Internet

The World Conference on International Telecommunications kicked off Monday behind closed doors in Dubai to a chorus of opposition from corporations, governments and civil-liberties groups worldwide. The conference, organized by the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations body, will r...

The UN-sponsored World Conference on International Telecommunications, which will feature government regulators from 193 countries, opened Monday, prompting fears that the meeting could ultimately damage Internet freedom. The UN's International Telecommunications Union reportedly is trying to allay ...

The European Union announced on Friday that it would oppose attempts to increase regulation of the Internet at a United Nations conference that will take place next week in Dubai. This move comes as some countries have called for tighter rules on Web service providers and phone operators. The Intern...

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Syria's Internet Silence Enters Day 2

Internet and mobile phone service has been cut off throughout war-ravaged Syria. The Syrian government blamed terrorists for the outage. Activists, on the other hand, have warned that Internet and phone blackouts commonly precede military operations in isolated areas. The networking firm Renesys rep...

Germany's parliament on Thursday began discussing legislation that would allow the nation's news publishers to charge search engines for displaying links to, and snippets of, news articles. Before debate began, Google launched a very public campaign on its German site asking the public to oppose the...

TECH TREK

Chinese Media Accuse Cisco of Lax Security

China's state-run media could be in the early stages of a wave of attacks against U.S. telecommunications giant Cisco. A pair of Chinese media outlets -- China Economy and Informatization and the Caijing National Weekly -- reportedly singled out Cisco on the same day, calling for the company to be i...

The End of the Printing Press?

Electronic communications are reshaping personal life, and may right now be causing the rapid demise of print. Media academics know well the theories of Marshall McLuhan. He came up with the phrase "the medium is the message," and the term "global village," among other juicy contributions to our com...

On Cyber Money -- the Super Bowl, if you will, of online shopping -- U.S. authorities seized some 130 domain names in several countries to prevent them from selling counterfeit merchandise. This is the third straight year authorities have launched a Cyber Monday counterfeit crackdown. Websites selli...

As many as 10,000 Twitter users in the United Kingdom face the threat of legal action because of their tweets regarding recent sexual abuse allegations. The tweeters could be in trouble because of comments -- either posted to Twitter or forwarded to other people -- in which they refer to a BBC repor...

Mozilla has made its Web browser more social -- and more secure -- with the release of Firefox 17. The latest version of the foundation's popular browser includes a plug-in that displays notifications and instant messages from Facebook in a sidebar. The plug-in is the first implementation of the Soc...

"GUYS, young people like to hang out in groups, and The Times is ON IT." So goes The Times Is On It, the latest parody account to take Twitter by storm. Creator Benjamin Kabak's running joke is on The New York Times for its breathless reporting of everything obvious. On Monday, though, @NYTOnIt sudd...

The committee reviewing applications for new top-level domains has publicized more than 250 objections to dozens of them, along with the reasons behind the responses. The Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers' Government Advisory Committee, which represents about 50 governments worldwide...

Legendary Australian rock band AC/DC, which had long been queasy about digital formats, has released its music on Apple's iTunes store. AC/DC previously asserted that it wouldn't make individual songs available digitally because each song was part of an album. And the band didn't want to break its...

File-Sharing's Cloudy Future

Last month Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who is facing charges in the United States for engaging in digital piracy, announced that he would relocate a new version of his site, Me.ga, outside the United States. The belief was that this would free him from coming under fire by U.S. law enforcement, b...

Lytro, the new darling of the digital photography world, has added a perspective shift feature and nine filters to create effects in Living Pictures. The software update will be available on Dec. 4, and will work even for photos previously taken. Because the Lytro camera captures a wealth of inform...

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