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 . '/' . substr('9781582437996',-6,3) . '/' . '9781582437996' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Linda Gray Sexton
$15.98
By Hannah Arendt
$22
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tastyblogsnack.com
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There’s a new kind of addiction out there, to which many of us are currently vulnerable, and from which some of us may be suffering right this moment: According to one Dr. Jerald Block, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry, excessive e-mailing and text messaging could be a form of mental illness.
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This has been described as the YouTube election, so it seems only fitting to get YouTube’s take on how the candidates have fared in the realm of viral videos. For all the fuss, it turns out some of the less fortunate candidates were the most industrious new media campaigners.
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youtube.com
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Those around the world who had trouble accessing YouTube on Sunday may be interested to know the cause of the problem: On Friday, the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority acted to block access to YouTube in order to prevent Pakistanis from seeing a YouTube clip promoting an anti-Islam film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders (pictured). Thus ensued an accidental chain reaction that blocked YouTube access for many thousands internationally. Now, the popular site is back up, even in Pakistan.
Posted on Feb 26, 2008
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Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been stirring up the Internet and more than a few journalists with accusations of word borrowing, a charge she pressed (to the dismay of the audience) at Thursday’s Democratic debate with Barack Obama. But in that same venue, it appears she may have borrowed a few words of her own.
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A California court has ordered Wikileaks.org, a Web site that allows users to anonymously post documents and allege corruption, to be shut down. A Swiss bank brought the case after someone using the site alleged the firm had facilitated money laundering. Wikileaks says it was “given only hours notice” of the hearing.
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Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh, a 23-year-old Afghan student, has been sentenced to death for blasphemy because of an article he downloaded from the Internet. The verdict has aroused outrage around the world, and top U.S. and European officials have spoken with the Afghan government. However, some worry that international pressure could back Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the nation’s religious fundamentalists into a corner and therefore ensure that the execution is carried out.
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By Joe Conason — The same conservatives sending Barack Obama love notes over the airwaves are likely to smear him from every angle if he secures the nomination. Obama says he is ready. Let’s hope so.
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AP photo / Mark J. Terrill
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Having just rebuffed a $42.1-billion offer from Microsoft, Yahoo Inc. has another suitor: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Although Murdoch is rich, he’s not Bill Gates rich, and MySpace, which is supposed to entice Yahoo into the deal, is so 2007. Murdoch detractors, therefore, should take pause, but not panic. The most popular news site on the Internet and Yahoo’s many other properties remain impartial, for now.
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By Barry Lando — The former “60 Minutes” producer laments the unfortunate tendency to treat any criticism of Israel as an attack on the Jewish people and a denial of their past suffering.
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By Elliot D. Cohen — It’s not enough for George W. Bush’s government to eavesdrop on phone calls, monitor financial transactions and sneak a peek at other people’s e-mails. Now the administration says it needs to monitor all Internet activity in the United States. That means you and everything you do online.
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AP photo / Mizzima News
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By Sarah Stillman — Remember when the world turned its attention to Burma and promised to no longer ignore the suffering of the people there? Truthdig contributor Sarah Stillman sat down with Burmese democracy organizer Maung Maung to check in on the Saffron Revolution and the brave men and women who continue to resist oppression, whether anyone is watching or not.
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npr.org
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America’s intelligence czar, Mike McConnell, drops a few eyebrow-raisers in a new interview in The New Yorker. He admits he wants the ability to access all U.S. Internet traffic, and says of waterboarding: “Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”
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guardian.co.uk
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During a panel discussion at the annual consumer electronics show, representatives from NBC, Microsoft and AT&T made the case for filtering Internet content at the service provider level. The idea is to stop the movement of copyrighted material, but there is a large, scary implication: allowing the pipe owner to control what passes through.
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By Amy Goodman — On Dec. 18, the five commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission met in Washington, D.C., and, by a 3 to 2 vote, passed new regulations that would allow more media consolidation. This, despite the U.S. public’s increasing concern over the nation’s media being controlled by a few giant corporations.
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abcnews.com
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The Hillary Clinton campaign has secured two domain names for Web sites that will be devoted to attacking Barack Obama. A Clinton representative says negative sites are nothing new, but the Obama campaign says Clinton’s latest Internet efforts are “politically motivated attacks in the eleventh hour of a closely contested campaign.”
