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By Robert Scheer
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti $22.95
$18
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 AP / Gene J. Puskar
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By Mark Heisler — Unfortunately, most people will insist they were the ones insisting this was a witch hunt all along, and believe it.
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 Flickr / UggBoy?UggGirl (CC-BY)
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That’s a big score for defenders of Internet freedom: On Friday, responding to strong public reactions and grass-roots campaigns, key members of the House and Senate put scheduled votes on the über-contentious SOPA and PIPA bills on ice.
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Manny Francisco, Cagle Cartoons, Manila, The Phillippines —
Posted on Jan 20, 2012
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 Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The great Internet switch-off; the ACLU vs. jailhouse abuse; S&P’s downgrade mania; Robert Scheer on the election, and Chris Hedges discusses his lawsuit against the president.
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The great Internet switch-off; the ACLU vs. jailhouse abuse; S&P’s downgrade mania; Robert Scheer on the election, and Chris Hedges discusses his lawsuit against the president.
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 Screen capture of Google.com
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By Amy Goodman — Wednesday, Jan. 18, marked the largest online protest in the history of the Internet. Websites from large to small “went dark” in protest of proposed legislation before the U.S. House and Senate that could profoundly change the Internet.
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To protest two pieces of legislation that threaten the free and open Internet as we know it, thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, are taking themselves offline. Others, including Google, are asking users to take action. (more)
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Twenty years ago, the celebrated director predicted that “some little fat girl in Ohio” and other amateur creators would help destroy “the so-called professionalism about movies” and usher in a new age of artistry.
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 ShardsOfBlue (CC-BY)
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The House Judiciary Committee, reviewing a proposal for a new law aimed at combating online piracy, suspended discussions Friday without setting a date to reconvene. The move pleased top Internet companies and others who warn that the bill could lead to a new age of censorship on the Web.
Posted on Dec 17, 2011
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Monte Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons —
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 Flickr / Gauldo
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As you may recall, a couple of years ago Facebook was caught making users’ personal information public without advance warning, suggesting a cavalier attitude toward the issue of privacy, putting it generously. Well, the Federal Trade Commission also treated the social networking giant generously, it turns out ... (more)
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 Felipe Kamakura (CC-BY)
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Something called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) could radically alter the way we share information and ideas online by empowering the FCC and a few corporations to give us what commentator Elliot Cohen explains would be our version of China’s Internet censorship.
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 Flickr/ Kevin Krejci (CC-BY)
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The year 1990 is calling with the exciting news that none other than MC Hammer has decided to reinvent himself as a Web entrepreneur. (And we really hope he gives webinars.) This story comes with the unexpected twist that instead of, say, making his distinctive mark in the domain of digital music ... (more)
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 AP / Paul Sakuma
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Here we have the latest news in the blossoming social networking subdiscipline of neurology, about which we are not entirely kidding, as a team of researchers from University College London has found a possible link between the size of their subjects’ flocks of Facebook friends and the size of certain parts of their brains. (more)
Posted on Oct 19, 2011
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 Alpha (CC-BY-SA)
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British Prime Minister David Cameron and four of the country’s Internet service providers are bending over backwards to accommodate parents concerned with the allegedly corrosive influence of titillating adverts and porn sites on youth, because teenagers never thought about sex before billboards were invented. (more)
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 Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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According to Google’s data, “4 of the top 10 cities with the most searches for [Herman Cain] are major cities right in Texas.” Those would be Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. (more)
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The Occupy Wall Street protests are making more than just a splash; LGBT activists join the Occupy Wall Street protests to assert their rights; meanwhile, a secret panel places Americans on a “kill list.” These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Oct 8, 2011
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 Flickr / derekGavey (CC-BY)
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Since sometime in 2008, more than 12 million computers around the world have been infected by a highly encrypted “worm,” or self-updating type of malware called Conficker, that allows remote access and control of a network of those computers, essentially creating the most powerful computer in the world.
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 Flickr / photosteve101
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The 2011 uprisings in the Arab world showed the Internet’s potential as a tool for both liberation and oppression. Protesters logged on to organize rallies that toppled dictators, while some leaders commandeered the Web to silence opposition. (more)
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 Flickr / planetc1 (CC-BY-SA)
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Amazon.com struck a deal with California on online sales taxes Friday, agreeing to create thousands of jobs in exchange for a one-year reprieve from collecting state sales taxes. (more)
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 Flickr / Dana Spiegel
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Days after two British men were sentenced to four years in prison for using Facebook to incite disorder that never materialized, Glenn Greenwald writes fluently and concisely about the efforts of governments to maintain power and order by controlling the flow of information and communication online.
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 Illustration by Peter Z. Scheer
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By Mark Heisler — For the last 32 years, I had been “Mark Heisler of the Los Angeles Times.” Before that, “Mark Heisler of the Philadelphia Bulletin” or “Mark Heisler of Somewhere” since June 1, 1967, when Gannett hired me at $125 a week. Suddenly, I was just “Mark Heisler.” Who in the hell was Mark Heisler?
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 kodomut (CC-BY)
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By David Sirota — From warrantless wiretapping to ever-present surveillance cameras, our world is right now in the midst of a long war on anonymity.
