Social Transmission and Viral Culture, by Jonah Berger, assistant professor of Marketing and Katherine L. Milkman, assistant professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

News release: "Microsoft Corp. and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced an agreement that will offer individual researchers and research groups selected through NSF's merit review process free access to advanced cloud computing resources. By extending the capabilities of powerful, easy-to-use PC applications via Microsoft cloud services, the program is designed to help broaden research capabilities, foster collaborative research communities, and accelerate scientific discovery. Projects will be awarded and managed by NSF. More details about funding opportunities are available here."

Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults: "Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application."

"Within a single generation, digital media and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialize and even conduct war. But is the technology moving faster than we can adapt to it? And is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we've gained? In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world. Continuing a line of investigation she began with the 2008 FRONTLINE report Growing Up Online, award-winning producer Rachel Dretzin embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations. "I'm amazed at the things my kids are able to do online, but I'm also a little bit panicked when I realize that no one seems to know where all this technology is taking us, or its long-term effects," says Dretzin."

Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, February 2, 2010

News release: Arab States define key ICT development priorities Broadband, digital broadcasting, open source software, Arab digital content and cybersecurity are main objectives. "The Arab States Regional Preparatory Meeting (RPM) for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) World Telecommunication Development Conference 2010 (WTDC-10) concluded on Tuesday, 19 January in Damascus, Syrian Arab Republic, with delegates reaching consensus on regional strategies to foster the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs)."

• Information Society Statistical Profiles 2009: Arab States - "Over the past decade, the Arab States region has made significant progress when it comes to ICT access and use. In the mobile market, a number of national operators have expanded their services to customers across and beyond the region. Mobile telephony has grown at an annual rate of 55 per cent, reaching a penetration level of 63 per cent at the end of 2008. There are now 16 Internet users per 100 inhabitants, compared to only 4 in 2003. Nevertheless, compared to other regions, Internet usage, and particular broadband access, is still rather limited and out of the reach of most people in the region, in particular those living in rural areas."
  
• See also Presentation, Information Society Statistical Profiles 2009 Arab States, Damascus, Syria, 17-19 January 2010

News release: "McAfee, Inc. revealed [at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010] the staggering cost and impact of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure such as electrical grids, oil and gas production, telecommunications and transportation networks. A survey of 600 IT security executives from critical infrastructure enterprises worldwide showed that more than half (54%) have already suffered large scale attacks or stealthy infiltrations from organized crime gangs, terrorists or nation-states. The average estimated cost of downtime associated with a major incident is $6.3 million per day. The report, In the Crossfire: Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyberwar, commissioned by McAfee and authored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), also found that the risk of cyberattack is rising. Despite a growing body of legislation and regulation, more than a third of IT executives (37%) said the vulnerability of their sector had increased over the past 12 months and two-fifths expect a major security incident in their sector within the next year. Only 20% think their sector is safe from serious cyberattack over the next five years."

OPNAV NOTICE 5400, January 11, 2010: "Action will establish U. S. Fleet Cyber Command as an echelon II command to serve as the Navy Component Commander to United States Cyber Command upon its establishment. Interim reporting will be to United States Strategic Command. Command will provide for operational employment of the Navy's cyber, network operations, information operations, cryptologic and space forces, and serve as the Navy's Service Cryptologic Component Commander to the National Security Agency. U.S. Tenth Fleet. will be re-commissioned to control operations supporting U. S. Fleet Cyber Command.

Christian Science Monitor: "At least three US oil companies were the target of a series of previously undisclosed cyberattacks that may have originated in China and that experts say highlight a new level of sophistication in the growing global war of Internet espionage. The oil and gas industry breaches, the mere existence of which has been a closely guarded secret of oil companies and federal authorities, were focused on one of the crown jewels of the industry: valuable “bid data” detailing the quantity, value, and location of oil discoveries worldwide, sources familiar with the attacks say and documents obtained by the Monitor show. The companies – Marathon Oil, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips – didn’t realize the full extent of the attacks, which occurred in 2008, until the FBI alerted them that year and in early 2009. Federal officials told the companies proprietary information had been flowing out, including to computers overseas, a source familiar with the attacks says and documents show. The data included e-mail passwords, messages, and other information tied to executives with access to proprietary exploration and discovery information, the source says."

Kaiser Family Foundation resource links: "With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours. The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today. And because of media multitasking, the total amount of media content consumed during that period has increased from 8:33 in 2004 to 10:45 today.

News release: "Astronauts aboard the International Space Station received a special software upgrade this week - personal access to the Internet and the World Wide Web via the ultimate wireless connection. Expedition 22 Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer made first use of the new system Friday, when he posted the first unassisted update to his Twitter account, @Astro_TJ, from the space station. Previous tweets from space had to be e-mailed to the ground where support personnel posted them to the astronaut's Twitter account. "Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s" This personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, takes advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and gives astronauts the ability to browse and use the Web. The system will provide astronauts with direct private communications to enhance their quality of life during long-duration missions by helping to ease the isolation associated with life in a closed environment."

News release: "comScore, Inc. today released a study on growth in the global search market in 2009. The study revealed that the U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google Sites retains a commanding position in the global search market...The total worldwide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute. The U.S. represented the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, or approximately 17 percent of searches conducted globally. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Among the top ten global search markets, Russia posted the highest gains in 2009, growing 92 percent to 3.3 billion, followed by France (up 61 percent to 5.4 billion) and Brazil (up 53 percent to 3.8 billion)."

Global Risks 2010 - A Global Risk Network Report. A World Economic Forum Report in collaboration with Citi, Marsh & McLennan Companies (MMC), Swiss Re, Wharton School Risk Center, Zurich Financial Services. January 2010.

Follow up to previous posting, FAA Issues Special New Security Regs for Boeing Model 787, see Federal Aviation Administration, Special Conditions: Boeing Model 747–8/–8F Airplanes, Systems and Data Networks Security—Protection of Airplane Systems and Data Networks From Unauthorized External Access - Federal Register: January 15, 2010 (Volume 75, Number 10)][Rules and Regulations][Page 2433-2434]:

A Perfect Storm Brewing: Budget Cuts Threaten Library Services at Time of Increased Demand, January 2010.

News release: " The Justice Department today announced separate agreements under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City and Reed College in Portland, Ore., regarding the use in a classroom setting of the electronic book reader, the Kindle DX, a hand-held technological device that simulates the experience of reading a book. Under the agreements reached today, the universities generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device."

Four in ten seniors go online, by Susannah Fox, Jan 13, 2010: "As of December 2009, 38% of U.S. adults age 65 and older go online, a significantly lower rate of internet adoption than the general population (74%) and even the next-oldest group (70% of adults age 50-64 years old go online). In addition, just 26% of U.S. adults age 65 and older have home broadband access, compared with 56% of adults age 50-64 years old (and 60% of all adults)."

Annual Report PandaLabs 2009

The New York Review of Books - Who's in Big Brother's Database? By James Bamford - The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the, National Security Agency, by Matthew M. Aid, Bloomsbury.

Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is closing a grant program that financed a series of high-profile university software projects, leaving some worried about a vacuum of support for open-source ventures. Mellon’s decade-old Research in Information Technology program, or RIT, helped bankroll a catalog of freely available software that includes Sakai, a course-management system used by Stanford University and the University of Michigan; Kuali, a financial-management program recently rolled out at Colorado State University; and Zotero, a program for managing research sources used by millions."

Updated Demographics for Internet, Broadband and Wireless Users, January 5, 2010

• "74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the internet -- a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. At that time we found that 79% of English-speaking adults use the internet.
  
• 60% of American adults use broadband connections at home -- a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% found in April 2009.
  
• 55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through a handheld device like a smart phone. This figure did not change in a statistically significant way during 2009."

Latinos Online, 2006-2008: Narrowing the Gap - "From 2006 to 2008, internet use among Latino adults rose by 10 percentage points, from 54% to 64%. In comparison, the rates for whites rose four percentage points, and the rates for blacks rose only two percentage points during that time period. Though Latinos continue to lag behind whites, the gap in internet use has shrunk considerably. For Latinos, the increase in internet use has been fueled in large part by increases in internet use among groups that have typically had very low rates of internet use."

News release: "Nearly 60,000 books prized by historians, writers and genealogists, many too old and fragile to be safely handled, have been digitally scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project [which is called Digitizing American Imprints] of the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC), the world’s largest library. Anyone who wants to learn about the early history of the United States, or track the history of their own families, can read and download these books for free...digitized books can be accessed through the Library’s catalog Web site and the Internet Archive (IA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free online digital library."

TIME - 50 Best Websites 2009: "50 offerings that are indispensable to navigating, enjoying yourself, shopping or just killing time on the Web."

Forbes: "If people can read this story a millennium from now, they may have Tadahiro Kuroda to thank. Kuroda, an electrical engineering professor at Keio University in Japan, has invented what he calls a "Digital Rosetta Stone," a wireless memory chip sealed in silicon that he says can store data for 1,000 years. As technology changes, storage goes stale. Can your computer read your old 51/4-inch floppies? Data typically has to be put on new storage systems every 20 years or less for it to be accessible. The digital migration costs time and money. Storing and maintaining a digital master of a very high-resolution movie, for example, costs $12,500 a year; archiving a standard film costs $1,000 a year."

"A new Harris Poll finds that adult Internet users are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online. Of course, people's usage varies greatly; one in five (20%) of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week while one in seven (14%) are spending 24 or more hours a week online. These are a few of the results of a Harris Poll of 2,029 adults surveyed by telephone between July 7 and 12 and October 13 and 18, 2009 by Harris Interactive. Over the years the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. In 2007, it increased to 11 hours. Last year (in October after the financial crisis broke and before the presidential election) Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002."

Pew Research Center - Current Decade Rates as Worst in 50 Years: "As the current decade draws to a close, relatively few Americans have positive things to say about it. By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years. This stands in stark contrast to the public’s recollection of other decades in the past half-century. When asked to look back on the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, positive feelings outweigh negative in all cases...There are a number of recent changes and trends that are viewed favorably. In particular, the major technological and communications advances are viewed in an overwhelmingly positive light."

News release: "In the EU27, 65% of households had access to the internet during the first quarter of 2009, compared with 60% during the first quarter of 2008, and 56% had a broadband internet connection in 2009, compared with 49% in 2008. The se data published by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, represent only a small part of the results of a survey on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) usage in households and by individuals in the EU27 Member States, the candidate countries, Norway, Iceland and Serbia. As well as internet use and broadband connections, the survey also covers other indicators such as e-shopping, e-government and advanced communication and content related services."

News release: "A new booklet released today by the Federal Trade Commission and other government agencies helps parents and teachers steer kids safely through the online and mobile phone worlds. Net Cetera: Chatting with Kids About Being Online was unveiled...by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski."

Mercurynews.com, Facebook releases first-ever demographic look at users: "Illustrating the growing diversity of online users as the Internet matures, a study by Facebook researchers found that about 11 percent of the social network's approximately 100 million U.S. members were African-American, about 9 percent were Latino and 6 percent were Asian, according to a post on Facebook's blog Wednesday evening — a much higher share for blacks and Latinos than four years ago."

Texting More Than Doubles in the Last Year: "How r u? The way we communicate is rapidly evolving, as evidenced by the fact that the number of text messages sent on cell phones has more than doubled from 48 billion in December 2007 to 110 billion in December 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010. The Statistical Abstract, aka “Uncle Sam’s Almanac,” perennially the federal government’s best-selling reference book, has been published since 1878 — before automobiles, airplanes and motion pictures had even been invented. Contained in the 129th edition are more than 1,400 tables of social, political and economic facts which collectively describe the state of our nation and the world. Included are 53 new tables, covering topics such as worldwide space launch events this decade, the use of complementary and alternative medicine, the type of work flexibility provided to employees, employment status of veterans and road fatalities by country."

Jose Antonio Vargas, Technology and Innovations editor, Huffington Post: "This is the transcript of a wide-ranging, two-part, three-hour interview with Al Gore, touching on the impact of technology and the Internet in politics, both in the U.S. and abroad; the state of the mainstream media and the left and right blogosphere; the role of the Web in spreading the facts about global warming, among others topics. The interviews were held in early and late October, first in the San Francisco offices of Current TV, then in his geothermal system-powered home in Nashville, which is certified as Gold LEED, one of the highest ratings for green design. An excerpt of the Q&A appeared in the Dec. 10, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone."

