully understand what the opportunities are for them, they could really make a lot of this."
But so far, few of the nation's biggest Internet providers seem to be taking that advice.
"They aren't leading, they aren't following, and they won't get out of the way," says Craig Settles, author of Fighting The Next Good Fight, a book about broadband business strategy. He says the nation's biggest telecom companies have generally decided not to apply for federal stimulus money.
"They're not going to put proposals on the table because they don't like the rules," Settles says. "Yet they're not going to cooperate with the entities that are going after the money."
Settles says that's in part because the grants could force those carriers to share their wires with competitors. But there has been no shortage of smaller companies and municipalities that are applying for the stimulus money. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has received more than 2,200 applications. Several of them came from a coalition of community groups and city government in Philadelphia.
The city's chief technology officer Allan Frank says the application — which so far has not been funded — calls for more computers in libraries and recreation centers in the poorest neighborhoods, as well as free wireless access in outdoor, public spaces.
"We don't expect to be providing the same sort of speeds in those public spaces as you can get when you pay," Frank says. "We're trying to focus on ... the neediest of the needy."
But it's the free public space wireless that has drawn an objection from cable and Internet giant Comcast. The Philadelphia-based company filed comments about the city's plans with the NTIA. The comments themselves are not public. Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice says her company is merely pointing out that it already offers broadband in Philadelphia.
"We said the applications that should have priority were areas that were unserved, rather than areas that are already served by a commercial competitor," Fitzmaurice says.
Comcast and other big Internet companies have filed thousands of such comments on applications across the country. NTIA spokeswoman Jessica Schafer says it's impossible to say exactly how much weight those comments carry.
"The fact that there's an existing provider that offers some level of broadband service somewhere within the project's service area does not disqualify the project from funding," Schafer explains.
The NTIA has given out less than $300 million so far. Most has gone to grants that focus on "unserved" rural communities, like the Three Ring Binder project in Maine. But Todd Wolfson at the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia wants to see more help for "underserved" urban communities where broadband is technically available, but still too expensive for many residents.
Wolfson says half of the people in Philadelphia don't have Internet in their homes. "They can't afford it," he says. "We need to solve this problem."
A second round of broadband grant applications is due in March. Wolfson says his group and the city plan to apply again.
Twitter may be valued at $1.4 billion, but it’s definitely not a smart buy in Suze Orman’s opinion. Well, that is if you’re Mark Z., a 25-year-old degreeless professional with $300 million in liquid assets, $4 billion in Facebook stock, $2,500 in monthly expenses and no debt.
In her latest “Can I Afford It” segment, Orman strongly advises Mark Z. — an obvious reference to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — against buying Twitter. She exclaims, “You want to spend $1.5 billion on Twitter, do I have that right? … Why do you need to buy it … you know Twitter, you can get it for free.”
Of course, the video is all in jest and first aired at last night’s Shorty Awards in New York. Orman, who happened to be nominated for a Shorty Award in the finance category, agreed to film the spoof video when approached by producers. The end result is a slice of comedic genius at the expense of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and even Chatroulette.
Check out the clever and entertaining mock segment below:
Internet companies have been expressing their shock at Wednesday's ruling by a court in Italy that held a group of Google executives responsible for a video posted on its Web site. The industry says it's impossible for a company like Google to vet every single video users upload, and they say the ruling threatens Internet freedom.
But many of those same companies have already bowed to local laws elsewhere in the world, and Internet freedom depends on where you live.
Google has framed this ruling as potentially disastrous. Spokesman Bill Echikson says it's a threat to creativity on the Internet.
"It would mean the Web as we know it wouldn't exist," he says.
'It's Supposed To Be Uniform!'
The thing is, the Web as we know it doesn't exist — at least, not in any one, universal form. There used to be a single Internet — Web sites, especially, were designed to be "worldwide."
"It's supposed to be uniform!" says Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "One link consistently is supposed to point to a particular destination!"
