Free Federal Wireless Broadband For All Americans? Fuggedaboutit!
The United States government is not going to be providing free WiFi Internet access to consumers anytime soon. That news may surprise anyone who read a startling Washington Post story on Sunday that seemed to confuse a fairly esoteric telecom policy proposal about the use of so-called “white space” wireless spectrum with some sort of free national wireless Internet access plan. The “free WiFi for all” story, which was passed around uncritically by Internet blogs and news sites, set off a furor because the notion cuts to the heart of ongoing battles over access to the Internet, the “digital divide,” and federal policy decisions that could have major implications for the telecom, cable, and technology industries. But the story was wrong, as Ars Technica pointed out. On Tuesday, outlets that repeated the bunk story began walking their reports back, in some cases apologizing for giving bad information to the public. The episode, which provoked a strong pushback from tech ...
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Twitter blocks its first account and hospitals get more malware
Friday, October 19, 2012 - 04:33 NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images Twitter flipped a switch this week and bam: Users in Germany could no longer see the tweets of a banned neo-Nazi group. Twitter flipped a switch this week and bam: users in Germany could no longer see the tweets of a banned neo-Nazi group. German cops wrote Twitter trying to get the account shut off completely ; Instead the company confined the blackout to Germany. How did they do that? The microblogging social network had already engineered its own system to block content country by country. Emma Llanso at the Center for Democracy and Technology sees Twitter's response as limited and appropriate. "If Twitter or other companies start responding to less formal requests from governments that doesn't go through a full court or administrative process," says Llanso, "and is just the government saying 'we don't really like this, can you make sure this is inaccessible in our country,' that would raise a concern." The head of the ...
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