Deep Web Research 2010: Marcus P. Zillman is a an internet search expert whose extensive knowledge of how to leverage the "invisible" or "deep" web is exemplified in this guide. The Deep Web covers somewhere in the vicinity of 1 trillion pages of information located through the world wide web in various files and formats. Current search engines are able to locate around 200 billion pages. Marcus identifies sources to mitigate the odds on behalf of serious searchers.

"Here we go again … our latest list of the 100 best websites sees short attention spans, the rise of Twitter, more browser wars and celebrity gossip sites setting the news agenda."

"The Federal Trade Commission will hold two days of workshops on December 1 and 2, 2009, to explore how the Internet has affected journalism. The workshop will assemble representatives from print, online, broadcast and cable news organizations, academics, consumer advocates, bloggers, and other new media representatives."

• Opening Remarks of Chairman Jon Leibowitz "Creative Destruction” or Just “Destruction”, How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?
  
• Federal Register Notice
  
• Agenda
  
• Panelist Bios
  
• Public Comments

Access to Social Websites in The Legal Environment - Fall 2009 - Part 1: Survey of Law Librarians in Selected Firms, County/State Law Libraries and Law Schools.

Federal Communications Commission, Notice of inquiry, November 23, 2009: "This document seeks comment on how to empower parents to help their children take advantage of the opportunities offered by evolving electronic media technologies while at the same time protecting children from the risks inherent in use of these technologies. It asks for comment about the extent to which children are using electronic media today, the benefits and risks this presents, and the ways in which parents, teachers, and children can help reap the benefits while minimizing the risks of using these technologies. It also asks about the effectiveness of media literacy efforts and about how the Commission can assist with efforts being made by other federal agencies that are addressing similar issues."

News release: "World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation), a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the Web to empower people, announced the launch of global operations including the existence of its first projects. Speaking at the 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a Web Foundation board member, unveiled the organization’s new partnerships with VU University Amsterdam (VU) in the Netherlands and CDI (Center for Digital Inclusion) based in Brazil. Web Foundation is delighted to announce a partnership with the VU to expedite “re-greening” initiatives throughout the African continent. This new program, Web Alliance for Re-greening in Africa (W4RA), will train and assist local developers to implement and deploy mobile Web- and voice-based platforms to improve communication between agricultural specialists and farmers in Burkina Faso, Mali and other countries."

Cognitive control in media multitaskers - Eyal Ophira, Clifford Nassb, and Anthony D. Wagnerc, Symbolic Systems Program and Department of Communication, and Department of Psychology and Neurosciences Program, Stanford University

The Application Usage and Risk Report - An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise, Fall Edition 2009, Palo Alto Networks: "Social networking, blogging/microblogging, cloud-based productivity and collaborative applications are just a few of the applications that are making the cross over from personal to corporate use as a means of improving productivity. This report shows that the use of these applications is commonplace across a worldwide sample of
more than 200 organizations in a wide range of industries.
Some specific findings from the research include:

• Twitter session use grew more than 250 percent from the Spring 2009 edition of the Application Usage and Risk Report, published in April.
  
• Facebook use increased 192 percent while Facebook Chat (released in April 2008) was the fourth most commonly detected chat application, ahead of Yahoo! IM and AIM.
  
• SharePoint collaboration is ubiquitous – bandwidth consumed by SharePoint, specifically the documents component, increased 17-fold from the previous report in April.
  
• Blogging and wiki editing increased by a factor of 39, while total bandwidth consumed increased by a factor of 48."

Protectionism Online: Internet Censorship and International Trade Law, ECIPE [European Centre for International Political Economy] Working Paper No. 12/2009, By Brian Hindley, Hosuk Lee-Makiyama

Social Isolation and New Technology by Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions, Eun Ja Her, Lee Rainie, Nov 4, 2009

As the book changes form, the library must champion its own power base—readers, By Tom Peters: "The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice."

News release: "The Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute (ACLP) at New York Law School has released a report identifying major barriers to broadband adoption among senior citizens and people with disabilities, and across the telemedicine, energy, education, and government sectors. This report was prepared in coordination with staff of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative (OBI) for use in the development of the FCC's National Broadband Plan."

News release: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today released a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) asking how children can be served and protected and parents can be further empowered in the new digital media landscape. The NOI comes almost 20 years after enactment of the Children’s Television Act and follows the Commission’s recently issued Child Safe Viewing Act Report, which examined parental control technologies for video and audio programming. Children live in a dramatically different media environment from the one their parents and grandparents grew up in decades ago. From television to mobile devices to the Internet, electronic media today offer an array of opportunities to, among other things, access educational content, communicate with family and peers, and acquire the skills and technological literacy necessary to compete in a global economy. However, digital media can also pose risks of harm to children, including exposing them exploitative advertising, inappropriate content, and cyberbullying, as well as potentially contributing to childhood obesity and other negative health impacts. The NOI asks to what extent children are using electronic media today, the benefits and risks this presents, and the ways in which parents, teachers, and children can help reap the benefits while minimizing the risks of using these technologies."

News release: "In the next chapter of a longstanding effort to preserve the free and open Internet, the Federal Communications Commission is seeking public input on draft rules that would codify and supplement existing Internet openness principles. In addition to providing greater predictability for all stakeholders, the Notice is aimed at securing the many economic and social benefits that an open Internet has historically provided. It seeks to do so in a manner that will promote and protect the legitimate needs of consumers, broadband Internet access service providers, entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses of all sizes that make use of the Internet."

Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009, by Susannah Fox, Kathryn Zickuhr, Aaron Smith - Oct 21, 2009

"Archive-It, a subscription service from the Internet Archive, allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born digital content. Through our user-friendly web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage, and browse their archived collections. Collections are hosted at the Internet Archive data center and are accessible to the public with full-text search...As of October 16, 2009: Archive-It has collected 1,178,670,876 URLs for 909 public collections."

Search User Interfaces by Marti A. Hearst [the author, with permission of Cambridge University Press, has placed the full text online free of charge. See the terms of service]: "This book focuses on the human users of search engines and the tool they use to interact with them: the search user interface. The truly worldwide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realization among computer scientists and laypeople of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in search interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not. Researchers and practitioners have developed a wide range of innovative interface ideas, but only the most broadly acceptable make their way into major web search engines. This book summarizes these developments, presenting the state of the art of search interface design, both in academic research and in deployment in commercial systems. Many books describe the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems, but the unique focus of this book is specifically on the user interface."

NielsenWire: "The Nielsen Company today reported September 2009 data for the Top Parent Companies/Divisions and Top Web Brands, as well as average Internet usage."

Kate Mosher in The Recorder: "Under a bill signed into law by the governor this week and sponsored by San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, prosecutors hope witnesses in the state's relocation program will be harder to find through Internet searching. Gang members have targeted witnesses through Internet search engines even when witnesses weren't aware their personal information was online, said Sen. Mark Leno, who authored SB 748, which was signed Sunday. The new law goes after people or agencies that disclose phone numbers, addresses or other identifying information of protected witnesses."

Senior Research Specialist Amanda Lenhart's slideshow presentation, The Democratization of Online Social Networks: A look at the change in demographics of social network users over time, given at AoIR 10.0 in Milwaukee, WI on October 8, 2009.

Follow up to previous postings on Google Book Search, this insightful commentary from The American Lawyer - Scanning the Future, by Ben Hallman: "Lawyers familiar with the talks say the book publishing industry had watched in horror as the music business waged a scorched-earth campaign against file-sharing sites like Napster, only to see their profits plunge and antipathy to their tactics grow. They didn't want to follow the same path. In the spring of 2006, executives and lawyers began e-mailing various proposals about how a comprehensive settlement might work, say lawyers familiar with the negotiations. The authors were most interested in getting paid for their out-of-print works. The publishers, meanwhile, wanted to ensure nothing could be done with in-print books without their permission. Google wanted a deal that would incorporate the most troublesome class of books: in-copyright, out-of-print books, for which the rights holders cannot be determined."

Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission in charge of Information Society and Media, The Future of the Internet and Europe's Digital Agenda - Brussels, 6 October 2009

National Cybersecurity Awareness Month: "October marks the sixth annual National Cybersecurity Awareness Month sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. The theme for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2009 is “Our Shared Responsibility” to reinforce the message that all computer users, not just industry and government, have a responsibility to practice good “cyber hygiene” and to protect themselves and their families at home, at work and at school. Americans can follow a few simple steps to keep themselves safe online. By doing so, you will not only keep your personal assets and information secure but you will also help to improve the overall security of cyberspace."

• How You Can Contribute to Cybersecurity Awareness
  
• Cybersecurity Awareness Events 2009
  
• Cybersecurity Resources

New York Times: "About two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley."

Deloitte: Cloud computing - A collection of working papers, released September 17, 2009 and published on July 31, 2009.

Peek: Mobile E-Mail On A Budget - Conrad J. Jacoby discusses his experiences using the Peek mobile e-mail device (Time Magazine's 2008 Gadget of the Year), which he believes is genuinely useful and an excellent value for its cost.

An Open Technology Initiative Policy Brief - 100 Megabits or Bust! An Overview of Successful National Broadband Goals from Around the Globe, By Chiehyu Li and James Losey, New American Foundation, September 17, 2009

Brookings: "Recognizing the need to expand the U.S. broadband network to ensure America’s infrastructure and economic development, Congress tasked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with developing a national broadband plan by February 17, 2010. On September 21, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski delivered remarks [link to transcript - 22 pages, PDF] on the national broadband plan and other communications issues."

News release: "With national unemployment topping 9 percent and many Americans seeking online information and new technology skills that can help keep them and their families afloat in hard times, U.S. public libraries are first responders in a time of economic uncertainty. Libraries Connect Communities 3: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2008-2009, a new report released by the American Library Association (ALA), says libraries are serving as crucial technology hubs for people in need of free Web access, computer training, and assistance finding and using E-Government and job resources. The study finds that more than 71 percent of all libraries (and 79 percent of rural libraries) report they are the only source of free access to computers and the Internet in their communities. Sixty-six percent of public libraries rank job-seeking services, including resume writing and Internet job searches, among the most crucial online services they offer – up from 44 percent two years ago. In a separate survey, 80 percent of New York libraries indicated they helped someone search for a job in late 2008."

The Internet as a Diversion, September 2009: "Three-quarters of online economic users go online to relax and take their minds off of the recession. Fully 88% of 18-29 year old online economic users look to the internet to relax."

Legal Implications of Cloud Computing - Part One (the Basics and Framing the Issues) - Attorney David Navetta contends that there there will be significant financial pressure on organizations to take advantage of the pricing and efficiency of cloud computing, and if attorneys fail to understand the issues ahead of time there is a serious risk of getting "bulldozed" into cloud computing arrangements without time or resources to address some serious legal issues that are implicated.

New York Times - A Legal Battle: Online Attitude vs. Rules of the Bar: "And with thousands of blogs and so many lawyers online, legal ethics experts say that collisions between the freewheeling ways of the Internet and the tight boundaries of legal discourse are inevitable — whether they result in damaged careers or simply raise eyebrows."

The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information, by Vivienne Waller. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 9 - 7 September 2009

The Internet and Civic Engagement, September 2009: "Just as in offline politics, the well-off and well-educated are especially likely to participate in online activities that mirror offline forms of engagement. But there are hints that social media may alter this pattern."

News release: "Great news for job seekers this Labor Day: the federal government is hiring tens of thousands of new employees, according to new projections in Where the Jobs Are 2009: Mission-Critical Opportunities for America, released today by the Partnership for Public Service. The online projections outline government-wide, mission-critical hiring needs through 2012 and are based on a survey of 35 federal agencies representing nearly 99 percent of the 1.9 million member federal workforce.

Official Gmail Blog: "Gmail's web interface had a widespread outage [September 1, 2009], lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologize to all of you — today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such. We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation."