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Despite opposition from Congress and the public, the FCC has decided it’s in the nation’s best interest to relax decades-old ownership rules that prohibit media giants from owning newspapers and broadcasts outlets in the same local market. The idea behind the old rules, crazy as it sounds, is that it’s probably not a good thing to get all of your information from the same place. The FCC’s three Republicans and America’s media conglomerates disagree.
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original: thewe.cc
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It’s perhaps the biggest single-day take in campaign history: $6 million raised in one day by Ron Paul supporters not affiliated with the campaign. The so-called “money bomb” was scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.
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Freespeech.org has this entertaining take on the privatization of the Internet, a medium that was once public, open and collaborative, but has since been taken over by corporate juggernauts. It’s not something we all think about, but it wasn’t so long ago that the Internet was organized around information and education, as opposed to shopping.
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By Ellen Goodman — Pretty soon, we’re going have to amend the favorite mom and dad moniker of the moment. Those much vaunted helicopter parents are turning into black-helicopter parents. The image of parents hovering over their kids is morphing into the darker image of parents spying on their kids.
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By Elliot D. Cohen — The “Last Days of Democracy” author warns that Congress is about to aid the Bush administration with its Orwellian plans by granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications giants for helping the government spy on Americans.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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If you’re a Truthdig reader, chances are you’re also a BBC News reader. For 10 years now, the BBC has done an excellent job of bringing online news to the world. To celebrate, it has pulled together important online front pages from that period, ranging from the Clinton impeachment to 9/11 to the hanging of Saddam.
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By Ellen Goodman — The attention on Al Gore’s trajectory misses something about this second act and second actor. As he approaches 60, Gore’s staking out something of a new path for his generation.
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Paul Zanetti, Australia —
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Under pressure from Congress, Verizon has provided some insight into the government’s domestic surveillance program. The telecommunications giant defended the legality of its actions, but admitted complying “as expeditiously as possible” when federal officials, without a subpoena, asked for telephone and Internet records.
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By Ellen Goodman — Warren Jeffs, a polygamist prophet, is on trial for aiding in the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl he married off to her cousin. It’s a sad story featuring an abhorrent man, but something about the case just doesn’t feel right to Ellen Goodman.
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googlelunarxprize.org
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If you can build an intelligent robot that can land safely on the moon and send back HD video by 2012, Google will give you $20 million. The search giant has partnered with the X Prize Foundation, which organizes contests around major technological breakthroughs, for its lunar challenge.
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Beijing Public Security Ministry
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Web users in Beijing will soon have to deal with a new annoyance as part of China’s endless effort to control the Internet. By the end of the year, all websites registered with the government will feature animated Internet cops that will warn users to avoid forbidden content and offer friendly (if obnoxious) Internet security tips.
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By Andy Borowitz — The satirist writes that, in what some political observers are calling an ominous sign for his cash-starved White House bid, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., today posted his campaign bus, The Straight Talk Express, on the Internet auction site eBay.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Perhaps you missed it, but Wednesday was the 19th anniversary of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Limbaugh was celebrating his ripe old age, in media years, on the same week that liberal blog fans were trekking to Chicago for the YearlyKos convention. Therein lies one of the most important stories in American politics.
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wikipedia.org
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In a profile in the libertarian magazine Reason, the founder of Wikipedia explains how and why he launched the controversial site in order “to make the Internet not suck.” Turns out the plan is much bigger than just building a better encyclopedia and is based on the ideas of libertarian economist F.A. Hayek.
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Feel strongly about Net Neutrality? Want to keep the online realm as free of pesky gatekeepers as possible? SaveTheInternet.com says yes to the above and is leading a rally to remind the FCC to work for the American people—not big corporations.
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Because royalties for webcasters have been dramatically increased, many Internet radio sites have proclaimed Tuesday, June 26, a day of silence. A recent ruling held that starting July 15, Web-based broadcasters must pay triple for royalties.
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Internet radio has provided an eclectic and independent alternative to the mainstream hit-oriented, payola-ridden music marketplace, but industry greed now threatens to wipe out the medium. Truthdig checks in with Frannie Wellings of Free Press to find out whether Internet radio stands a chance and what music fans can do to save it.
