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)

Aug 25th, 2009 - As predicted, a number of cyberbullying laws were put into effect after the suicide of Megan Meier last fall, which left prosecutors unable to charge the Missouri woman who created a fake MySpace person to mock the 13-year-old girl with anything other than violating MySpace's terms of service. ... (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)

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 13th, 2009 - It launched in a flurry of controversy over privacy issues, but within weeks of going live the 118800 mobile phone online directory service has been suspended. Although the official reason for the, so far, 3 day unavailability of the website is being given as "undertaking major developments" to the... (Read More)

Feb 15th, 2009 - Although it is all too easy to think of Queen Elizabeth II, as being something of an old fart the truth is that Her Madge would appear to have one eye firmly on the future. Indeed, the thoroughly modern monarch can already be found broadcasting just like the Pope on her very own YouTube channel and... (Read More)

Jan 30th, 2009 - It looks like Encyclopaedia Britannica, for hundreds of years the first name you thought of when the word 'encyclopaedia' was mentioned until Wikipedia came along and kicked sand in its face, is about to change. Sure, EB has changed rather a lot since it first saw the light of day in 1768. Not... (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 18th, 2009 - Facebook, home of the 104 year old Frisbee Queen, would appear to have taken a disliking to large parts of Wales. You know, that rather lovely country which borders England and forms part of the United Kingdom. Wales even has a devolved Government in the Welsh Assembly, something the Welsh fought... (Read More)

Apr 21st, 2009 - A recent survey reckoned that, here in the UK at least, while 45 percent of the working population is female only 21 percent of the IT industry workforce can say the same. And this number seems to be falling, rather than increasing, year on year. I suspect, however, that the number of women taking... (Read More)

Jan 10th, 2009 - She has already been president of the British Computer Society and was the first feamle senior vice-president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton here in the UK, and sits on the Prime Ministerial Council for Science and... (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 28th, 2009 - Yesterday I blogged about a blogger who didn't seem to realise he'd become a de facto publisher by putting his stuff on the Internet. He'd taken someone to court over a comment they'd made on his blog and - understandably - the judge considered that if he hadn't felt strongly enough to remove the... (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)

Feb 24th, 2009 - If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you know I focus a lot on employment -- or lack thereof -- in the tech sector. I'm always on the lookout for ways IT professionals can get additional skills or enhance the ones they have, so I feel compelled to tell you about Microsoft's... (Read More)

Feb 18th, 2009 - As layoffs mount in every industry across the nation, there's no shortage of advice on how to avoid or cope with them. Suggestions range from taking some time off to catch your breath to jumping right back on the in the saddle after your last paycheck clears. It's difficult to know just who or... (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)

Jan 20th, 2009 - In the run-up to Inauguration Day, just about has been everyone speculating on what changes our newly-elected president will bring to the table. Naturally, we talk a lot around DaniWeb about how Obama's plans will affect the tech sector. As long as everyone else is making predictions and... (Read More)

Jan 6th, 2009 - A new study by Janco Associates, Inc. is full of gloom-and-doom about the state of employment in the IT industry. A year-long survey of U.S. and Canadian businesses indicates a combination of job outsourcing, layoffs, and other cost-cutting measures have led to the worst job market IT professionals... (Read More)

Feb 23rd, 2009 - Is there hope for stocks in 2009? At all? A University of Iowa business professor things so, and he claims he has the data to prove it. It’s all about upside potential – and the fact that Wall Street has already baked a lot of the bad news into the trading mix. Says Todd Houge,... (Read More)

Dec 10th, 2008 - The stock market held its gains of earlier today, although doubts about how financial companies are going to raise capital when their balance sheets are in complete disarray are prevalent on the street. The Dow was up 70 points and the Nasdaq up 18 points - thus providing some relative stability in... (Read More)

Dec 3rd, 2008 - It almost seems out of place – like a spritz of a lilly inching up through the crusted snow after a long winter – to report some good economic news these days. But there it is, in the form of an investment forecast by the investment bank UBS that says the U.S. stock market will rise, and... (Read More)

Dec 3rd, 2008 - Both the Dow and the Nasdaq are flirting with positive territory today, thanks in part to one biotechnology stalwart, Amgen, which is up three points in trading. Why? Well, the Street is getting excited about life sciences stocks again, as several research reports hit the street suggesting that... (Read More)