Arbor Networks: The Internet After Dark (Part 1), by Craig Labovitz: "After dark when the dinner dishes are put away and the kids are safely tucked into bed, the Internet subtly changes. Starting in the twilight of early evening, business traffic slows to a crawl, previously dormant applications flicker on home computer screens, and like clockwork, Internet activity begins its nightly climb towards a regular after hours bandwidth peak...In our last post blog post, we found (somewhat unexpectedly) that the pattern of North American daily Internet traffic differs from Europe and Asia. Unlike European Internet traffic which peaks around 7pm GMT and then quickly drops off until morning business hours, US Internet traffic reaches its peak at 11pm EDT and then stays relatively high until 3am in the morning (i.e. stays above 60% of peak or more). This uniquely American traffic pattern holds true across dozens of individual ISPs, tens of millions of subscribers, and petabytes of daily Internet traffic."

Online Behavioral Tracking and Targeting Concerns and Solutions, Legislative Primer September 2009 - from the Perspective of: Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Consumer Watchdog, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Lives, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy Times, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, The World Privacy Forum.

News release: "In an effort to obtain data for its next mobile wireless competition report, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) [August 27, 2009] announced a Notice of Inquiry (“NOI”) that seeks to enhance its analysis of competitive conditions in the mobile wireless market. The NOI also seeks to better understand the net effects on the American consumer. Wireless mobility has become central to the economic, civic, and social lives of over 270 million Americans. We are now in the midst of a transition from reliance on mobile voice services to increasing use of and reliance on mobile broadband services, which promise to connect American citizens in new and profound ways. A robustly competitive mobile wireless
market will be essential to realizing the full benefits to American consumers and channeling investment into vitally important national infrastructure. The FCC is seeking to ensure that competition in the mobile wireless market continues to bring substantial benefits to American consumers."

Teens and Mobile Phones Over the Past Five Years: Pew Internet Looks Back, August 2009: "Teenagers have previously lagged behind adults in their ownership of cell phones, but several years of survey data collected by the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that those ages 12-17 are closing the gap in cell phone ownership. The Project first began surveying teenagers about their mobile phones in its 2004 Teens and Parents project when a survey showed that 45% of teens had a cell phone. Since that time, mobile phone use has climbed steadily among teens ages 12 to 17 – to 63% in fall of 2006 to 71% in early 2008. In comparison, 77% of all adults (and 88% of parents) had a cell phone or other mobile device at a similar point in 2008."

The Third Branch: "The Judicial Conference has issued a series of “suggested practices” to assist courts in the use of Internet materials in opinions. The recommendations follow a pilot project conducted by circuit librarians who captured and preserved webpages cited in opinions over a six-month period...The guidelines suggest that, if a webpage is cited, chambers staff preserve the citation by downloading a copy of the site’s page and filing it as an attachment to the judicial opinion in the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files System. The attachment, like the opinion, would be retrievable on a non-fee basis through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system."

News release: "A new USDA economic analysis has found that rural communities with greater broadband Internet access had greater economic growth than areas with less access. The study, Broadband Internet's Value for Rural America by economists at USDA's Economic Research Service, compared counties that had broadband access relatively early - by 2000 - with similarly situated counties that had little or no broadband access. Employment growth was higher and non-farm private earnings greater in counties with a longer history of broadband availability."

American Customer Satisfaction Index - Annual E-Business Report, August 18, 2009, by Larry Freed
President and CEO, ForeSee Results

News release: "Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the appointment of several senior staffers who will work on the development of a National Broadband Plan as part of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative...The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, directed the FCC to submit a National Broadband Plan to Congress by February 17, 2010 that addresses broadband deployment, adoption, affordability, and the use of broadband to advance solutions to national priorities, including health care, education, energy efficiency, public safety, job creation, investment, and others."

Via Slate: Seeking How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous, by Emily Yoffe. "...Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting...If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly."

Burney's Legal Tech Reviews: The Dell Mini 9 and the Averatec All-in-one PC - Legal tech guru Brett Burney reviews the pros and cons of one of the smallest netbooks on the market, as well as a low-end all-in-one model PC, sporting a big monitor, all of which can easily be accommodated on just about any desktop.

Fuchs, Christian. 2009. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic Surveillance. Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group UTI. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.

Follow up to July 28, 2009 posting New Data On Cell Phone Use and Driving Distraction, news today that Illinois became the 17th state to ban text messaging while driving.

Law Practice Technology Information Sources and Tools - Ken Strutin identifies core sources to learn about new technologies that apply to legal research and law practice. In addition, he has identified specific tools that will contribute to managing research, communication and information-based tasks.

The Audience for Online Video-Sharing Sites Shoots Up, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist, July 2009.

"Herdict is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Herdict is a portmanteau of 'herd' and 'verdict' and seeks to show the verdict of the users (the herd). Herdict Web seeks to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict. The brainchild of Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Herdict Web is a natural progression from the OpenNet Initiative. Whereas OpenNet views Internet filtering through an academic lens, Herdict uses crowdsourcing to learn about and present a real time view of the experiences of users around the globe."

Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age, Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age; National Academy of Sciences

News release: "comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, released a June 2009 overview of the career services & development category based on data from comScore Media Metrix and comScore Marketer. The study revealed that more than 65 million Americans visited the category in June, representing a 10-percent increase versus year ago, ranking it as one of the top-growing site categories. Seven of the top ten sites in the category achieved double-digit gains during that period."

The Internet and the Recession, by Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith - July 15, 2009

Wireless Internet Use, by John Horrigan, July 22, 2009

News release - High-Speed Services for Internet Access. Provides summary statistics of subscribership data that facilities-based providers of high-speed services file twice a year on FCC Form 477: "High-speed lines, defined as connections delivering services at speeds exceeding 200 kbps in at least one direction, increased by 10% during the first half of 2008, from 121.2 million to 132.8 million lines in service, following a 20% increase, from 101.0 million to 121.2 million lines, during the second half of 2007. For the full twelvemonth period ending June 30, 2008, high-speed lines increased by 32% from 101.0 million to 132.8 million (or 31.8 million lines) compared to a 55% increase, from 65.0 million to 101.0 million lines (or 36.0 million lines), in the twelve-month period ending June 30, 2007."

The Internet and the Recession by Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith, July 15, 2009: "More than two-thirds of Americans – 69% – have used the internet to help them with personal economic issues that have arisen in the recession and to gather information about the origins and solutions to national economic problems. That amounts to 88% of the adult internet users in the country. The internet ranks high among sources of information and advice that people are seeking during hard times, especially when it comes to their personal finances and economic circumstances. At the same time, broadcast media outpace the internet as sources of news about national economics and broadcast sources still overshadow the internet among all Americans for information and advice related to their personal financial circumstances."

News release, July 9, 2009: "On the day that Commissioner Viviane Reding unveils her strategy for a Digital Europe during the Lisbon Council, and as the European Commission's consultation on the Content Online Report draws to a close this week, senior members of the publishing world are presenting to Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding and Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, a landmark declaration adopted on intellectual property rights in the digital world in a bid to ensure that opportunities for a diverse, free press and quality journalism thrive online into the future."

Optimizing Web Traffic via the Media Scheduling Problem. Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinbergy, Ravi Kumar, 15th ACM SIGKDD Intl. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2009: "Website traffic varies through time in consistent and predictable ways, with highest traffic in the middle of the day. When providing media content to visitors, it is important to present repeat visitors with new content so that they keep coming back. In this paper we present an algorithm to balance the need to keep a website fresh with new content with the desire to present the best content to the most visitors at times of peak traffic. We formulate this as the media scheduling problem, where we attempt to maximize total clicks, given the overall traffic pattern and the time varying clickthrough rates of available media content. We present an efficient algorithm to perform this scheduling under certain conditions and apply this algorithm to real data obtained from server logs, showing evidence of significant improvements in traffic from our algorithmic schedules. Finally, we analyze the click data, presenting models for why and how the clickthrough rate for new content declines as it ages."

Broadband USA: "The Recovery Act appropriated $7.2 billion and directed the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) to expand broadband access to unserved and underserved communities across the U.S., increase jobs, spur investments in technology and infrastructure, and provide long-term economic benefits. The result is the RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). BIP will make loans and grants for broadband infrastructure projects in rural areas. BTOP will provide grants to fund broadband infrastructure, public computer centers and sustainable broadband adoption projects. For details on the definitions and requirements of the BIP and BTOP programs, please refer to the Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for Broadband Initiatives Program and Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. For details on the definitions and requirements of the State Broadband Data and Development programs, please refer to the Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for the State Broadband Data and Development Grant Program. For details on the "Buy American" waiver for the NTIA broadband initiative, please refer to the July 1 Federal Register notice."

USAspending.gov: Where Americans Can See Where Their Money Goes - Have you ever wanted to find more information on government spending? Have you ever wondered where Federal contracting dollars and grant awards go? Or perhaps you would just like to know, as a citizen, what the Government is really doing with your money."

"The IT Dashboard provides the public with an online window into the details of Federal information technology investments and provides users with the ability to track the progress of investments over time. The IT Dashboard displays data received from agency reports to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), including general information on over 7,000 Federal IT investments and detailed data for nearly 800 of those investments that agencies classify as "major." The performance data used to track the 800 major IT investments is based on milestone information displayed in agency reports to OMB called "Exhibit 300s." Agency CIOs are responsible for evaluating and updating select data on a monthly basis, which is accomplished through interfaces provided on the website."

New York Times: "Google handles roughly two-thirds of all Internet searches. It owns the largest online video site, YouTube, which is more than 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. And last year, Google sold nearly $22 billion in advertising, more than any media company in the world."

Marketing Yourself with Webinars - Attorney Wells H. Anderson recommends presenting periodic webinars as an effective, direct and efficient technique to attract new clients and professionals who refer business to you.

Review of HTC Magic (G2) vs iPhone 3G (and 3G S): Techie expert extraordinaire Nicholas Moline compares the upcoming T-Mobile G2 (HTC Magic) with the iPhone 3G, which has the new iPhone 3.0 Software. Nick ran detailed and thorough tests of each Smartphone's usability and functionality, and he highlights the respective range of features, including bar code readers, removable memory, cameras, GPS, touchscreens, email, web access, and lots more. He also shares his thoughts about which gadget delivers the best applications for users.

TIME: "In a complex settlement agreement, which took three years to hammer out and spans 135 pages excluding attachments, Google will be allowed to show up to 20% of the books' text online at no charge to Web surfers. But the part of the settlement that deals with so-called orphan books — which refers to out-of-print books whose authors and publishers are unknown — is what's ruffling the most feathers in the literary henhouse. The deal gives Google an exclusive license to publish and profit from these orphans, which means it won't face legal action if an author or owner comes forward later. This, critics contend, gives it a competitive edge over any rival that wants to set up a competing digital library. And without competition, opponents fear Google will start charging exorbitant fees to academic libraries and others who want full access to its digital library. "It will make Google virtually invulnerable to competition," says Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system."

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Home Broadband Adoption 2009, by John Horrigan, June 17, 2009

"Social networks are exploding in popularity. Forty-three percent of the online community now uses social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. This is up from 27 percent a year ago, reports The Conference Board and TNS. The Consumer Internet Barometer, a quarterly report produced by The Conference Board, the global business membership and research association, and TNS, a global market insight and information group, surveys 10,000 households across the country and tracks who's doing what on the Internet. More than half of social networkers log on at least once a day, and the majority log on several times a day. Interacting with family, friends and celebrities are among the main reasons people log on to sites like Twitter. The majority of users log on at home, although a quarter of social networkers log on at work, and 10 percent connect through their phone."

"On 16 June the Government published The Digital Britain Report, its strategic vision for ensuring that the UK is at the leading edge of the global digital economy. The report provides actions and recommendations to promote and protect talent and innovation in our creative industries, to modernise TV and radio frameworks and support local news, and introduces policies to maximise the social and economic benefits from digital technologies."

"This Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation survey finds that technology is not an end, but a means to accelerate the pace of discovery, widen social networks, and sharpen the questions someone might ask when they do get to talk to a health professional. Technology can help to enable the human connection in health care and the internet is turning up the information network’s volume."