It was called the World Wide Web for a reason, and Web addresses are URLs — that is, Uniform Resource Locators. But that's turning into a misnomer.
"More and more, what we see is that depending where you are, one jurisdiction vs. another — Canada vs. the U.S., the U.S. vs. Thailand — that Uniform Resource Locator isn't so uniform anymore," Zittrain says.
Commercial, Government Interests Intervene
Your computer's IP address — the numeric code that shows where you are — directly affects what you get to look at. Brazilians can't watch Hulu. Americans can't watch the BBC. Usually, this is done for commercial reasons — the Web site only has rights to show movies in certain countries. But sometimes, this regionalization happens because of government pressure.
"We've seen an increasing ability to have a local Internet that can conform to local law," Zittrain says.
China is the obvious example, but companies like Google have also restricted access to their sites in other countries, too. For instance, in Thailand, YouTube — which is owned by Google — agreed to block locals from seeing certain videos insulting their king.
Then there's Europe, which has more restrictive privacy laws than the U.S. The Italian case, for example, was based on the fact that the teenager being bullied in the video hadn't consented to having the video posted.
"There are likely thousands of privacy laws that can affect any one piece of data," says Trevor Hughes, head of the International Association of Privacy Professionals. People who work for companies like Google to try to comply with the wide array of privacy laws around the globe.
Pleasing Everyone Not An Option
But sometimes it's just not possible for a single Web site to satisfy every country.
"While the Internet is indeed a global platform," Hughes says, "we certainly see organizations that cannot find the lowest common denominator with regards to compliance. Or perhaps it's the highest common denominator. And as a result, they need to segment their offerings significantly."
This "segmentation" of the Internet comes as a disappointment to some of the American idealists who'd hoped the Internet would become a global free-speech zone that trumps local authority. But those idealists sometimes forget that freedom can mean very different things in different places.
Zittrain quotes a familiar aphorism among Internet law experts.
"In cyberspace, the First Amendment is just a local ordinance, and it doesn't protect you anywhere else," he says.
As the laws and customs of other countries weigh more heavily on the policies of companies like Google, Americans who are fond of their own concepts of freedom may be glad someday that the Internet isn't as universal as it used to be.
It's fun to brag when you're at a great bar or going off on vacation. Social networking sites and location-based apps have made it easy to broadcast that kind of information to your friends. The problem is that you may not just be making your friends jealous, but supplying criminals with useful information as well.
A new Web site called PleaseRobMe.com has drawn attention to the issue by repurposing posts from foursquare, a social networking site that lets people share the latest about their whereabouts. PleaseRobMe demonstrates that it's easy for anyone to find out you're not at home — and therefore, are presenting an "opportunity" for burglary.
"There are physical and economic safety risks when you're publicizing to the world where you are," says Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's obviously a treasure trove of information for criminals. PleaseRobMe is a good demonstration of how easy it is."
In a post on its Web site, foursquare notes that access to user information is limited to select universes of friends, but cautions users from pushing their status updates on more easily searchable sites, such as Twitter.
"We definitely 'get' the larger issue here — location is sensitive data and people should be careful about with whom and when they share it," writes "team foursquare."
That really is the larger issue, privacy experts say. There's no evidence that many criminals are using the Internet to pick out robbery locations, but it's likely to be a growing problem.
"We are seeing issues arising from Web sites, not only with reference to criminal acts against property, but also [gathering] intelligence about people," says an official with the California attorney general's office.
And most people are not thinking about how readily accessible to criminals their personal information is on the Internet.
"What seems like an innocent pass-off of information to a small number of friends can be useful for bad guys to exploit," says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project."
Last year, a "bling ring" of four teenage girls and a man were arrested for allegedly carrying out a string of burglaries targeting celebrities including Lindsay Lohan and Orlando Bloom. They were accused of using Internet mapping and gossip sites to case the stars' homes.
