19 Hours Ago - We're already heard about people being fired for calling in sick and then posting on Facebook. Now a woman has lost her insurance. According to CBCNews, Nathalie Blanchard, 29, has been on leave from her job at IBM for the past year and a half after she was diagnosed with major depression.... (Read More)

2 Days Ago - Here's a switch. Instead of newspapers trying to protect the identities of the people posting to their websites, the newspaper is the one outing them. As described by editor Kurt Greenbaum of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, someone posted a vulgar word in the paper's online commenting system, and... (Read More)

21 Days Ago - Calling social media sites a "productivity black hole," the UK IT services group Morse said that staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year, according to the BBC. More than half those surveyed said they used social... (Read More)

28 Days Ago - Twitter, Inc., has shut down 33 fake Twitter accounts created by Republicans using the names of Democratic state representatives, but fake websites using the Democrats' names are still up. The story was reported in the Hartford Advocate, an alternative newsweekly. State Republican Chairman... (Read More)

33 Days Ago - The 2008 presidential election featured a new emphasis on using the Internet, ranging from raising money to advertising to getting support. It's still going on. Facebook, in particular, due to the ease in which people can set up affinity groups, is proving to be a new source of online activism,... (Read More)

Sep 30th, 2009 - GovLoop, an online social network for government workers that was started by a federal worker, has been sold to GovDelivery Inc., a venture-backed government communications platform, with GovLoop founder Steve Ressler as its head of social networking. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The... (Read More)

Sep 28th, 2009 - A poll on whether President Barack Obama should be assassinated, which was posted to Facebook on Saturday, has been taken down after an investigation by the Secret Service, according to NPR. The poll consisted of a single question: 'should obama be killed? ' with the choices yes, maybe, if he... (Read More)

Sep 21st, 2009 - In an attempt to build support for a bill that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress, the online gambling industry is running online ads noting that legal online gambling could raise $48 billion for the deficit-plagued U.S. government. "At a time when... (Read More)

Aug 3rd, 2009 - The Twitter Platform Team is recommending to all Twitter developers that they make sure their applications support 64-bit integers because the popular service has almost reached the limit of 32-bit unsigned integers. "Twitter status ids are fast approaching the maximum 32-bit *unsigned* integer... (Read More)

Aug 1st, 2009 - Convention and visitors bureaus -- perhaps more than 300 of them -- are increasingly using Twitter to help market their locations, and a recent study examined how they do that. Development Counsellors International, a New York-based tourism firm, said it looked at the convention and visitors... (Read More)

Jul 26th, 2009 - A recent panel sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) discussed the issue of gay characters in online games, some of which forbid them. Games produced by Bay Area-based Electronic Arts Inc., such as the Sims properties and Spore have no restrictions about revealing... (Read More)

Jul 9th, 2009 - It's said about writers that you should never get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. But United Airlines has learned not to get into fights with musicians who have videocameras. As Dave Carroll, of the folk-rock group Sons of Maxwell, reports on his blog, it all started on... (Read More)

Jul 1st, 2009 - It's been known for a while that current and potential future employers look at people's profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook. And it's also been known that people are using social networking sites to announce the status of their relationship -- or lack of one. Now the two... (Read More)

Jun 29th, 2009 - If Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, gets his way, blog postings like this one could be illegal. On his blog, Posner recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded. "Expanding copyright law to bar online access... (Read More)

4 Days Ago - A lawsuit over a website's publication of a celebrity threesome sex tape is provoking some thoughtful discussion about fair use. Not to mention giving PBS, NPR, and the New York Times the opportunity to talk about sex tapes. The tape consists of Grey's Anatomy actor Eric Dane and his wife... (Read More)

Oct 3rd, 2009 - A company that has been attempting to obtain licensing fees from adult companies, as well as other providers such as Internet radio stations and leading satellite and cable companies such Echostar, DirectTV, Time Warner Cable, and CSC Holdings, Inc., has had its patent thrown out by the U.S.... (Read More)

Sep 17th, 2009 - Far from being made superfluous by the Internet, a recent study by the American Library Association finds that the library is often the only source of free Internet access in a community. More than 71 percent of all libraries (and 79 percent of rural libraries) report they are the only source of... (Read More)

22 Days Ago - The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously earlier this week to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. The contract is worth $7.25 million and covers 30,000 employees. In June, Washington, D.C. made a similar decision, signing a contract... (Read More)

