After 30 years of operation, Compuserve Information Service has shut down. [more inside]
posted by Kadin2048 on Jul 3, 2009 - 67 comments

The 8 Most Awesome Examples of Internet Vigilantism. Contains a heady mix of justice and harrassment.
posted by mippy on Jul 2, 2009 - 62 comments

Web Site Story West Side Story without the race issues and more about internet dating.
posted by Del Far on Jul 1, 2009 - 26 comments

Crap Detection 101 Howard Rheingold offers a fairly in-depth primer on media and internet BS detection. Lots of links to resources for enabling critical analysis of various information sources included.
posted by telstar on Jun 30, 2009 - 17 comments

Internet Anonymity: A Right of the Past? | North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology

A newly designed Internet Protocol, restricting communication source autonomy, is being quietly drafted with detailed technical standards that “define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous” by a United Nations agency. The “IP Traceback” drafting group, which has declined to release key documents or allow their meetings to be open to the public, includes, among others, the United States National Security Agency.

The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn. A review of Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism : A Writer's Manifesto. [more inside]
posted by shoesfullofdust on Jun 19, 2009 - 70 comments

Data Center Overload. "Data centers are increasingly becoming the nerve centers of business and society, creating a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources."
posted by homunculus on Jun 15, 2009 - 32 comments

Its reach is impossible to measure precisely, but more than 3 million vulnerable machines may ultimately have been infected. : The inside story on the Conficker Worm at New Scientist.
posted by The Whelk on Jun 15, 2009 - 84 comments

With the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on Thursday, China's ever-vigilant censors have stepped up the reach of the "Great Firewall," blocking Western sites like Twitter, Flickr, and (just one day after its launch) Microsoft's Bing. via [more inside]
posted by infini on Jun 3, 2009 - 54 comments

This is what 300 baud looks like online today.
posted by loquacious on Jun 1, 2009 - 111 comments

On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired. "Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge. 'You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper,' says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. 'But you need the Internet.'"
posted by homunculus on May 30, 2009 - 47 comments

Pick One
posted by You Should See the Other Guy on May 25, 2009 - 96 comments

The Internet as Imagined in 1969. A cute video replete with sexist overtones.
posted by KevinSkomsvold on May 14, 2009 - 50 comments

Acting on criticisms and pressure from law enforcement, Craigslist has announced it will shut down its "erotic services" category in the U.S. Reaction is mixed and some are suggesting that online prostitution will simply find a new name.
posted by stinkycheese on May 14, 2009 - 61 comments

My, how the tables have turned: Many of the same daily newspaper correspondents that not too long ago turned up their noses at us online journalism pioneers, claiming we weren't "real" journalists, now fill my email box daily with their resumes, looking to me and others like me to provide them with work. ... Memo to my remaining daily print colleagues and their nostalgia club: Get over it and get over yourselves. It’s not that the Internet is Mr. Wonderful. Much of it mimics the same bad qualities that drove the public away from daily newspapers. You lost the public to us because - there's no nice or sugar-coated way to say it - you guys really suck at what you do. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on May 12, 2009 - 95 comments

With Rupert Murdoch planning to start charging for access to some of the content of his newspaper's websites is this the end of the age of free? But will it rescue the newspaper industry? Or is the Kindle or other ebook reader the answer? And if free news on the web is unsustainable from advertising what about YouTube, Twitter and Facebook?
posted by fearfulsymmetry on May 10, 2009 - 31 comments

Metafilter's own Sean Tevis made history with his run for Kansas House of Representatives in 2008. Read more here, here, and here. Sean is back and ready to commence 'Option 4', once again changing the way politics is done in Kansas. From his website "Sean Tevis is visiting more than 50 politicians who can make open government a reality. He wears a different shirt with each politician. Eash shirt is unique and displays the names of 100 people like you. These shirts also have messages on them, which are Twitter-sized: 140 characters or less. The politician receives a copy of this shirt, too, for meeting with Sean. You get an account of this visit."
posted by jlowen on May 6, 2009 - 25 comments