These days, you don't have to be a celebrity for criminals to connect the dots about your location. Posts and pictures give away all the information criminals need for learning when you're on vacation, whether you have a big dog and whether you own cars or flat-screen TVs worth stealing, says Nick Newman, a computer crimes specialist with the National White Collar Crime Center.
Rainie calls it the 21st-century equivalent of reading the obituaries. Burglars have been known to read obits to find out when funerals are taking place, knowing that the homes of loved ones are left unoccupied and unprotected.
That kind of thing still happens, but technology has made the job a lot easier. "Like any useful tool, the bad ends to which it could be put is limited only by the human imagination," Bankston says.
"People should think very carefully before they broadcast personal information to the world, because they don't know who is on the other end of that line."
Authorities have smashed one of the world's biggest networks of virus-infected computers, a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs.
The "botnet" of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks, according to investigators.
Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. More arrests are expected soon in other countries.
Spanish authorities have planned a news conference for Wednesday in Madrid.
The arrests are significant because the masterminds behind the biggest botnets aren't often taken down. And the story of investigators' hunt for them offers a rare glimpse at the tactics used to trace the origin of computer crimes.
Also, the suspects go against the stereotype of genius programmers often associated with cyber crime. The suspects weren't brilliant hackers but had underworld contacts who helped them build and operate the botnet, Cesar Lorenza, a captain with Spain's Guardia Civil, which is investigating the case, told The Associated Press.
Investigators were examining bank records and seized computers to determine how much money the criminals made.
"They're not like these people from the Russian mafia or Eastern European mafia who like to have sports cars and good watches and good suits — the most frightening thing is they are normal people who are earning a lot of money with cybercrime," Lorenza said.
The three suspects were described as Spanish citizens with no criminal records. They weren't named and their mug shots weren't released, which Lorenza said is standard in Spain to protect the privacy of defendants. They face up to six years in prison if convicted of hacking charges.
Authorities identified them by their Internet handles and their ages: "netkairo," 31; "jonyloleante," 30; and "ostiator," 25.
Botnets are networks of infected PCs that have been hijacked from their owners, often without their knowledge, and put into the control of criminals. Linked together, the machines supply an enormous amount of computing power to spammers, identity thieves, and Internet attackers.
The Mariposa botnet, which has been dismantled, was easily one of the world's biggest. It spread to more than 190 countries, according to researchers. It also appears to be far more sophisticated than the botnet that was used to hack into Google Inc. and other companies in the attack that led Google to threaten to pull out of China.
The researchers that helped take down Mariposa first started looking at it in the spring of 2009.
Chris Davis, CEO of Ottawa-based Defence Intelligence, said he noticed the infections when they appeared on networks of some of his firm's clients, including pharmaceutical companies and banks.
It wasn't until several months later that he realized the infections were part of something much bigger.
After seeing that some of the servers used to control computers in the botnet were located in Spain, Davis and researchers from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center joined with software firm Panda Security, which is headquartered in Bilbao, Spain.
The investigators caught a few lucky breaks. For one, the suspects used Internet services that wound up cooperating with investigators. That isn't always the case.
Critically, one suspect also made direct connections from his own computer to try and reclaim control of his botnet after authorities took it down around Christmas. Investigators were able to identify him based on that traffic. They were able to back up their claims with records from domains he registered where he would eventually host malicious content.
It turned out that the botnet runners had infected computers by instant-messaging malicious links to contacts on infected computers. They also got viruses onto removable thumb drives and through peer-to-peer networks. The program used to create the botnet was known as Mariposa, from the Spanish word for "butterfly."
"I don't think there's anything about this guy that makes him smarter than any of the other botnet guys, but the (Mariposa) software, it's very professional, it's very effective," said Pedro Bustamante, senior research adviser with Panda Security. "It came alive and started spreading and it got bigger than him."