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 Enrique Dans (CC-BY)
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Remember, remember the fifth of November 2011. That’s the day hactivist collective Anonymous plans to “kill” the second-busiest website on the Internet “for the sake of your own privacy.” In a video message, Anonymous warns that “you are not safe from them [Facebook] nor from any government” to which the social networking website feeds information. (more)
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 Ruthanne Reid (CC-BY)
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How did Borders go from being the nation’s second-biggest brick-and-mortar book chain to a bitter memory? Apparently the book, music and coffee peddler, which we can only assume bankrupted plenty of mom-and-pop stores in its day, charged ahead blindly when customers went looking for better deals online. And now 11,000 people are out of a job. (more)
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Former MoveOn.org Executive Director Eli Pariser (a name you may recognize from your inbox) explains how sites such as Facebook and Google are quietly creating a personalized Internet that removes content that may be challenging, uncomfortable or important.
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The Zapatistas in Mexico mobilize against the drug war; the AOL-HuffPo merger is starting to lose its charm; and Google’s Internet monopoly is threatened by Facebook. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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 damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/
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In a curious case of scrambled online identities, a 40-year-old American man has been outed as the writer of an attention-grabbing blog by the name of A Gay Girl in Damascus, which was supposedly written by a Syrian-American lesbian.
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Nate Beeler, Cagle Cartoons, The Washington Examiner —
Posted on Jun 12, 2011
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 Wikimedia Commons / aphrodite-in-nyc (CC-BY)
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Busting purveyors and consumers of unsanctioned online music circulation (aka piracy) has typically been the heavy-handed tack taken by record labels and other industry players, but one British outfit, Web Sheriff, prefers kid gloves. (more)
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 Facebook
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Regulators in the U.S. and Europe are concerned about a new Facebook feature that uses face-recognition software to “tag” users in their friends’ photos. (more)
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 Pete Simon (CC-BY)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Do we really need to encourage politicians to limit their thoughts to 140 characters or make them think we want the same details about their lives that we expect from pop stars and marquee athletes?
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 United Nations
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Months after the start of the uprisings that are roiling the Middle Eastern and Arabic world, the United Nations has recognized the essential role the Internet plays in human aspirations, deeming unhampered Internet availability a basic human right. (more)
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 Flickr/konszvi (CC-BY-SA)
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So you go online and noodle around, and if you’re like many other Internet users, you “Like” things on Facebook, buy some stuff and perhaps use Gmail. Somewhere in there, the little gnomes from Google and other data-gathering superpowers cobble together your cyber-profile.
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 Flickr/dyashman
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Hard manual labor is one time-honored method of putting prisoners to work, but Chinese jail bosses have caught on to another lucrative way to keep inmates occupied while lining their own pockets: online gaming.
Posted on May 26, 2011
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 webbyawards.com
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We’re ever so happy and humbled to announce that Truthdig has once again been picked as one of the five finalists for the Webby Award in the “Blog - Political” category! This year, the competition is formidable, with some serious heavy hitters ...
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 Flickr / wallyg
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With murmurs of a veto in the background, Republicans successfully pushed a measure through the U.S. House rejecting the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules for Internet service providers.
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The GOP begins to roll back Wall Street reform, college graduates are snubbing law school, and Washington’s pro-nuke consensus. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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 Graph by m86security.com
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Rustock, the world’s largest spam e-mail network, has been disabled by a coordinated action between Microsoft and the FBI, effectively reducing worldwide spam by up to a whopping 39 percent.
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 nytimes.com
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Let’s try this again, shall we? The New York Times has experimented in the past with the idea of charging for content, and starting later this month the Grey Lady is launching a new pay-to-play plan and squirreling most of what’s fit to print behind a firewall.
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 Daniel Erwin (CC-BY)
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In the age of oversharing, we take it for granted that our every status is up to date and hanging out for all to see. Privacy, we are told, is dead. But over in Europe, they have crazy new laws that actually restrict how businesses stalk us online. Communists.
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The Google executive who helped organize the Egyptian uprising compares the movement to Wikipedia, with many individuals contributing in their own ways.
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 Illustration from Mr. T in DC
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By Derek Lazzaro — Apparently having learned nothing from its failure to rein in Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and the rest, Congress is pushing to deregulate Internet service providers.
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 AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Chris Hedges — The sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, and the tidy profit made by principal owner and founder Arianna Huffington, who was already rich, is emblematic of the new paradigm of American journalism.
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 Flickr / Dan Edelstein
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House Republicans have succeeding in amending a spending bill to deny the FCC money to implement new (and heavily gutted) network neutrality regulations. That’s right: banning a government agency from using government money to do government work.
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 The Official CTBTO Photostream (CC-BY)
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Thanks to a new undersea cable linking the island nation to Venezuela, Cuba will get a 3,000-fold boost in its information bandwidth. As Read Write Web’s Curt Hopkins points out, the project indicates how valuable the Internet is, even to a country that has serious blogging anxiety.
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 USDA
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The former U.S. Department of Agriculture official is suing conservative webmaster Andrew Breitbart for defamation. Sherrod was forced to resign after Breitbart posted a heavily edited video of a speech she gave, setting off a right-wing hullabaloo.
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Wael Ghonim is Google’s chief of marketing in the Middle East and North Africa. He is also one of the driving forces behind the Egypt uprising. Ghonim was called a hero by opposition groups for using Facebook, Twitter and his technical expertise and connections to help organize the movement ... (more)
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In this TED talk, Johanna Blakley of USC argues that “there is an upside to having your taste monitored” online. Rather than pigeonhole you in a demographic prison, the people who make entertainment are paying more attention to what you actually like—especially if you’re a woman.
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