Below The Beltway

The battle for internet freedom suffered another setback today when Australian leaders announced plans to make filtering mandatory for all internet feeds:
Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says new measures are being put in place to provide greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites.
Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service [...]

Microsoft issued a security patch this week that crashes Internet Exploder:
December 19, 2007 (Computerworld) — Microsoft Corp. acknowledged late yesterday that security patches issued last week for Internet Explorer (IE) crippled the browser for some users, but rather than rework the fix, the company offered up a registry hack work-around.
The confirmation and work-around came a [...]

Yesterday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would impose strict reporting requirements on web site operators and public wi-fi providers:
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines [...]

Syria has joined the list of dictatorships realizing that the Internet is not their friend:
DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syrian users of Facebook said on Friday the authorities had blocked access to the social network Web site as part of a crackdown on political activism on the Internet.
“Facebook helped further civil society in Syria and form civic [...]

Because no matter how much spam my email address gets bombarded with, almost none of it gets through.

I’m still not quite sure how it is that anyone thinks that social networking sites Facebook or Myspace are going to make anyone money, but Facebook has been the subject of a bidding war of sorts between Microsoft and Google, and it looks like Microsoft won:
SAN FRANCISCO — Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has [...]

That certainly seems to be the plan according to this report:
Google has disclosed for the first time that it is prepared to bid in a forthcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the US, a move that could eventually mean it will emerge as a fully fledged operator of a wireless communications network.
However, while the search [...]

Dead tree newspapers aren’t attracting the attention of younger people:
Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people [...]

Apparently, the CEO of Whole Foods has been spending alot of time on the Internet talking pretending to be someone else:
SAN FRANCISCO, July 15 — On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog — or the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company.
Or so thought John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, who [...]

As it turns out, the iPhone wasn’t the only big news in the cell phone industry.
Look at this from T-Mobile:
It’s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it’s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like [...]