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YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular websites will no longer be accessible via U.S. military computers. A military spokesman says the move is meant to address bandwidth issues, but it’s no secret the military has been less than thrilled with the content sometimes posted by soldiers. Service members with personal computers will be unaffected, free to visit the Pentagon’s own YouTube channel.
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Steve Kornacki, community outreach director of Unity08, the online independent party, speaks with Truthdig about his organization’s vision for a third way in the coming election, why our political system is broken and how he intends to fix it.
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The community outreach director of Unity08, the online independent party, speaks with truthdig about his organization’s vision for a third way in the coming election, why our political system is broken and how he intends to fix it.
Posted on May 1, 2007
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Voting closes at midnight tonight for the Webby People’s Voice awards. Truthdig has been nominated for three, in the categories of News, Politics, and Blog - Political. Click here to support Truthdig.
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musicsupervisioncentral.com
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By Aram Sinnreich — The Internet radio business changed suddenly on April 16, when the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board decided in favor of drastic hikes in the royalty fees that webcasters pay record labels to play their music. Pandora founder Tim Westergren (above) says this ruling could put an end to American internet radio as we know it.
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A human rights organization is suing Yahoo for assisting the Chinese government in arresting dissidents by providing information on its users. Like Google and Microsoft, Yahoo has defended the practice of handing over data to China as a necessary evil mitigated by the benefits of the Internet, crippled and corrupt though it may be.
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A deluge of tax procrastinators attempting to file electronically before the midnight deadline on Tuesday slowed the TurboTax servers to a crawl, causing wait times in the hours. A spokesman for the company that makes the popular tax preparation software said it was “absolutely amazing” how many people had waited until the last possible moment.
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siliconbeat.com
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Why worry about preventing the climate crisis when you can profit from it? An online gambling site received more than 3,000 bets in three days on whether or when major U.S. landmarks will be flooded. Most are banking on Manhattan being underwater by 2011.
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A couple of leading Internet personalities, including the creator of Wikipedia, have proposed a set of voluntary guidelines to help rein in the nastiness and abuse that can thrive in the blogosphere. Critics say the proposal would limit free expression, while supporters argue that “free speech is enhanced by civility.”
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By Ellen Goodman — Is Justice Ruth Ginsburg in poor health, or did she just lose a shoe? The answer depends on how quickly—and accurately—you get your news.
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Yet another court has ruled against the 1994 Child Online Protection Act, a major victory for civil rights advocates. The law has been a mess from the start. With the stated goal of protecting kids from pornography, it would punish offending websites with $50,000 fines and jail time for exposing children to “harmful” material, whether intentionally or not. Innocent sites like Salon and BoingBoing could’ve been targeted under the legislation.
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After calling on her vast army of supporters and contributors, it was only a matter of time before Arianna Huffington was able to identify Philip de Vellis as the creator of the wildly viral (and funny) anti-Hillary commercial everybody is talking about (watch after the jump). It turns out he worked for a firm employed by the Obama camp, though his boss swears he had nothing to do with the account.
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fcc.gov
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Jonathan Adelstein, one of five FCC commissioners, speaks with Truthdig about the battle to control America’s airwaves, the value of an open and fair Internet and his initial thoughts on the XM-Sirius merger.
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The popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which draws its content from countless anonymous contributions, will institute safeguards following revelations about the identity of one of its most industrious contributors. Ryan Jordan, under the name “Essjay,” wrote thousands of articles for the site while claiming to be a theology professor but was exposed by The New Yorker as a 24-year-old college dropout.
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Free-speech and human rights groups are decrying an Egyptian court’s decision to jail blogger Abdel Karim Suleiman for criticizing Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on his online forum. Critics and fellow bloggers fear Suleiman’s four-year sentence will set the stage for more arrests and fewer alternatives to state-controlled media outlets in his country.
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By Ellen Goodman — Politicians know all too well the impact the blogosphere can have on their careers, but bloggers themselves are discovering their words can come back to haunt them.
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View the most popular tags overall?
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Real American Boy: How Our Byzantine Immigration System and Failed Economy May Have Made a Terrorist
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