• Army Working Capital Fund: Actions Needed to Improve Budgeting for Carryover at Army Ordnance, GAO-09-415, June 10, 2009
• Environmental Contamination: Lessons Learned from the Cleanup of Formerly Used Defense and Military Munitions Sites, GAO-09-779T, June 10, 2009
• VA Real Property: VA Emphasizes Enhanced-Use Leases to Manage Its Real Property Portfolio, GAO-09-776T, June 10, 2009
• Voters With Disabilities: More Polling Places Had No Potential Impediments Than in 2000, but Challenges Remain, GAO-09-685, June 10, 2009
• Telecommunications: Broadband Deployment Plan Should Include Performance Goals and Measures to Guide Federal Investment, GAO-09-494, May 12, 2009

Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University report: Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies: Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Taskforce to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States in December of 2008.

News release: "A rogue Internet Service Provider that recruits, knowingly hosts, and actively participates in the distribution of spam, child pornography, and other harmful electronic content has been shut down by a district court judge at the request of the Federal Trade Commission. The ISP’s upstream providers and data centers have disconnected its servers from the Internet."

News release: "Terms of Service" policies on websites define how Internet businesses interact with you and use your personal information. But most web users don't read these policies -- or understand that the terms are constantly changing. To track these ever-evolving documents, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is launching "TOSBack": a "terms of service" tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and other major websites...At www.TOSBack.org, you can see a real-time feed of changes and updates to more than three dozen polices from the Internet's most popular online services. Clicking on an update brings you to a side-by-side before-and-after comparison, highlighting what has been removed from the policy and what has been added."

"New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that 62 percent of households reported using Internet access in the home in 2007, an increase from 18 percent in 1997, the first year the bureau collected data on Internet use. Sixty-four percent of individuals 18 and over used the Internet from any location in 2007, while only 22 percent did so in 1997. Among households using the Internet in 2007, 82 percent reported using a high-speed connection, and 17 percent used a dial-up connection."

"FlightAware offers live flight data, airport information, weather maps and charts, as well as aviation news to nearly two million users a month. FlightAware also powers operational management and dispatch software, airport FIDS (flight information displays), and provides reporting data to aircraft and airport operators. [currently] tracking 2,274 airborne aircraft with 88,882,867 total flights in the database. FlightAware has tracked 39,546 arrivals in the last 24 hours." [ars technica's backgrounder]

Follow up to April 26, 2009 posting - WSJ Interactive Map - Adverse events at top 100 newspapers, 2006-2009, this New York Times op-ed by Frank Rich - The American Press on Suicide Watch: "Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Legendary brands from The Los Angeles Times to The Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering. The New York Times Company threatened to close The Boston Globe if its employees didn’t make substantial sacrifices in salaries and benefits. Other papers have died. The reporting ranks on network and local news alike are shriveling. You know it’s bad when the Senate is moved, as it was last week, to weigh in with hearings on The Future of Journalism."

News release: "Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg with 13 Partner Countries Release First World Internet Project Report - Pioneering Report Finds Remarkable Similarities and Significant Differences Globally - Online Purchasing Not Yet Part of the Global Internet Experience; A Majority of Users Believe Only Half of the Information they Find Online is Reliable."

On May 6, 2009 the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held the following Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet hearing: The Future of Journalism. Witness statements:

• Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, Google Inc.
  
• Alberto Ibargüen, President and Chief Executive Officer, John S. And James L. Knight Foundation
  
• David Simon, Author, TV Producer and Former Newspaperman
  
• Steve Coll, Former Managing Editor, The Washington Post
  
• James Moroney, Publisher/CEO, The Dallas Morning News
  
• Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post

News release: "Recommind...search-powered information risk management (IRM) software....released the results of its recent research into the information access and search habits of UK organisations. With businesses capable of searching just 50 percent of the information that their employees need for their daily tasks, the findings indicate that legacy, one-size-fits-all ‘Enterprise Search 1.0’ systems are no longer suitable for modern enterprises that require instant, automated and highly relevant access to all kinds of information – from documents and email to fellow colleagues’ expertise and knowledge to project-specific information. The impact on businesses from this technology failure includes staff spending many hours searching fruitlessly for the information they need to do their daily jobs – with approximately a quarter of those surveyed admitting that employees typically spend more than half a day a week on this task. For a company with 1,000 employees, this equates to upwards of £50,000 worth of lost time a week or £2,600,000 a year."

Burney's Legal Tech Reviews: A Review of the CradlePoint PHS300 mobile broadband router and the Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter - Mobile traveler Brett Burney describes how he uses his laptop and iPhone, both of which connect beautifully to Wi-Fi networks, to create his own little hotspot by plugging his Verizon Wireless USB760 modem into the PHS300 and turning it on. Within 5-10 seconds, the PHS300 is broadcasting a private, secure Wi-Fi hotspot that his laptop and iPhone connect to immediately.

News release: "In a video posted on her website this morning, Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, called for greater transparency and accountability in Internet Governance as of October 2009. Key decisions related to Internet Governance, like top level domains and managing the internet's core directory, are currently made by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private not-for profit corporation established in California. So far, ICANN has been operating under an agreement with the US Department of Commerce. However, this agreement expires on 30 September this year. For the time after, Commissioner Reding today outlined a new governance model for the internet. This would include a fully private and accountable ICANN, accompanied by an independent judicial body, as well as a "G12 for Internet Governance" – a multilateral forum for governments to discuss general internet governance policy and security issues."

"In 2008, OCLC conducted focus groups, administered a pop-up survey on WorldCat.org—OCLC’s freely available end user interface on the Web—and conducted a Web-based survey of librarians worldwide. The report, Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want, presents findings from these research efforts in order to understand:

• The metadata elements that are most important to end users in determining if an item will meet his or her needs
  
• The enhancements end users would like to see made in online library catalogs to assist them in consistently identifying appropriate materials
  
• The enhancements librarians would recommend for online library catalogs to better assist them in their work
  
• The findings indicate, among other things, that although library catalogs are often thought of as discovery tools, the catalog’s delivery-related information is just as important to end users.

News release: "A national survey of American white collar workers found that while technology is widely embraced among working professionals, significant gaps exist among generations regarding its use and application in the workplace. The newly released Technology Gap Survey found generational differences in the effect of technology on workplace etiquette, the blurring boundaries between personal and professional tasks, and the impact of technology overload. The survey – commissioned by LexisNexis, a leading provider of content-enabled workflow solutions – examined the impact of technology in the workplace. It compared technology and software usage among generations of working professionals, including Boomer (ages 44-60), Generation X (ages 29-43) and Generation Y (ages 28 and younger)."

News release: "The value of libraries in communities across the country continued to grow in 2008—and accelerated dramatically as the national economy sank and people looked for cost effective resources in a time of crisis, according to the American Library Association’s (ALA) annual State of America’s Libraries report, released today as part of National Library Week, April 12-18, 2009. U.S. libraries experienced a dramatic increase in library card registration as the public continues to turn to their local library for free services. More than 68 percent of Americans have a library card. This is the greatest number of Americans with library cards since the American Library Association (ALA) started to measure library card usage in 1990, according to a 2008 Web poll conducted by Harris Interactive. The report also says library usage soared as Americans visited their libraries nearly 1.4 billion times and checked out more than 2 billion items in the past year, an increase of more than 10 percent in both checked out items and library visits, compared to data from the last economic downturn in 2001."

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing April 2, 2009: Recovery and Investment Spending: Implementing a Bold Oversight Strategy, the Chairman Joseph Lieberman and Ranking Member Susan M. Collins discussed the urgency of making sure that proper controls are in place to deter waste, fraud, or mismanagement before stimulus money is distributed..."The two witnesses - Robert L. Nabors, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget and Earl Devaney, Chair of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board - spoke about the development of Recovery.gov, the Administration website that allows Americans to track grants, contracts and other forms of assistance as they are awarded and report back on suspected waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement in their own communities. Recovery.gov receives about 4,000 hits a second, for a total of about 300 million since its creation, according to Devaney."

"In December 2003, the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) was renamed the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) to better reflect the broad character of such criminal matters having a cyber (Internet) nexus. The 2008 Internet Crime Report is the eighth annual compilation of information on complaints received and referred by the IC3 to law enforcement or regulatory agencies for appropriate action. From January 1, 2008 – December 31, 2008, the IC3 website received 275,284 complaint submissions. This is a (33.1%) increase when compared to 2007 when 206,884 complaints were received. These filings were composed of complaints primarily related to fraudulent and non-fraudulent issues on the Internet."

Burney's Legal Tech Reviews: Verizon Wireless USB760 Modem and the Cradlepoint CTR500 Mobile Broadband Travel Router - For consistent, resilient mobile internet connectivity, Brett Burney recommends these three small, versatile products that are cost effective and reliable.

"The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is launching a new roof strength rating system to help consumers pick vehicles that will help protect them in rollover crashes. Twelve small SUVs are the first to be put to the test. Only 4 earn the top rating of good...This new rating system is based on Institute research showing that occupants in rollover crashes benefit from stronger roofs. Vehicles rated good must have roofs that are more than twice as strong as minimum federal safety standards require."

• View/download: includes color ratings chart
  
• Video: roof strength rating system
  
• Status Report special issue: roof strength, Vol. 44, No. 3, March 24, 2009
  
• Research paper: Roof strength and injury risk

News release: "According to an international study released today by software company 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy, nearly half of US workers who use a PC at their job do not typically shut down at night1. The 2009 PC Energy Report, which examines workplace PC power consumption in the US, UK and Germany, found that US organizations waste $2.8 billion a year to power 108 million unused machines. In 2009, these unused PCs are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly the equivalent impact of 4 million cars."

• PC Energy Report UK 2009
  
• PC Energy Report US 2009
  
• PC Energy Report Germany 2009

The Mobile Difference, by John Horrigan, March 25, 2009

International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR): Countering Online Radicalisation: A Strategy for Action

2007 Circumvention Landscape Report: Methods, Uses, and Tools, March 2009 by Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, and John Palfrey

Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus - Online Growth, but Print Losses are Bigger, February 26, 2009: "The trend is unmistakable: Fewer Americans are reading print newspapers as more turn to the internet for their news. And while the percentage of people who read newspapers online is growing rapidly, especially among younger generations, that growth has not offset the decline in print readership."

"In the past three years, developments in social networking and internet applications have begun providing internet users with more opportunities for sharing short updates about themselves, their lives, and their whereabouts online. Users may post messages about their status, their moods, their location and other tidbits on social networks and blogging sites, or on applications for sending out short messages to networks of friends like Twitter, Yammer and others. As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others."

In the article Fifty Varied Lives, Ended on a Cold, Foggy Night the New York Times shares the loss using photos, text, a slide show and related links.

Center for Research Libraries/Global Resources Network: The Future of Newspapers: A Conversation. Alex Jones, Laurence M. Lombard Lecturer in the Press and Public Policy and Director of the Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, John Carroll, Former Editor, Los Angeles Times.

Follow up to previous postings on the Google Book search project, from the New York Review of Books, Google & the Future of Books, by Robert Darnton

5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year: "Data visualization continues to grow online and in the real world. It exists as masterful art pieces and amazingly useful analysis tools. In both cases though it brings data -- which is oftentimes cryptic -- to the masses and shows that data is more than a bucket of numbers. Data is interesting. As we collect more and more data about ourselves and our surroundings, the data and the visualization will only get more interesting. On that note, I give you FlowingData's picks for the top 5 data visualization projects of 2008. Visualizations were judged based on the use of data, aesthetics, overall effect on the visualization arena, and how well they told a story."

News release: "Over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44 years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online, according to surveys taken from 2006-2008. Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the "Net Generation," internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life. Generation X is the most likely group to bank, shop, and look for health information online. Boomers are just as likely as Generation Y to make travel reservations online. And even Silent Generation internet users are competitive when it comes to email (although teens might point out that this is proof that email is for old people)."

Google Public Policy Blog: When an Internet application doesn't work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP, the application, your PC, or something else? It can be difficult for experts, let alone average Internet users, to address this sort of question today...Today Google, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers are taking the wraps off of Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that researchers can use to deploy Internet measurement tools." [See About Measurement Lab for more details including a FAQ]

Intel: "On January 28, 2009, the United States, Canada, and 27 European countries will celebrate Data Privacy Day together for the second time. Designed to raise awareness and generate discussion about data privacy practices and rights, Data Privacy Day activities in the United States have included privacy professionals, corporations, government officials, and representatives, academics, and students across the country. One of the primary goals of Data Privacy Day is to promote privacy awareness and education among teens across the United States. Data Privacy Day also serves the important purpose of furthering international collaboration and cooperation around privacy issues."

