Aug 27th, 2009 - The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a ruling that not only threw out other cases, but has more broadly set a limit upon the use of data seized in a computer search. The ruling has to do with the "plain view" doctrine, which allows law enforcement to take steps to pursue a crime when the... (Read More)

Aug 26th, 2009 - As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, states were required to set up websites in a specific format to explain to citizens how the money was spent. The first look at how states have done has come out, and it isn't pretty. According... (Read More)

Jun 30th, 2009 - President Barack Obama's administration made two announcements Monday about improved transparency in government: one about IT projects in general, and one about improving broadband access. The announcements were made at the Personal Democracy Forum, in New York. Tuesday, White House Chief... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2009 - It's said that the Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. Maybe, but it barely survived the death of Michael Jackson. A series of web sites fell like dominoes as Boomers and GenXers raced to verify the truth of the Jackson death rumors yesterday. Twitter, Wikipedia, tmz.com,... (Read More)

Apr 18th, 2009 - The Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General has issued a report finding that the Rural Utilities Service continues to grant loans to areas that already have broadband service and to communities near major cities. For example, 77 percent of loans were said to have been made... (Read More)

Mar 16th, 2009 - "Most Americans can easily find videos of water skiing squirrels on the Internet, but they’ll have less luck finding out whether their children's school buses and classrooms are safe, or if neighborhood gas stations are overcharging," said the Sunshine Week 2009 Survey of State Government... (Read More)

Jan 24th, 2009 - A recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that even if broadband Internet is made more widely available in the U.S., 9% of adults said they aren't interested in switching from dial-up, and 25% of adults aren't on the Internet at all and are unlikely to change, according... (Read More)

Nov 28th, 2008 - 'Internet for Everyone' sounds like a laudable goal. Very Mom and apple pie. Who could be against that? The problem is that the name of an organization doesn't necessarily accurately depict what it's trying to do, and what Internet for Everyone is actually trying to do is far from clear -- and... (Read More)

Nov 22nd, 2008 - It seemed too good to be true: A Britax Marathon child car seat, the top rated seat from Consumer Reports, usually with a price tag of nearly $300, on sale at Target for $43, with free shipping. It was. The news spread like wildfire between members of the wired mommy community, and many... (Read More)

Oct 20th, 2008 - In recent weeks, both American Airlines and Delta Airlines have announced that their in-flight wireless Internet services will include a filtering service to keep passengers from viewing porn on their laptops. I admit it, I'm torn. Porn proponents such as Violet Blue, in the San Francisco... (Read More)

Sep 6th, 2008 - No sooner had the echoes of “Sarah *who*?” faded than the blogosphere was on the job, showing that even for an unknown person from a remote area, there was plenty of readily accessible information available – and not only perhaps doing a better job of vetting than the McCain campaign itself had... (Read More)

Sep 2nd, 2008 - If you were one of the just seven people in the first half of the year who went to the Washington State Department of Transportation web page using free wifi from the rest areas along its highways, you're out of luck -- the state dropped the little-used service as of September 1. The state... (Read More)

Aug 26th, 2008 - A website purporting to encourage improved broadband Internet access in the U.S. runs the risk of undercutting its argument by playing games with statistics. www.speedmatters.org, a project of the Communications Workers of America, has released its second survey of broadband Internet speeds in... (Read More)

Aug 24th, 2008 - Both the Democratic and Republican national conventions -- scheduled for next week and the following week, respectively -- will feature major roles for bloggers, giving them the same access as traditional press. Hundreds of bloggers are slated to attend the Democratic convention in Denver -- 500... (Read More)

Aug 6th, 2008 - It's been a long-running joke that Republicans don't understand technology, what with United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) trying to describe the Internet as a "series of tubes" and President George W. Bush referring to "the Internets." However, a new generation of Republicans is not... (Read More)

Aug 1st, 2008 - If you sent out a Twitter or email message after Tuesday's Southern California earthquake, you had a lot of company. As is typical in technology-heavy California, the moderate earthquake generated a following seismic wave of Internet messages of people checking in with each other. In fact, one... (Read More)

Aug 10th, 2009 - With the investigation into the death of Michael Jackson still ongoing, and claims over the paternity of Paris Jackson hitting the headlines with the involvement of the chap who rose to fame as Oliver in the film way back when and then plummeted to obscurity, you might think that it would be pretty... (Read More)

Jul 6th, 2009 - Over the last year, Microsoft ads have been simply bad on one end of the spectrum and horrible on the other. It's really time for the company to reconsider their ad agency choices and their overall strategy because right now they are throwing good money after bad. I had one friend who described the... (Read More)

Jun 29th, 2009 - In the final days of a failing model, old media made one last futile attempt to save its fading way of life by trying to expand copyright law to exclude fair use and linking. Just this morning, my DaniWeb colleague, Sharon Fisher wrote a post called This Blog Post Could Be Illegal. Seems... (Read More)

Mar 30th, 2009 - Video killed the radio star. Pictures came and broke your heart. ~Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star It turns out the old song was wrong. Video didn't kill the radio star and the internet didn't kill the newspaper industry. It was a failure to embrace new technology, to believe they could... (Read More)