24 Days Ago - In addition to funding broadband projects in the states, particularly in rural areas, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, includes funds for collection of state-level broadband data, as well as state-wide broadband mapping and planning. The... (Read More)

27 Days Ago - Two groups are working to set up a .gay top-level Internet domain, with plans for using some of the proceeds for registering sites in that domain to support gay causes, according to an article in the New York Times. While it can cost up to $400,000 to set up a new top-level domain, companies... (Read More)

31 Days Ago - In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications... (Read More)

Aug 11th, 2009 - As feared, the Administration has caved to telecom industry restrictions on mapping the availability of broadband Internet, making it less likely that $7 billion in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, will actually help improve... (Read More)

26 Days Ago - The Associated Press reported this weekend that the official White House website has been switched to using the open-source Drupal content management system Using open source will result in improved security -- because more programmers will be looking for errors in the software -- as well as... (Read More)

Sep 29th, 2009 - In its ongoing effort to become the coolest city in the U.S., the mayor of Portland, Oregon, is going to attempt tomorrow night to make it an "open source city," making its data as open as possible while respecting privacy, and buying open source applications when possible. If passed by the City... (Read More)

32 Days Ago - The other day I was on Facebook and a chat window popped up from a college friend of mine. Bob: Hey there. How are u doing? Sharon: ok. you? Bob: Am not too good. Im in some kind of deep mess right now Sharon: uh oh. what happened? What "Bob" didn't know was that I was already suspicious... (Read More)

Sep 25th, 2009 - Idaho, where I live, likes to brag when it makes lists such as "best places to live," "best places to start a business," etc. Now we've made another list: we're the most spammed. According to MessageLabs, which was acquired by Symantec in November, the ten states with the highest percentage... (Read More)

Sep 22nd, 2009 - Remember Terry Childs? He was the network administrator for the city of San Francisco who -- claiming he was protecting the city government's computer system from incompetent coworkers -- changed the system's passwords and then for more than a week refused to give them to anyone, even after being... (Read More)

Sep 20th, 2009 - Two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have learned that it is possible to predict which men in social networks are gay, even if they aren't out, based on who their friends are. It's the theory behind traffic analysis, or the process of intercepting and examining messages to... (Read More)

Aug 29th, 2009 - What, you hadn't heard? "A Senate bill would offer President Obama emergency control of the Internet and may give him a "kill switch" to shut down online traffic by seizing private networks -- a move cybersecurity experts worry will choke off industry and civil liberties," FOX News said... (Read More)

Aug 10th, 2009 - Want to do a public records search on email messages from your state legislator? Chances are, you won't be able to, even with the recent move toward transparency in government. Even states that do have an email retention policy in state government -- and many of them don't -- often don't... (Read More)

Jul 28th, 2009 - A group of University of Washington students and professors has developed an application called Vanish that automatically makes data used with it disappear after eight to nine hours. The open-source software is downloadable now, as well as information about how to use it and a research paper... (Read More)

Jul 18th, 2009 - Some users discovered last week that Amazon has the capability to remove books from their Kindle electronic reading devices, even though they were bought, paid for, downloaded, and in the users' possession. Ironically, among the books with which this was discovered was George Orwell's 1984,... (Read More)

Jul 2nd, 2009 - Yahoo! announced this week that it would build what it said what would be the greenest, most energy-efficient data center in the world, powered by Niagara Falls. Data centers are some of the heaviest users of electrical power there are, both to run the servers themselves and to cool them. In... (Read More)

Aug 29th, 2009 - If you've used Facebook for more than, oh, five minutes, you've seen a Facebook quiz. "What Greek dance are you?" "Which NFL coach are you?" "Which Diplomacy country should you play?" and so on. (I forget every quiz I see, and I'm up to more than 250 by now.) But there's one quiz you might want... (Read More)

Jul 31st, 2009 - How transparent is too transparent? In an attempt to make it easier for ordinary people to see what their governments are spending their money on, more entities -- from city to federal -- are putting this information online, noting that it's a public record. But some government workers are... (Read More)

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)

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)

Jul 29th, 2009 - A company has been awarded a patent for providing episodic media downloads, which essentially gives it a patent on all forms of podcasting. The company, VoloMedia, calls itself the "leading provider of advertising and reporting solutions for portable media, extending the reach of video and audio... (Read More)