White House Tech More Tired Than Wired: "Any tech geek recognizes that modern technology is far more than a means to an end: Whether we own iPods, Zunes, MacBooks, iPhones or BlackBerry smartphones, our gadgets have become intimately integrated into our lifestyles. So you have to feel the pain of Obama and his team, who drove the most tech-savvy presidential campaign in history, for having to cope with the White House's bureaucratic IT swamp. "It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of the White House's outdated tech."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Efforts to Combat Crimes Against Children, Audit Report 09-08, January 2009

According to Atlantic, President Obama will use a National Security Agency approved encrypted PDA, perhaps this one.

CDT news release: "The Supreme Court Wednesday dealt the final blow to the government's 10-year campaign to place onerous restrictions on Internet content. The Court declined to hear the government's appeal of lower court rulings [3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Decision in COPA February 22, 2008] that declared the Child Online Protection Act as unconstitutional. COPA passed in 1998 but was never enforced due to immediate court challenges on First Amendment grounds. Since COPA was passed there have been at least three major commissions or studies that have concluded that education and voluntary technology tools are the most effective way to protect kids online. These approaches are the ones Congress and the President should pursue to enhance Internet safety."

CNN: "Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and the nation's first African-American president Tuesday. This is a transcript of his prepared speech." The video link is here.

Presidential Inaugural Committee: "Don’t miss it when Barack Obama takes the Oath of Office next Tuesday, January 20th. As part of our commitment to making this the most open inauguration in history, we’ll be streaming the swearing-in ceremony on our site using Microsoft’s Silverlight. You can view high quality Silverlight streams, in full screen, and enjoy related inaugural video content. As long as you have an Internet connection, you’ll be able to watch the ceremony as if you were there. Visit www.pic2009.org on Tuesday, January 20th to watch the swearing-in live. The swearing-in ceremony begins at 11:30 a.m. ET on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Take a look at the rest of the scheduled events for Inaugural Weekend."

Where to watch Obama’s presidential inauguration online: Links to more than a dozen sources, from news and social media sites as well as bloggers. Of course, the networks will also be "televising" the inaugural, live.
See also:

Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States, Published January 14, 2009: "The Internet Safety Technical Task Force was created in February 2008 in accordance with the Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety announced in January 2008 by the Attorneys General Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking and MySpace. The scope of the Task Force's inquiry was to consider those technologies that industry and end users - including parents - can use to help keep minors safer on the Internet."

"The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey. While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks. Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young."

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: "The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news. Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%."

Those Active in the Obama Campaign Expect to be Involved in Promoting the Administration, by Aaron Smith, Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 30, 2008: "Voters expect that the level of public engagement they experienced with Barack Obama during the campaign, much of it occurring online, will continue into the early period of his new administration. A majority of Obama voters expect to carry on efforts to support his policies and try to persuade others to back his initiatives in the coming year; a substantial number expect to hear directly from Obama and his team; and a notable cohort say they have followed the transition online."

"Information technology (IT) and broadband are major drivers of research, innovation, economic growth and social change. The 2008 edition of the OECD Information Technology Outlook analyses recent developments in the IT goods and services industries, and suggests that the outlook is for continued long-term growth, constrained by the currently very uncertain macroeconomic environment in OECD countries. Cross-border investment, trade, and mergers and acquisitions remain high, and ICTs drive globalisation in general. The industry is rapidly restructuring, and China and India are major suppliers of information and communications technology (ICT)-related goods and services."

News release: "The music industry must move away from the retail CD as its primary revenue generator before Christmas 2009, according to Gartner. Gartner said that reliance on revenue from the sale of prerecorded CDs is hindering the music industry from fully embracing online distribution opportunities...Enabling the transition away from retail music CDs toward online distribution is now in sight, given that 77 percent of U.S. households (a total of 96 million connections) will have broadband connections by 2012. Beyond these consumers, the alternative distribution afforded by Wi-Fi-enabled notebooks and rapidly improving media-enabled mobile phones pose opportunities that provide multiple paths for marketing, promotion and distribution outside the consumer’s home."

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: "The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news. Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%."

"The transformation of the media world is well underway, facilitated by the spread of digital tools. A myriad of innovative new media organizations have sprung up to take advantage of the opportunities that stem from low-cost distribution networks. Meanwhile the economic base of many of the large media companies continues to erode. Despite the demonstrated success of many new media enterprises, the euphoria over the rise of participatory media has been tempered by concerns over the quality and credibility of online media, the possible fragmentation of audiences, a decline in editorial standards and the persistent challenge of effectively reporting the news. Over the past year, researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society have reached out to a broad range of media experts to help in this assessment of the changes in new media over the past several years and to take a sober look at the successes and ongoing challenges.

National Health Interview Survey Early Release Report: "Preliminary results from the January-June 2008 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that the number of American homes with only wireless telephones continues to grow. More than one out of every six American homes (17.5%) had only wireless telephones during the first half of 2008, an increase of 1.7 percentage points since the second half of 2007. In addition, more than one out of every eight American homes (13.3%) received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones despite having a landline telephone in the home. This report presents the most up-to-date estimates available from the federal government concerning the size and characteristics of these populations."

2008 Network Advertising Initiative Principles: "Through the present 2008 revision to the NAI’s Self-Regulatory Code of Conduct, NAI members continue their commitment to respect appropriate fair information practices adapted for this medium and to their business models, maintaining self-regulation with respect to notice, choice, use limitation, access, reliability and security."

Best Careers, 2009: "U.S. News profiles 30 careers that offer strong outlooks and high job satisfaction. Here's what's new in 2009...as well as a look at 13 cutting-edge careers, viable now and poised for future growth. They stem from megatrends like globalization, digitization, and the wave of environmentalism sweeping the world." See the entry for Librarian.

News release: "Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total of 1,196 participants who shared their views..."

E-Discovery Update: My E-Discovery Holiday Wish List - Conrad J. Jacoby's holiday wish is for the legal community to finally develop one or more judicially accepted standards that can be used to craft consistent ways of requesting and producing information. With baseline procedures in place, both producing and requesting parties, as well as judges, will be able to make more informed decisions about the need for discovery and the way in which such discovery should be conducted.

"The mission of Let's Say Thanks is to provide a way for individuals across the country to recognize U.S. troops stationed overseas. By submitting a message through this site you have the opportunity to send a free personalized postcard greeting to deployed servicemen and women. The postcards, depicting patriotic scenes and hometown images, were selected from a pool of entries from children across the country.

All you have to do is click on your favorite design and either select the message that best expresses your sentiment or draft a personal note. The postcards are then printed on the Xerox iGen3® Digital Production Press and mailed in care packages by military support organization Give2TheTroops®." [thanks to Marilyn Neforas via Mike Love]

"The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) today released a series of papers [Transition Materials for President Obama] that outline Internet policy proposals for President-elect Obama's Transition Team in the areas of security and civil liberties; preserving free speech on the Internet; keeping the Internet an open platform; protection of consumer privacy; and promoting open government. The 2-3 page memos provide a concise overview of the issues and recommend practical, achievable actions the new administration can take to keep the Internet open, innovative and free. The Internet played an integral part in this election, making it the most participatory in history. CDT believes the Internet can play an equally critical role in other areas, including health care, economic development and education, given the right government policies."

DOJ OIG: Review of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), Evaluation and Inspections Report I-2009-001, December 2008: "...we found that information in the national sex offender registries is incomplete and inaccurate and therefore the registries are not reliable tools for law enforcement and the public. For example, we found that registries were missing records, did not always identify known fugitives, and did not always contain sufficient information to enable law enforcement and the public to accurately identify sex offenders."

"The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency has released its final report, Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency. The Commission’s three major findings are: cybersecurity is now one of the major national security problems facing the United States; decisions and actions must respect American values related to privacy and civil liberties; and only a comprehensive national security strategy that embraces both the domestic and international aspects of cybersecurity will improve the situation."

Google's gatekeepers, by Jeffrey Rosen, IHT: "For the past two years, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with other international Internet companies, have been meeting regularly with human rights and civil-liberties advocacy groups to agree on voluntary standards for resisting worldwide censorship requests. At the end of October, the Internet companies and the advocacy groups announced the Global Network Initiative, a series of principles for protecting global free expression and privacy.

Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Wong [Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google] and her colleagues will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good - even a corporation whose informal motto is "Don't be evil"?"

How to Publish Without Perishing, by James Gleick: "As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars...Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it."

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship, James A. Evans, Published 18 July 2008, Science 321, 395 (2008) [Subscription only - Supporting Online Material available free]

Via YouTube: Weekly Address from the President-Elect, November 26, 2008

"In this report, e-Government and e-Participation, produced for the publication series ICT Research: The Policy Perspective, we examine how information and communications technology, or ICT, is revolutionising the way citizens, businesses and public administrations interact. The EU is investing heavily in e-government to help boost growth while delivering on the benefi ts of the information society, including greater cross-border collaboration, less fragmented research effort, and access to ICT anywhere, any time and by any one."

Improving Government Interoperability: A capability framework for government managers, Theresa A. Pardo, G. Brian Burke, Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, SUNY. October 2008.

Chumby: Internet Access You Can Hug? - Conrad J. Jacoby reviews a quirky, open source dual purpose gadget: both alarm clock and a delivery outlet for Internet content that is pushed to you in real time.

News release: "Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. "This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington. NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., partnered 10 years ago to develop this software protocol. The DTN sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet's Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed."

The Future of Privacy Forum Agenda for Consumers and Businesses [See also: About the Forum]

• "FPF will seek to bring transparency to online data practices. Our plan is to document practices, produce multi-media educational materials, and commission reports and studies that provide consumers and policy makers the real story about how their data is used.
  
• FPF will seek to bring true transparency and user control to behavioral targeting and will broaden the discussion of the ethics of what the online norms can be with regard to use of web browsing.
  
• FPF will seek to ensure that considerations around data retention, limitation, and deletion are a significant part of the consumer privacy debate.
  
• FPF will seek to drive practices that enhance consumer controls - ensuring that data use is obvious, useful, intuitive and used and for a benefit he values and controls - no matter the type of technology used..."

News release: "A new Web site launched by four national legal organizations will help victims of disasters find valuable information and assistance to speed recovery from hurricanes, fires, floods or other disasters. The site is sponsored by the American Bar Association, Legal Services Corporation, National Legal Aid & Defender Association and Pro Bono Net.

“The site – www.disasterlegalservices.org – lists information for people who need help and the lawyers who want to volunteer to help them,” said ABA President H. Thomas Wells Jr. “By pooling the resources of our organizations, we can provide services in a timely, efficient manner.”

Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment, and Problematic Content, Literature Review by the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, Andrew Schrock and Danah Boyd, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Draft Version. November 14, 2008

News release: "Although information technology is well integrated into the lives of many Americans, gadgets and communication services require, for some, a call for help. Some 48% of technology users usually need help from others to set up new devices or to show them how they function. Many tech users encounter problems with their cell phones, internet connections, and other gadgets. This, in turn, often leads to impatience and frustration as they try to get them fixed."

Washington Post: "Armed with millions of e-mail addresses and a political operation that harnessed the Internet like no campaign before it, Barack Obama will enter the White House with the opportunity to create the first truly "wired" presidency. Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media."

News release: "The Internet will be the catalyst for advancement of programs promoting social justice over the next decade, according to new research from Harvard Professor Elaine C. Kamarck, PhD. The research paper, titled Transforming the Fight Against Poverty: The Internet & Anti-Poverty Strategies, addresses how the Internet has enhanced productivity in government run anti-poverty programs and bridged physical and market isolation gaps prevalent in poor populations."

Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, Volume III: "Arbor Networks®, Inc., in cooperation with the Internet security operations community, has completed the third edition of an ongoing series of annual operational security surveys. This survey, covering a 12-month period from July 2006 through June 2007, is designed to provide data useful to network operators so that they can make informed decisions about their use of network security technology to protect their mission-critical infrastructures. It is also meant to serve as a general resource for the Internet operations and engineering community, recording information on trends and employment of various infrastructure security techniques."