Dec 21st, 2008 - The time has come to drag the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) kicking and screaming into the 21st century because it clearly has a lot to learn about marketing on the internet. The RIAA had a good news/bad news announcement on Friday. The good news was that it would stop... (Read More)

May 4th, 2009 - The UK Government's communications agency GCHQ has issued a rare statement saying it has no plans to monitor every individual's emails. Instead, the Home Secretary says we should all be ready to have our ISPs record all our Internet contacts. I've met a few ISPs. They're going to be delighted, nay,... (Read More)

Mar 10th, 2009 - Many UK participants in Daniweb will be aware of the various social media that carry music. They will have been delighted by the free stuff that you can listen to on Last.FM, Spotify and YouTube - you can even get the Beatles on YouTube, which is pretty much unique among online providers. Except... (Read More)

Mar 3rd, 2009 - It's official - the regulators are not going to stop British Telecom from going ahead with putting faster Internet in throughout the UK as long as it's financially viable. Some non-UK readers might wonder why the regulator had to get involved - it's because we have a strange and twisty history... (Read More)

Feb 26th, 2009 - It looks like common sense has broken out in New Zealand. There was a proposal to allow people to cut off customers completely when they were suspected of flouting copyright laws. Now that appears to be on hold. I hope it won't come back. Let's be honest, I don't like people who flout... (Read More)

Feb 26th, 2009 - A belated word about last week's Facebook fiasco, if I may. You might remember the company aroused all sorts of excitement when it changed its terms and conditions to allow itself rights in perpetuity to images on its servers. The BBC had a social media expert in to explain how the company was... (Read More)

Feb 24th, 2009 - Many people will have seen the report on Digital Britain and what our Government wants from it in the relatively near future. Everyone to have fast broadband (good idea but not necessarily affordable), more Government services to be available online, that sort of thing. There's a discussion and... (Read More)

Feb 6th, 2009 - I was initially pleased to see that Microsoft is going to start offering a Fix-it system which you can download from the Web. You have a computer problem, then assuming you can still get at the Internet you go onto Microsoft's pages, download this new fix-it thing and it will address whichever... (Read More)

Feb 3rd, 2009 - Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Once upon a time, there was a newspaper in the UK. It had an editor, it had employees, it had stories, like any other newspaper. Then it grew a website. One day, presumably someone made someone on the web side very unhappy. We will never know... (Read More)

Feb 2nd, 2009 - I can't imagine the issue is of much interest outside the UK (although I see the New York Times is having a laugh at our expense, understandably) but it's been snowing a bit in London. This will become important in a minute, bear with me. I should explain that in London we don't get much... (Read More)

Jan 16th, 2009 - It's true, Elvis Presley's birthplace and I are complete strangers. But if I had been there, or better still if I were planning to visit, I hope I wouldn't say anything overtly insulting about the place. Unlike, say, James Andrews, VP of Ketchum PR. He seems to have embarrassed himself terribly. ... (Read More)

Dec 30th, 2008 - An interesting report from the BBC this morning suggests that smartphone sales will decline worldwide except in developing nations over the coming 12 months. Well, duh. It's been known for a while at least in the UK that there are now actually more handsets than there are people. And as the... (Read More)

Oct 24th, 2008 - This is possibly going to be very badly timed. A lot of users are going to get very confused. Essentially in the UK we have a lot of free or very cheap Internet services. We also have a lot of people - Apple, the BBC, many media providers - offering us rich media experiences through the Web. ... (Read More)

Sep 26th, 2008 - ...with the idea that the world is coming crashing down around our shoulders, particularly with IT stocks falling and banks making tech staff redundant, let's have a think about one particular story. The EU is going to try to get broadband to every house on the continent from which I am writing... (Read More)

Sep 17th, 2008 - This is a strange one. Forgive me for bringing the subject up but airline staff are asking that their providers restrict the sites people can look at when they're flying. Essentially they're asking that people shouldn't look at porn while they're serving coffee, and funnily enough some of the... (Read More)

Aug 12th, 2008 - Here's an interesting one for anyone involved in an online trading community. There are increasing moves afoot to make the communities themselves, whether we're talking about eBay, Amazon's second hand scheme or whatever we're thinking about, responsible for what they sell. In other words, if... (Read More)

Jul 24th, 2008 - The fact that the UK's Internet providers are doing something about illegal downloads of music is of course to be welcomed in principle. Whenever the subject comes up there are a handful of objections; civil liberties, the Internet should be free, whatever, the objectors seem to come from... (Read More)

Feb 2nd, 2009 - From angry customers to irate CIOs, service outages are an IT nightmare to be avoided at all costs. It's impossible to prevent them entirely, so post-mortem assessment is critical to understanding how to minimize their impact in the future. While not strictly a service "outage," Google's search... (Read More)

Dec 2nd, 2008 - An new study by London-based Deloitte and the Cranfield School of Management validates what CIOs have known all along: "You're out of the loop, and when we want your opinion we'll tell you what it is." CIOs are caught in a tough situation right now. Technology is emerging at a lightening pace... (Read More)

Nov 23rd, 2008 - Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC technology Correspondent, is apparently the most visible person online in the UK according to the latest MostPublic Index due to be published tomorrow. The NowPublic network, which acts as a detailed barometer of whose voices are the most heard in the digital... (Read More)