While arrests of people accused of running smaller botnets are fairly common, the biggest botnet leaders are rarely nabbed. That's partly because it's easy for criminals to hide their identities by disguising the source of their Internet traffic. Often, every computing resource they use is stolen.
For instance, there have been no busts yet in the spread of the Conficker worm, which infected 3 million to 12 million PCs running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and caused widespread fear that it could be used as a kind of Internet super weapon. The Conficker botnet is still active, but is closely watched by security researchers. The infected computers have so far been used to make money in ordinary ways, pumping out spam and spreading fake antivirus software.
The adult-entertainment industry is in a tailspin, shattering the notion that it is one of the few recession-proof industries.
The slump is especially stinging because technology — which helped adult-entertainment enterprises reap riches through innovations such as video streaming, webcameras and online payments — is contributing to the misery.
DVDs and online pay sites, which make up the majority of porn-related sales, are in a free fall largely because of the rise of so-called tube sites.
Knockoffs of video-sharing site YouTube, the sites serve up snippets of free porn that is often pirated. (Google's YouTube has done its best to bar explicit content.)
Some 1,000 tube sites — double those of a year ago — have put a sizable dent in the estimated $13 billion porn industry, prompting a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. Most tube sites run ads to make money.
"We're dealing with the perfect storm: declining DVD sales, rampant piracy, free content and a weak economy," says Steven Hirsch, founder of porn heavyweight Vivid Entertainment. He says its DVD sales plunged 20% last year. "This is the worst I've seen in this industry in 25 years."
The wide range of free content available — be it pirated video content or amateur-shot footage — will "continue to have a negative impact on premium providers' ability to attract and retain paying customers," says a recent report by market researcher XBIZ. It says initial orders of DVD titles by distributors have sunk, on average, to 1,500 to 2,000 now, vs. 5,000 to 6,000 in 2005.
Vivid fires off more than several hundred takedown notices a month to sites that illegally show its content.
Last month, Ventura Content, which owns Pink Visual studio, filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Mansef, which operates some of the top-visited tube sites, for more than $6.5 million in damages.
At least eight of the 100 top sites in the U.S. are adult-entertainment sites, according to Internet traffic-ranking service Alexa.com.
Muddying matters, the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act puts the onus on content providers to legally protect their content when it is filched by smaller sites, industry experts says.
Vivid's Hirsch likens the exercise to a digital version of Whac-A-Mole. His company must troll the Internet, looking for offenders. It issues a letter, asking the offending site to take down its content within the law's 72-hour deadline. But the pirated content often is resurrected on someone else's site after being taken down.
"The tubes are making money off the studios' investment of time and money, while the studios are forced to spend ever larger chunks of change to police the tubes and send endless takedown notices," says Kathee Brewer, an editor at AVN, which covers the adult-entertainment industry.
Think of Jelli as American Idol, radio style, where the songs you hear on a station aren't picked by a DJ or program director, but by you.
"The future of radio is based on being relevant to a younger demographic," says Mike Dougherty, a former Microsoft executive who co-founded Jelli. "This is a way to reach them."
Jelli is a start-up that combines a website and syndicated radio format. It's a new twist on all-request radio — except these requests are logged online, on the Jelli.net website. The songs that get the most votes get played on the air.
Traditional broadcast radio stations in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Syracuse, N.Y., and a handful of smaller markets have signed with Jelli to bring "crowd-sourcing" music decisions to the people, and away from professional programmers.
Jelli's website streams personalized music to registered users and provides a home for radio listeners to vote for songs. Where Dougherty hopes to profit is through traditional commercial on-air advertising. Jelli's all-request radio format — a variation on Top 40 — is given to stations for free, in exchange for two minutes of commercial airtime each day that Jelli gets to sell.
Jelli began in summer 2009 with a trial Sunday-night run in San Francisco on CBS-owned Live 105; in February it expanded to seven nights a week.
This week, a handful of new stations will add Jelli, including the outlets in Philadelphia and Las Vegas.