Dan Farber, CNET News: "Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices."

Hull D, Pettifer SR, Kell DB 2008 Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web. PLoS Computational Biology 4(10): e1000204 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204 [Gerry McKiernan]

News release: "Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today announced that all four television networks enjoyed month-over-month growth in online video viewers in September, coinciding with the season premieres of many popular and new television shows. NBC.com had the largest increase in video viewers, growing 312 percent month-over-month, followed by FOX Broadcasting and ABC.com, with 165 percent and 105 percent growth, respectively."

News release: "In its continuing efforts to promote efficient use of spectrum and to extend the benefits of such use to the public, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today adopted a Second Report and Order (Second R&O) that establishes rules to allow new, sophisticated wireless devices to operate in broadcast television spectrum on a secondary basis at locations where that spectrum is open. (This unused TV spectrum is now commonly referred to as television “white spaces”). The rules adopted today will allow for the use of these new and innovative types of unlicensed devices in the unused spectrum to provide broadband data and other services for consumers and businesses.

The rules represent a careful first step to permit the operation of unlicensed devices in the TV white spaces and include numerous safeguards to protect incumbent services against harmful interference. The rules will allow for both fixed and personal/portable unlicensed devices. Such devices must include a geolocation capability and provisions to access over the Internet a data base of the incumbent services, such as full power and low power TV stations and cable system headends, in addition to spectrum-sensing technology. The data base will tell the white space device what spectrum may be used at that location."

IHT: "As the financial crisis deepened and his employer teetered on the brink of collapse, Gautam Bose, a senior vice president at the U.S. bank Wachovia, found a discreet way to ponder his future and that of the financial industry. Bose turned to MeettheBoss, a new online social networking site for financial services executives. It was started in September - a timely introduction for a forum that helps nervous bankers connect with their peers...In addition to facilitating discussion groups, MeettheBoss, which is based in Bristol, England, allows members to speak by video conference and instant messaging. Interviews with industry leaders are shown on the site, which says it has attracted 25,000 active members."

As print media decline, so does the amount of available information, by David Carr, IHT: "It has been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. Just Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force - as many as 3,000 people...The paradox of all these announcements is that newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem - newspaper Web sites are a vital source of news and growing - but they do have a consumer problem."

News release: "Introducing new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) is central to fostering choice and competition in domain registration services, and as such is significant to the promotion of ICANN’s core values. The evolution of the namespace towards an enhanced diversity of services and service providers must be planned and managed effectively to preserve the security, stability, and global interoperability of the Internet.

The proposed policy to guide the introduction of new gTLDs was created by the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) through its bottom-up, multi-stakeholder policy development process. The elements addressed in the development of the new gTLD policy involve technical, economic, operational, legal, public policy, and other considerations. The intended result is a straightforward, fair, and efficient process for allocating new gTLDs."

News release: "Traditional nuclear families use the internet and cell phones to create a “new connectedness” that revolves around remote interactions and shared online experiences...Among all household types, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage and ownership. A national survey of 2,252 adults by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that households with a married couple and minor children are more likely than other household types -- such as single adults, homes with unrelated adults, or couples without children – to have cell phones and use the internet."

Review of CiteGenie - Automatic Bluebook citations when using Westlaw: Attorney Marc Hershovitz reviews CiteGenie, a new extension for the Firefox web browser that, as its website promises, "automagically" creates Bluebook formatted pinpoint citations when copying from Westlaw.

News release, September 29, 2008: "Europe could take the lead in the next generation of the Internet. The European Commission today outlined the main steps that Europe has to take to respond to the next wave of the Information Revolution that will intensify in the coming years due to trends such as social networking, the decisive shift to on-line business services, nomadic services based on GPS and mobile TV and the growth of smart tags. The report shows that Europe is well placed to exploit these trends because of its policies to support open and pro-competitive telecom networks as well as privacy and security. A public consultation has been launched today by the Commission on the policy and private sector responses to these opportunities. The Commission report also unveils a new Broadband Performance Index (BPI) that compares national performance on key measures such as broadband speed, price, competition and coverage. Sweden and the Netherlands top this European broadband league, which complements the more traditional broadband penetration index used so far by telecoms regulators."

• The Commission Communication on Future networks and the Internet
  
• The public consultation on the Internet of Things
  
• Press factsheet: Broadband Performance Index - Monitoring high-speed Internet access in the EU

From NextGov: "Members of the House will be permitted to use third-party Web sites like YouTube to communicate with constituents as long as the content is for official purposes, and not personal, commercial or campaign communication, according to rules adopted Thursday by the House Administration Committee."

Courthouse News: "Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters' EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base."

Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation - Hearing on: Broadband Providers and Consumer Privacy, September 25, 2008

The Government Domain: Political Fact-Checking Websites - Peggy Garvin's well-timed article identifies and evaluates key websites that monitor the accuracy of statements and representations made by political candidates and their respective campaigns.

News release: "A new national survey shows that 62% of adults who are currently employed use the internet or email at work and they have mixed views about the impact of technology on their work lives. On the one hand, they cite the benefits of increased connectivity and flexibility that the internet and all of their various gadgets afford them at work. On the other hand, many workers say these tools have added stress and new demands to their lives."

Teenagers: A Generation Unplugged - A National Survey by CTIA–The Wireless Association® and Harris Interactive: "As the wireless industry celebrates the upcoming 25th anniversary of the first commercial cell phone call (October 13, 1983), this in-depth online study of more than 2,000 teenagers around the nation sheds new light on how today’s teens feel about wireless products and services, how they are using them today and most importantly, how they would like to use them in the future. A growing wireless segment, teens view their cell phones as more than just an accessory."

News release: "blinkx, the world’s largest video search engine, today launched an evolution of its broadband television offering: blinkx BBTV will now be available without download, straight from your browser. Leveraging blinkx’s patented speech and visual recognition technology, BBTV simultaneously delivers a high-quality television experience over the Internet, and links it to the universe of information on the Web, adding dimension and context to the viewer’s experience. Now, BBTV is available in the browser, without any software download, integrating video into the fiber of the Web for true, full-screen Online Television. To try blinkx BBTV direct from your browser - click here."

"Some 69% of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the web. Online users who take advantage of cloud applications say they like the convenience of having access to data and applications from any Web-connected device. However, their message to providers of such services is: Let's keep the data between us."

News release: "The (ITN) International Telecommunication Union launched its key Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008...The Report (for purchase) focuses on broadband connectivity as a vehicle for content to drive development and build a knowledge-based information society. While some Asia-Pacific economies are world leaders in information and communication technologies (ICT) where broadband access is ultra-high speed, affordable and close to ubiquitous, in most of the region’s poorer countries Internet access remains limited and predominantly low-speed. The Report finds evidence that ICTs and broadband uptake foster growth and development, but the question remains as to the optimal speed that should be targeted in view of limited resources."

Catalyst Group - Beyond Red and Blue: Insights into the Design of Presidential Candidate Websites, August 6, 2008 - "The results of our research indicated that aesthetics play an important role in users’ evaluation of a candidate’s site, but that ease-of-use may ultimately carry the day as the quality that people value most."

AmLaw Daily: "In the last two years or so, though, Web development and marketing professionals say law firms have gotten increasingly serious about the Web. Slowly, the gap in quality between Am Law 200 Web sites and those of Fortune 500 companies has narrowed, as more and more firms put in the investment and manpower to make their Web sites more than just regurgitations of what can be found in print."

News release: "A new study clearly finds that America’s public libraries are breaking through traditional brick-and-mortar walls to serve more people online and in person. America’s 16,543 public library buildings are leveraging technology to help children succeed in school and support lifelong learning. More than 83 percent now offer online homework resources, including live tutors and collections of reliable Web sources – up 15 percent in one year, according to Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2007-2008...The study, conducted by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University (FSU), shows today’s libraries are partners in learning – providing free access to expensive online resources that would otherwise be out of reach for most families..."

News release: "Worldwide sales of mobile phones reached close to 305 million units in the second quarter of 2008, a 11.8 percent increase over the second quarter of 2007, according to Gartner, Inc. Sales of mobile phones in the mature markets of Western Europe and North America slightly recovered after a difficult start. Western Europe reached close to 42 million units while North America surpassed 44 million units in the second quarter of 2008."

USDOJ: "Enhanced 911 systems would accommodate calls from Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled phones under rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Electronic 911 (e-911) calls are routed to about 6,000 call centers nationwide (known as public safety answering points) using various technical protocols to identify the caller's location and the appropriate answering point to handle the call. FCC published a notice of proposed rulemaking on August 25, 2008 with the goal of ensuring that voice-over-IP (VOIP) service providers have access to the capabilities they need to provide 911 and e-911 services. FCC officials say the proposed rule is part of their effort to comply with provisions of the New and Emerging Technologies 911 Improvement Act of 2008, which became law on July 23, 2008."

Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload: "Sarah Houghton-Jan explores different strategies for managing and coping with various types of informational overload." Ariadne, Issue 56 July 2008.

Tracking the Terrorists Online, By Yassin Musharbash in Washington, D.C.: "For years, al-Qaida and other terror groups have set up shop in the Internet. Those who track them have covertly followed. The companies SITE and IntelCenter have penetrated even deeper into the terror Web than most intelligence agencies."

Threats to Internet Routing and Global Connectivity, 20th Annual FIRST Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia Canada, June 2008 (69 page presentation) includes discussion of the following topics:

• Physical problems (Physical Infrastructure: Natural, accidental or intentional destruction)
  Earthquakes, Anchors/Backhoes, Hurricanes
• Routing Vulnerabilities (Logical Infrastructure: if routers cannot direct traffic appropriately, the Internet is broken.)
  Misconfigurations, hijacks, attacks
• Business Conflicts (Competitors might not want to exchange traffic.)
  De-peerings
Permanent Link

"TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map 2008 edition includes information for over 120 submarine cable systems, including major systems that are in service as well as announced cable systems expected to join a reinvigorated cable market. All data contained in the map is drawn from our Global Bandwidth Research Service, our definitive guide to the supply, demand and pricing of international bandwidth."

Center for Studying Health System Change: Striking Jump in Consumers Seeking Health Care Information, Tracking Report No. 20, August 2008, Ha T. Tu, Genna Cohen

Pew Internet and American Life Project - Podcast Downloading 2008, 8/28/2008, Mary Madden Sydney Jones

Realizing the Global Promise of the Internet: The Future of Internet Governance, Constance Ledoux Book, Janna Quitney Anderson, Michele Hammerbacher, Anne Nicholson, Dannika Lewis, Eryn Gradwell, August 13, 2008.

"Features include significant security, privacy and developer tools updates."

• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Fact Sheet
  
• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Images

Electronic Media and Youth Violence: A CDC Issue Brief for Educators and Caregivers "focuses on the phenomena of electronic aggression. Electronic aggression is defined as any kind of harassment or bullying that occurs through email, chat rooms, instant messaging, websites, blogs, or text messaging. The brief summarizes what is known about young people and electronic aggression, provides strategies for addressing the issue with young people, and discusses the implications for school staff, education policy makers, and parents and caregivers."

The Kindle for Professional Researchers: DC based journalist Cheryl Miller offers seven good reasons to buy this gadget seemingly tailor-made for dedicated readers, but she also provides caveats worth your attention.

The Government Domain: Back to School for Constitution Day 2008 - E-gov expert Peggy Garvin guides researchers, educators and librarians to key online resources available for teaching, training and educational activities associated with the September 17, 2008 celebration of Constitution Day in the United States.

News release: "The second annual speedmatters.org survey of actual Internet speeds of users nationwide shows that the United States has not made significant improvements in deploying high-speed broadband networks in the past year. Our nation continues to lag behind other industrial nations and currently is ranked 15th in the percentage of residents who have broadband access."

