This of course raises the question, are you the telecom’s customer, or their product? The New York Times reports: The C.I.A. is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist…
Telecommunication
Red Pepper on Cybersyn, an ingenious proto-internet largely unknown outside of a cult following: The pioneering cybernetic planning work of the Chilean leader, his ministers and a British left-wing operations research scientist…
Ah, a world wide web, it was a beautiful dream while it lasted. Talking Points Memo writes: Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a…
Time to start the internet over with? New Scientist reports on the burgeoning world of meshnets: The internet is neither neutral nor private, in case you were in any doubt. So some…
What would you do with your own community radio station? It’s your chance to snap one up this fall! Nation of Change writes: The FCC has just released free applications for thousands…
Via Common Dreams, political cartoonist Ted Rall foresaw exactly where we would be today in a piece written in 2006: Several months ago employees of Verizon, the company that enjoys a monopoly…
Since April, under a secret court order, Verizon has been providing the government daily with details of every phone call made by U.S. customers on its network, Glenn Greenwald reports in the…
The BBC on those who believe that radio and tape recording devices offer a window to the realm of the dead: In 1969, a mysterious middle-aged Latvian doctor turned up in Gerrards Cross…
A dose of strange history via BLDGBLOG: Project Sanguine was a U.S. Navy program from the 1980s that “would have involved 41 percent of Wisconsin,” turning that state into a giant “antenna…
TIME on the possibility that we are oblivious to extraterrestrial messages shining right down onto us: Lucianne Walkowicz wants to conduct a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), not by doing anything so…
When your viewing a website is blocked due to censorship, should your internet service provider should inform you? A 403 or 404 error code amounts to lying, argues Terance Eden. Some have…
To stay positive, think of it as the creation of a giant quilted tapestry, weaving together everything anyone in the country says or does. Via the Washington Post: British authorities on Thursday…
It seems like a very egalitarian, Scandinavian approach to divine pronouncements. No matter whom you are, you may dial the number and hear your voice echo across the land. Via Unsworn Industries:…
Curious how long your cell phone company holds onto to data regarding what you’ve been doing with your phone? AT&T/Cingular will preserve your text and call detail records for 5-7 years. The…
On the internet you can be whomever you wish to be — it gets truer every day. In the future, when video-chatting, the first step will be to pick which face you want to use:
New York Republican Peter King has made national headlines in 2011 with his congressional hearings on the (dis)loyalties of Muslim-Americans. However, that is not the only trouble he has been stirring up….
Lightspeed Magazine has a fun rundown of humanity’s historical efforts to send space transmissions to whatever intelligent life might be out there. The whole endeavor is slightly desperate and pathetic — “The…
In the past few weeks, we’ve seen a number of national governments shut off internet access in attempts to quash dissent. PC World has a guide on how to access the web…
In an article for the Atlantic, Andrew Blum points out that recent events in Egypt have reminded us of something oft forgotten: the networks that comprise the Internet are connected physically, and…
Beginning tomorrow, anyone who wants to communicate a message to the people of New York City may do so by calling 979-997-3041. His or her voice will be blared out of a…
Just in case mahrams, or male guardians, in Saudi Arabia needed a shorter leash. If you’re a man in Saudi and are worried about your woman leaving the country, well, there’s an…