Stephen Wolfram discusses Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine - at the same time Google Adds Search to Public Data, viz: "Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast" -- like a cross between designing for big data and a glossary of game theory terms -- on Wolfram|Alpha (previously), yet the veil is being lifted nonetheless: "[on] a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before," cf. hunch & cyc (and in other startup news...) [via] [more inside]
posted by kliuless on May 1, 2009 - 29 comments

In the town of Wilson, North Carolina, an ISP battle is underway that could have implications across the entire United States. When Greenlight began offering cheaper and faster internet service to the town's residents, Embarq and Time Warner couldn't compete. So they responded by sponsoring legislation that "would effectively either cripple or ban the service all together", and backing this up by phoning local residents to urge their support. The city of Wilson has responded: "[Embarq and Time Warner] don't want to level the playing field. They want to be the only team on the field." Time Warner defends the legislation, saying in part that, "Cities can cross-subsidize their service, using income from water or electric service fees to pay for the system. We can’t solict door to door. They can." (Via)
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing on Apr 29, 2009 - 59 comments

Man fell from the garden of Eden, and he planted the Garden of Herbal Evil, to justify Brutal Myths against women. Fortunately women have the Blissful Garden of Herbal Good to bind the evil herbs. (possibly NSFW, contains line drawings of genitals.) [more inside]
posted by fontophilic on Apr 28, 2009 - 32 comments

Getting into a lather wondering which of the new wave of URL modifiers - tinyurl, bitly, trim, etc - to use? Why not give gianturl a whirl?
posted by puffmoike on Apr 28, 2009 - 49 comments

Been overjoyed with hulu and other online internet television sources? You need to know about Miro, the video podcast tracker and media display program for everyone. [more inside]
posted by hippybear on Apr 27, 2009 - 19 comments

"the scale-free network modeing paradigm is largely inconsistent with the engineered nature of the Internet..." For a decade it's been conventional wisdom that the Internet has a scale-free topology, in which the number of links emanating from a site obeys a power law. In other words, the Internet has a long tail; compared with a completely random network, its structure is dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, while the rest of the web consists of a gigantic list of sites attached to hardly anything. Among its other effects, this makes the web highly vulnerable to epidemics. The power law on the internet has inspired a vast array of research by computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. According to an article in this month's Notices of the American Math Society, it's all wrong. How could so many scientists make this kind of mistake? Statistician Cosma Shalizi explains how people see power laws when they aren't there: "Abusing linear regression makes the baby Gauss cry."
posted by escabeche on Apr 23, 2009 - 30 comments

Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Geocities, we hardly knew ye.
posted by awenner on Apr 23, 2009 - 111 comments

It's been only two years since the writer Jo Walton proposed a day for authors to post their writing for free online. This was in response to the resignation speech of Howard Hendrix, former V.P. of the Science Fiction Writers of America, which turned into a rant on the evil of giving away work for free on the internet. [more inside]
posted by happyroach on Apr 23, 2009 - 42 comments

Sunday, February 28, 1993. A new word -- Internet -- makes its first appearance in The New York Times.
posted by william_boot on Apr 13, 2009 - 44 comments

Happy 40th birthday, RFC 1!
posted by loquacious on Apr 7, 2009 - 17 comments

Beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned. - Glenn Greenwald. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Apr 7, 2009 - 102 comments

A new university of Melbourne study finds that surfing the web at work can actually boost rather than hurt productivity, even when the content is not work related. Finally I have an excuse for why I am "always looking at that blue site."
posted by Bango Skank on Apr 2, 2009 - 43 comments

Dear FileFront User: We regret to inform you that due to the current economic conditions we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended. We would like to give a warm thank you to all of you who have been part of the FileFront communities we have built together. Your support has had a meaningful impact for all of us here at FileFront. Again, we want to give you a sincere “thank you” for your support over the years and wish you all the very best. Keep gaming alive, FileFront Management and Team.
posted by lazaruslong on Mar 26, 2009 - 34 comments

In what has been described as "a major blow to online free speech in Canada", an Ontario court has ordered the owners of FreeDominion.ca to disclose all personal information on eight anonymous posters to the chat site - including email and IP addresses. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Mar 25, 2009 - 34 comments