Council on Library and Information Resources, pub 142 - No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century, August, 2008 (74 pages, PDF)

"As personal information becomes more widely available on blogs, MySpace, Facebook and other social networking Web sites, the Internet has become an important tool for jury consultants and trial lawyers. Such sites are a treasure trove of information about potential and seated jurors that can be used in picking the right jurors, bouncing potential jurors and even influencing jurors during trial and in closing arguments. Jury consultants have begun turning to private investigators, some of whom have started niche businesses offering Internet jury research and "personality profiling" of jurors." [National Law Journal, August 11, 2008 - subscription req'd]

"W3C...announced new standards that will make it easier for people to browse the Web on mobile devices. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, published as a W3C Recommendation by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, condenses the experience of many mobile Web stakeholders into practical advice on creating mobile-friendly content. These guidelines will help to improve the experience of people browsing the Web on a wide array of mobile handsets."

"Fuelly is a site that lets you track, share, and compare your gas mileage. Simply sign up, add a car, and begin tracking your mileage. By recording and analyzing your mileage, you can see how much money you can save with small driving changes. You can also see how your mileage compares with EPA estimates and the mileage of other drivers using Fuelly. Tips and a discussion forum also offer ways to save. The site is free to use, so sign up to start tracking your miles today." [via Andy Baio]

"Professors and librarians talk about plagiarism and other issues of academic integrity a lot more than they used to, said Barbie Selby, a university librarian, because research is so much easier to do now. It takes just a couple of clicks to copy and paste a passage from an online source into a paper, rather than going to the library, finding the right books and copying something by hand. Even unintentional mistakes are easier." [Link]

News release: "U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) announced that a number of the largest American internet companies [Microsoft, Google, Yahoo], human rights organizations and other stakeholders have reached agreement on a voluntary code of conduct that would govern internet companies operating in countries where internet freedom is restricted, like China."

Planetary-Scale Views on a Large Instant-Messaging Network, Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz

Abstract: "We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals. The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. From the data, we construct a communication graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges, creating the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date. We report on multiple aspects of the dataset and synthesized graph. We find that the graph is well-connected and robust to node removal. We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by “six degrees of separation” and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6. We find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender."

Instant-Messagers Really Are About Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon
Big Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory, By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post, Saturday, August 2, 2008; A01 - "The "small world theory," embodied in the old saw that there are just "six degrees of separation" between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication. With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances."

News release: "The Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) announced today that their anti-censorship software tools are ready to help journalists and tourists during the Olympics, to circumvent China's Internet blockade. The software, which is available free of charge, can be downloaded onto a hard drive or USB drive to safely and effectively overcome the Internet censorship in China.

In the run-up to Olympics, Beijing tightened control over media and Internet. Overseas web sites that have keywords on Beijing's blacklist are blocked and cannot be visited from China without any "anti-censorship" tools. The decision to block access to these websites is in contravention to Beijing's earlier promises to grant unrestricted Internet access to foreign reporters during the Games, and will seriously impede reporters' ability to do their work in Beijing. Although web restrictions were relaxed to some degree on Friday, it is unclear how long these conditions will last.

In order to overcome these Internet restrictions and gain free access to the Internet in China, the GIFC recommends that journalists and tourists download the free software packages by its partners. All Internet traffic through the tools is encrypted and can successfully bypass the Internet blockades in repressive nations around the world."

RE: Formal Complaint of Free Press and Public Knowledge Against Comcast Corporation for Secretly Degrading Peer-to-Peer Applications; Broadband Industry Practices, Petition of Free Press et al. for Declaratory Ruling that Degrading an Internet Application Violates the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement and Does Not Meet an Exception for “Reasonable Network Management,” File No. EB-08-IH-1518, WC Docket No. 07-52, Memorandum Opinion and Order.

News release: "Comcast Corp.’s management of its broadband Internet networks contravenes federal policies that protect the vibrant and open nature of the Internet, the Federal Communications Commission found [August 1, 2008]. Ruling on a complaint by Free Press and Public Knowledge as well as a petition for declaratory ruling, the Commission concluded that Comcast has unduly interfered with Internet users’ right to access the lawful Internet content and to use the applications of their choice. Specifically, the Commission found that Comcast had deployed equipment throughout its network to monitor the content of its customers’ Internet connections and selectively block specific types of connections known as peer-to-peer connections.

...The Commission’s action today is the result of an exhaustive examination of conduct that was first brought to light by Comcast subscribers who noticed that they had problems using peer-to-peer applications, such as BitTorrent, over their Comcast broadband connections...The Commission’s extensive investigation into this matter – which included two public hearings, substantial input from experts, and thousands of comments from companies, organizations, and the public at large – confirms that Comcast’s interference is far more invasive and widespread than the company first conceded."

Related news from the Electronic Freedom Foundation (FCC): "Hours before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to take action against Comcast for violating the FCC's net neutrality principles, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is releasing "Switzerland," a software tool for customers to test the integrity of their Internet communications."

• For more information and to download the Switzerland software:
• For more about EFF's "Test Your ISP" Project

OECD Ministerial Meeting -- The Future of the Internet Economy, Seoul, Korea, 17-18 June 2008. Shaping Policies for Creativity, Confidence and Convergence in the Digital World

• The Seoul Declaration for the Future of the Internet Economy
  
• Chair's Summary
  
• Shaping policies for the future of the Internet economy
  
• Shaping policies for the future of the Internet economy: Annexes
  (including Recommendations and Guidances)

New York Times: Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?: "Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs...Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends."

InformationWeek: " "More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy. The study, Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design Flaws, examined 214 bank Web sites in 2006. It was conducted by University of Michigan computer science professor Atul Prakash and doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders."

• "In this paper, we examine the prevalence of user-visible security design flaws by looking at sites from 214 U.S. financial institutions. We specifically chose financial websites because of their high security requirements. We found a number of flaws that may lead users to make bad security decisions, even if they are knowledgeable about security and exhibit proper browser use consistent with the site’s security policies. To our surprise, these design flaws were widespread. We found that 76% of the sites in our survey suffered from at least one design flaw. This indicates that these flaws are not widely understood, even by experts who are responsible for web security. Finally, we present our methodology for testing websites and discuss how it can help systematically discover user-visible security design flaws."
  
• Related news, Washington Post. Banks: Losses From Computer Intrusions Up in 2007 - "U.S. financial institutions reported a sizable increase last year in the number of computer intrusions that led to online bank account takeovers and stolen funds, according to data obtained by Security Fix. The data also suggest such incidents are becoming far more costly for banks, businesses and consumers alike. The unusually detailed information comes from a non-public report assembled by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the federal entity that oversees and insures more than 9,000 U.S. financial institutions. The statistics were gathered as part of a routine quarterly survey called the Technology Incident Report, which examines so-called suspicious activity reports (SARs)."

News release: "Worldwide consumer broadband connections will grow from 323 million connections in 2007 to 499 million in 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide consumer broadband connections penetrated 18 percent of households in 2007, and by 2012, households with a broadband connection will reach 25 percent. Five countries exceeded 60 percent broadband penetration into the home in 2007; and, this is expected to grow to 17 countries by 2012. The five countries with broadband penetration into the home above 60 percent are Canada, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Korea and Hong Kong."

"The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a lower court ruling striking down the controversial Child Online Protection Act (COPA) that required Web operators to restrict access to large amounts of constitutionally protected speech. COPA placed severe restrictions on a wide range of legal, socially valuable speech, including content relating to sexual identity, health and art. CDT, which has filed friend-of-the-court briefs opposing COPA and supporting parental empowerment technology, applauds the ruling. July 22, 2008.

• CDT Statement on Ruling July 22, 2008
  
• 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Decision in COPA [PDF] July 22, 2008
  
• CDT Policy Post on COPA March 23, 2007
  
• Related postings on COPA and articles from LLRX.com

Project for Excellence in Journalism: "Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008. It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued." [thanks TM]

• Table of Contents
  
• Full Report - The Changing Newsroom (57 pages, PDF)

Internet for Everyone: "Survey after survey shows American broadband quality and access falling perilously behind countries in Europe and Asia. Getting everyone connected to an open Internet should be a national priority. Click on your state...to learn more about Internet access in your area." [Example - As of 2007, in Maryland 56.1% of homes had broadband]

"Today’s tech-savvy world demands tech-savvy government. Increasingly connected citizens and stakeholders are asking governments to deliver services more rapidly and efficiently. Yet the public service bureaucracies that form the governmental backbone often take a conservative approach to adopting the latest Internet-based technologies to accelerate service delivery. On June 3, 2008, Deloitte and the National Academy of Public Administration convened a group of government leaders, subject matter experts and forward thinkers to develop a road map to help the next administration navigate the work force and organization changes that need to occur to move to a more collaborative model of government." [Note: links to related documents are here]

News release: "Today, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Initiative Statement of Capability Evaluation Report highlighting the Federal government’s rapid progress toward strengthening IT security. This was achieved by reducing external connections, including Internet points of presence from over 4,300 reported in January 2008, to a target of less than one hundred."

Draft Guide to Bluetooth Security, July 9, 2008, SP 800-121.

News release: "Despite a decline in the number of Web sites advertising or selling controlled prescription drugs, like OxyContin and Valium, Xanax and Vicodin, and Ritalin and Adderall, in the past year, 85 percent of Web sites selling such drugs do not require a prescription, according to You’ve Got Drugs! V: Prescription Drug Pushers on the Internet, the fifth annual White Paper on this subject released by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University."

"HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers."

News release: "Some 55% of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a May 2008 survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 47% in early 2007 and 42% in early 2005. Among individuals who use the internet at home, 79% have a high-speed connection while 15% use dialup.

The 17% growth rate from 2007 to 2008 represents is comparable to the 12% growth rate recorded in the 2006 to 2007 timeframe. However, several groups exhibited little or no growth in broadband adoption at home from 2007 to 2008.

• FOIA Facts: My Proposals for the FOIA: Following up on the passage earlier this year of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, FOIA expert Scott A. Hodes make two proposals absent from the law, but which would help FOIA requesters. — Published June 29, 2008
• 60 Gadgets in 60 Minutes - Three techie gurus (Barbara Fullerton, Ed Vawter, and Dina Dreifuerst) take you on a whirlwind, freewheeling virtual trip of the latest, greatest, fun, fanciful, must have gadgets available now and in the near future. — Published June 24, 2008
• Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Sabrina I. Pacifici's revised and updated pathfinder focuses on leveraging selected reliable, focused, free and low cost sites and sources to effectively profile and monitor companies, markets, countries, people, and issues. This guide is a "best of list" of web and database products, services and tools, as well links to reliable sources produced by governments, academia, NGOs, the media and various publishers. — Published June 1, 2008

News release, June 26, 2008: "The Board of ICANN today approved recommendation that could see a whole range of new names introduced to the Internet's addressing system. "The Board today accepted a recommendation from its global stakeholders that it is possible to implement many new names to the Internet, paving the way for an expansion of domain name choice and opportunity" said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN. A final version of the implementation plan must be approved by the ICANN Board before the new process is launched. It is intended that the final version will be published in early 2009.

"The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net," said Dr Twomey. "It's a massive increase in the 'real estate' of the Internet."

Presently, users have a limited range of 21 top level domains to choose from — names that we are all familiar with like .com, .org, .info.

This proposal allows applicants for new names to self-select their domain name so that choices are most appropriate for their customers or potentially the most marketable. It is expected that applicants will apply for targeted community strings such as (the existing) .travel for the travel industry and .cat for the Catalan community (as well as generic strings like .brandname or .yournamehere). There are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based top level domain, like .nyc (for New York City), .berlin and .paris.

Laptop Searches and Other Violations of Privacy Faced by Americans Returning from Overseas Travel, Senate Judiciary Committee
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, June 25, 2008.

Pew Internet news release: "The Library of Congress invited Michael Wesch to deliver the third of four Digital Natives lectures. Wesch, creator of the world-famous YouTube video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, presented the "Anthropology of YouTube" to a packed, fascinated and amused audience on Monday...Wesch said that there are now well over 200,000 three-minute videos posted on YouTube. About half of those videos are posted by 18-24-year-olds."

News release: "Americans 50+ are increasingly becoming immersed in the Internet and in many ways can be compared to users who are decades younger, according to findings from the Center for the Digital Future released today in conjunction with AARP. The study takes a look at online behaviors of those age 50+ compared to the under 50 demographic...The Internet as news source – Users 50+ go online more frequently to check for news compared to those under 20. Forty-two percent of users 50 and older check the Internet for news daily or several times a day, compared to 18 percent of users under 20."