Stations are looking to marry social media and traditional radio broadcasting to stem declining ratings. According to the Radio And Internet Newsletter, broadcast radio ratings in aggregate declined 30% from 1990 through 2010.
Power of the group
Radio needs all the help it can get, as once-loyal radio fans have turned to other sources, such as iTunes, Facebook and Pandora, to hear new music.
Jelli's challenge is the free availability of music. Back in radio's pre-digital heyday, music fans might wait a long time to hear a specific song. But now, anyone with an Internet connection can locate and listen to the song of their choice within seconds. A Google search for a tune pops it up instantly, with full listening capability. And if Google doesn't have it, there's always 30-second samples at Amazon.com or Apple's iTunes.
Voting for a song on Jelli is more than just wanting to listen, Gartner analyst Mike McGuire says: "It's a way to display your affection for a band. It's for someone who wants to tell everybody and anybody, 'By the way, AC/DC is the most awesome classic rock band ever.' "
Kurt Hanson, editor of the Radio And Internet Newsletter blog, calls the Jelli radio format a "high-tech gimmick" that's little different from on-air request lines. "People aren't really controlling what's played on the station," he says. "They're just voting up or down on songs, like they do on Pandora and Slacker." He believes that, as with request lines, a "tiny subset' of listeners will choose to participate.
Dougherty and business partner Jateen Parekh, a former Amazon executive, first kicked around ideas for a website when they were both still in Seattle. "What if Google ran a radio station?" Dougherty wondered. "What would it look like?"
Like YouTube, they figured, it would have an active community of participants, venturing forth thousands of comments. But unlike YouTube, the material wouldn't be created by the masses. Instead, the crowd would pick the playlist.
Blissfully ignorant
The pair raised $2 million from friends and angel investors. Even though they knew nothing about radio, and had no contacts in the closely knit community of broadcasters, they got in the door to make their pitch.
"We came to it with an outsider perspective, not knowing what we couldn't do," says Dougherty, who serves as CEO.
(Dougherty and Parekh weren't the first to come up with the notion of crowd-sourced radio. Radio consultant Mike McVay is marketing a similar format called Listener Driven Radio, which is currently available in Minneapolis.)
Donovan Short oversees three stations in Montana and Wyoming for GAP West Broadcasting, which will add Jelli shortly. "Any programmer is just trying to find more ways to reach his listeners," he says. "This isn't just one guy with eclectic tastes taking over your playlist — it's the power of the group."
The music selected by the crowds tends to be not that different from what a programmer would pick, says Aaron Axelson, Live 105's music director. It's still the hits, but a little more eclectic.
"This is the iPod generation," he says. "They're more open to hearing everything from hip-hop to electronica."
A global Internet oversight agency is reopening discussions about whether to create a ".xxx" domain name as an online red-light district where porn sites can set up shop away from the wandering eyes of children and teenagers.
Facebook friend lists are the cornerstone of privacy on Facebook. While you don’t need to take advantage of friend lists, understanding this feature will instantly turn you into a “Facebook power user”. Understand that friend lists can take time to configure so don’t expect to breeze through this step. The concept behind friend lists is simple: it’s a way of organizing your friends into various affiliation groups. If you aren’t clear with our explanation, here’s how Facebook describes friend lists:
The risk of having applications publish stories without your approval, which we covered in the last Facebook privacy guide, is being eliminated completely. However it’s important to understand what information applications can access. As Facebook writes, when you visit applications, they “may access any information you have made visible to Everyone as well as your publicly available information.” Publicly available information “includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages.”
Yes, I understand that you want the whole world to know that you are popular and have lots of friends! However, not all users want everybody knowing who their friends are and there are clear justifications for blocking others from seeing your Facebook friends. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.
Think of Jelli as American Idol, radio style, where the songs you hear on a station aren't picked by a DJ or program director, but by you.