Wikileaks has posted the complete list of websites that the Australian Government intends to block under its proposed opt-out internet censorship scheme. The Government has flagged plans to expand the blacklist to 10,000 sites or more. [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000 on Mar 18, 2009 - 79 comments

The piece is attached via a network cable to the internet. The needle indicates results.
posted by Fiasco da Gama on Mar 11, 2009 - 15 comments

That Voodoo That Scientists Do. "When findings are debated online, as with a yet to be released paper (PDF) that calls out the field of social neuroscience, who wins?"
posted by homunculus on Feb 27, 2009 - 53 comments

Newspaper says goodbye via Vimeo. The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition today, after 149 years, 311 days in circulation.
posted by yiftach on Feb 27, 2009 - 82 comments

The day will come when the words of Shakespeare are no longer known. Roger Ebert looks back on a long career and waxes philosophical.
posted by The Card Cheat on Feb 10, 2009 - 60 comments

I'm On a Boat, Featuring T-pain (NSFWork or Landlubbers) [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue on Feb 10, 2009 - 56 comments

Politics, the Press, and the Public. Bill Moyers speaks with Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen about the role of the establishment press in America’s dysfunctional political system.
posted by homunculus on Feb 7, 2009 - 18 comments

The internet has concluded its broadcast day. Thank you for tuning in. Please join us again tomorrow when the internet resumes it's regularly scheduled programming. (via)
posted by Meatbomb on Feb 2, 2009 - 46 comments

The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. At Harvard they are working with the Business School on new business models, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society on understanding online life, and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations on one potential path for news organizations.
posted by netbros on Jan 22, 2009 - 11 comments

A tempest in a Livejournal: It starts with author Elizabeth Bear's post Writing for The Other. Or maybe it started with Jay Lake's Thinking about the Other. It leads to a wide ranging, intense and angry debate on the portrayal of ethnicity in fiction, culture and the media. Avalon's Willow responds with an open letter on the racial content in one of her books, and relates it to media portrayals of ethnic peoples. Deepa D follows up with a post on, cultural appropriation. And then things get intense. [more inside]
posted by happyroach on Jan 19, 2009 - 82 comments

How Google Is Making Us Smarter: Humans are "natural-born cyborgs," and the Internet is our giant "extended mind."
posted by homunculus on Jan 15, 2009 - 50 comments

Everyone else is on Facebook, why aren't you? Not knowing the rules is not an excuse.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero on Jan 15, 2009 - 248 comments

A high-profile task force created by 49 state attorneys general to find a solution to the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.
posted by theroadahead on Jan 13, 2009 - 55 comments

How to blog, or counter-blog, for the US Air force, in handy flow chart form.
posted by Artw on Jan 6, 2009 - 40 comments

History of the Internet is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.
posted by Surfin' Bird on Jan 6, 2009 - 17 comments

After a year of research spanning four continents and interviews with dozens of people across the internet, Dancing Ink Productions will release their findings from the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project on Thursday, January 29.
posted by gman on Jan 6, 2009 - 2 comments

In a move applauded by some internet privacy advocates, Yahoo will retain personally identifiable search information for only 90 days. This places it above competitors Google and Microsoft in terms of protecting user privacy. Congressional representatives are taking notice, but others criticize Yahoo's method of preserving user anonymity as not enough, hearkening back to AOL's massive data leak in 2006.
posted by Law Talkin' Guy on Dec 24, 2008 - 11 comments

Looks like Telecoms cashed out hard, and we lost out. At this point I'm not sure if I should blame deregulation, closed door deals or endemic corporate greed. Maybe it's a little of all three. All I know is we've fallen behind and it wasn't supposed to work like this. Plus, don't mess with our internets.
posted by Mr. Crowley on Dec 22, 2008 - 48 comments

BBC: Users of the world's most common web browser (good old IE!) have been advised to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed. Microsoft Security Advisory 961051. [more inside]
posted by chuckdarwin on Dec 16, 2008 - 116 comments