White Space Devices & The Battle Over Innovation: Public Access vs. Industry Control of the Airwaves, By Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation, June 2008

News release: "Fully 46% of all Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. Further, the proportion of Americans going online on a typical day at the tail end of the primary season to get political news or information has more than doubled since a comparable point in the 2004 race—from 8% of all adults in spring 2004 to 17% of all adults in spring 2008."

AP: "Thoroughbred racetracks in the U.S. reported more than three horse deaths a day last year and 5,000 since 2003, and the vast majority were put down after suffering devastating injuries on the track, according to an Associated Press survey."

New York Times: "Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge."

"This is the companion website for the following book. Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. 2008. This "is the first textbook with a coherent treatment of classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering. Written from a computer science perspective, it gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents and of methods for evaluating systems, along with an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. Designed as the primary text for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course in information retrieval, the book will also interest researchers and professionals. A complete set of lecture slides and exercises that accompany the book are available on the web."

Akamai, 1st Quarter 2008 - The State of the Internet Report.

"During the first quarter, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 125 unique countries around the world. China and the United States were the two largest attack traffic sources, accounting for some 30% of this traffic in total. Akamai observed attack traffic targeted at 23 unique network ports. Many of the ports that saw the highest levels of attack traffic were targeted by worms, viruses, and bots that spread across the Internet several years ago. A number of major network “events” occurred during the first quarter that impacted millions of Internet users. Cable cuts in the Mediterranean Sea severed Internet connectivity between the Middle East and Europe, drastically slowing communications. Cogent’s de-peering of Telia
impacted Internet communications for selected Internet users in the United States and Europe for a two-week period. A routing change by Pakistan Telecom that spread across the Internet essentially took YouTube, a popular Internet video sharing site, offline for several hours.

From the poughkeepsiejournal.com, users may search the U.S. forces deaths database for more than 4,500 men and women who have died in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Search fields include: Last name, Home state or province, Service branch, year of death, and conflict (Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom).

Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT): Global Internet Freedom Should Be Top Human Rights and Foreign Policy Priority - "The Congress and Administration should make global Internet freedom a top human rights and foreign policy priority, CDT said today in testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law. The government should closely monitor and report on global Internet freedom and factor progress in this area into criteria for development assistance and conditions for trade agreements. CDT also called for greater cooperation between the U.S. government and the technology industry to better manage human rights risks associated with offering Internet services in repressive countries."

"The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off. Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past." [Microsoft Research]

European Digital Rights: "The European Ministers of Justice and Internal Affairs have agreed to make publishing bomb-making instructions on the Internet a crime...Justice and interior ministers from the EU member states backed a proposal from Commissioner Frattini to harmonise the normative acts that will make the "public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, recruitment, and training for terrorism" a crime. According to the statements of the EU officials publishing these acts on the Internet completed the European legislation in this domain. They described the Internet as "a virtual training camp for militants, used to inspire and mobilise local groups." Gilles de Kerchove, the EU anti-terrorism co-ordinator, declared that there are approx. 5,000 websites that are used to radicalise young people."

• Council of Europe: Why terrorism? Addressing the Conditions Conducive to the Spread of Terrorism, Strasbourg, 25-26 April 2007, Conclusions
  
• EU Project on Cybercrime: Guidelines for the cooperation between law enforcement and internet providers against cybercrime, April 2, 2008 (provisional)

Written Statement of Kevin J. Martin, Chairman Federal Communications Commission Before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing, Future of the Internet, April 22, 2008.

National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA): Households using the Internet in and outside the home, by selected characteristics: Total, Urban, Rural, Principal City, October 2007

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online: "For decades available only to scholars at Cambridge University Library, the private papers of Charles Darwin, one of the most influential scientists in history, can now be seen by anyone online and free of charge. This is the largest ever publication of Darwin papers and manuscripts, totalling about 20,000 items in nearly 90,000 electronic images. This vast and varied collection of papers includes the first draft of his theory of evolution, notes from the voyage of the Beagle and Emma Darwin's recipe book." Readers may also browse the papers here.

"This presentation [April 7, 2008] is an overview of recent data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project about internet use and Web 2.0 activities. It also focuses on the Project's findings about the role of libraries when Americans are trying to solve problems...This presentation covers the highlights from the report issued late last year about library use and the experiences people had at libraries when they went there for problem-solving help."

Jerry Crimmins, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, April 10, 2008: " The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most of its classrooms because of a growing problem of students surfing the Web on laptops during lectures...Law students' use of laptops to surf the Web, read and write e-mail and play computer games during class has brought changes at a number of schools, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford."

News release: AeA, Advancing the Business of Technology - Cyberstates 2008: A Complete State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry (fee)

"This project is an ongoing commitment by Universal McCann to measure consumer usage, attitudes and interests in adopting social media platforms and is the largest exploration of its kind. It aims to provide the facts behind the hype...This report (Wave 3) surveyed 17,000 internet users in 29 countries and was completed in March 2008.

Power to the people, Social Media Tracker, Wave 3.0, March 2008 - Wave 3 Highlights:

Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development. If you are online you are using social media

• Asian markets are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
  
• All social media platforms have grown significantly over the three Waves
  
  Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3
  
  • 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content
    
  • 55% of users have uploaded photos
    
  • 22% of users have uploaded videos
  
  
• Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and as a collective rival any traditional media
  
• 73% have read a blog
  
• The blogsphere is becoming increasingly participatory, now 184m bloggers world-wide
  
• China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers, more than the US and Western Europe combined."

Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium, Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
Tuesday, April 1, 2008. Witness List & Prepared Testimony.

BBC News: How the open net closed its doors - "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering challenges the long-standing assumption that the internet is an unfettered space where citizens from around the world can freely communicate and mobilise. In fact, the book makes it clear that the scope, scale and sophistication of net censorship are growing."

News release: "Many Americans assume that China's internet users are unhappy about their government's control of the internet, but a new survey finds most Chinese say they approve of internet regulation, especially by the government."

"Today is Document Freedom Day: The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with roughly 200 active teams worldwide. It is a day of grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open Standards in general...Open Standards are essential for interoperability and freedom of choice based on the merits of different software applications. They provide freedom from data lock-in and the subsequent vendor lock-in... This makes Open Standards essential for governments, companies, organisations and individual users of information technology.This is where teams will report their activities in 2008."

Still Seeking a Truly Digital Life - Analysis: "The French call it 'dematerialization' but the search for a paperless existence continues to elude even technophiles." Peter Sayer, IDG News Service.

News release: "Sixty-five million Americans depend on broadband services for work, education, entertainment and communications. But too many other Americans have no access to broadband services, according to a new telecom industry survey. Aggravating the country's broadband gap is the current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) definition of broadband, 200 kilobits per second. At that rate, it takes longer to download a movie than to watch it. The survey, commissioned by Tellabs, reflects responses from 451 readers of leading U.S. telecom publications."

News release: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today released new data on high-speed connections to the Internet in the United States. Twice a year, all facilities-based broadband providers are required to report to the Commission basic information about their service offerings and types of customers pursuant to the FCC’s local telephone competition and broadband data gathering program (FCC Form 477). Statistics released today reflect data as of June 30, 2007."

High-Speed Services for Internet Access: Status as of June 30, 2007 - Industry Analysis and Technology Division - Wireline Competition Bureau, March 2008.

• "High-speed lines increased by 22% during the first half of 2007, from 82.8 million to 100.9 million lines in service, following a 27% increase, from 65.3 million to 82.8 million lines, during the second half of 2006. For the full twelve-month period ending June 30, 2007, high-speed lines increased by 55% from 65.3 million to 100.9 million (or 35.7 million lines) compared to a 54% increase, from 42.5 million to 65.3 million lines (or 22.8 million lines), in the twelve-month period ending June 30, 2006."

New York Times: On Thursday [March 20, 2008] Sports Illustrated "will introduce the Vault, a free site within SI.com that contains all the words Sports Illustrated has ever published [over 53 years] and many of the images, along with video and other material, in a searchable database."

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) press release: "Five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions. Despite limited improvements in security in some areas, armed violence is still having a disastrous impact. Civilians continue to be killed in the hostilities. The injured often do not receive adequate medical care. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers."

Carnage and despair: Iraq five years on. Index Number: MDE 14/001/2008. Date Published: 17 March 2008.

Project for Excellence in Journalism - State of the News Media 2008 - Preface: "The State of the News Media 2008 is the fifth edition of our annual report on the health and status of American journalism. Its goal is to gather in one place as much data as possible about all the major sectors of journalism, to identify trends, mark key indicators, note areas for further inquiry and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers...This year, we also offer A Year in the News, a content analysis of more than 70,000 stories from 48 news outlets across five media sectors; a Survey of Journalists, produced with the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press; a Special Report on the Future of Advertising and a content study of Citizen Media Sites, 64 in 15 communities."

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011, March 2008, By International Data Corporation.

VOIP-News: "Email, IM (instant messaging) and even VoIP solutions like Skype and Vonage have taken over communications in both the business and social worlds. These systems work well because they're a much-needed solution for high phone bills, static-filled communications and dropped cell-phone calls. Internet-based communication methods also give users optimum remote access, since all one needs to use VoIP or send an IM is an Internet connection. But with this increase in popularity comes serious security issues. VoIP technology is still relatively new, and hackers are finding new ways to rip off service providers and their customers. Just who might be spying on your online communications? You might be surprised."

Political Knowledge Update: "Public awareness of the number of American military fatalities in Iraq has declined sharply since last August. Today, just 28% of adults are able to say that approximately 4,000 Americans have died in the Iraq war. As of March 10, the Department of Defense had confirmed the deaths of 3,974 U.S. military personnel in Iraq."

"Reporters Without Borders calls on Internet users to come and protest in virtual versions of countries that are Internet enemies...There are 15 countries in this year’s Reporters Without Borders list of “Internet Enemies” - Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. There were only 13 in 2007. The two new additions to the traditional censors are both to be found in sub-Saharan Africa: Zimbabwe and Ethiopia...There is also a supplementary list of 11 “countries under watch.” They are Bahrain, Eritrea, Gambia, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and Yemen."

Byting Back - Regaining Information Superiority Against 21st-Century Insurgents, RAND Counterinsurgency Study - Volume 1, by Martin C. Libicki, David C. Gompert, David R. Frelinger, Raymond Smith.

AARP Report Finds Brand Name Drug Prices Continue to Soar - March 5, 2008: "According to a report released today by AARP, pharmaceutical companies have substantially raised prices on 220 brand name prescription drugs most commonly used by people in Medicare Part D since the implementation of the drug benefit in 2006. AARP has studied drug prices since 2002 and reported the findings in a series of Watchdog reports. Today’s report expands on the series by focusing its analysis on those brand prescription drugs most widely used by people enrolled in Medicare Part D."

"CDT today released a set of privacy principles to help guide the development of software tools related to online behavioral targeting. Developed in consultation with members of CDT's Internet Privacy Working Group (IPWG), the principles aim to bolster the development of tools for Web browsers and other software that empower users with the ability to manage their privacy and control online behavioral tracking activities. The document is a result of meetings with IPWG, sparked by renewed interest in behavioral targeting at the FTC, in the private sector and among consumer groups."

2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey - Over Half of All Employers Combined Fire Workers for E-Mail & Internet Abuse, February 28, 2008

"The Safer Internet plus programme aims to promote safer use of the Internet and new online technologies, particularly for children, and to fight against illegal content and content unwanted by the end-user, as part of a coherent approach by the European Union."

"Women have made great strides in the fight for equality, but gender bias continues to create huge barriers for many—especially immigrants, women of color, women with low incomes, and victims of domestic violence. Women's History Month draws attention to the women who have fought for the rights we have today, and at the same time highlights the ongoing struggles for women's equality, such as ensuring economic and educational opportunities for all women, ending violence against women, and addressing the harms to women and girls caught up in the criminal justice system. Since 1972 the ACLU Women's Rights Project has been working to systematically end discrimination against women and girls and to challenge the obstacles that prevent women and girls from participating fully in all aspects of society."

The Connection Has Been Reset, by James Fallows.

Global Insight: "The existing median home price data, released by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) for the fourth quarter of 2007, show that all but 11 of the 145 metro areas covered by NAR saw quarter-to-quarter declines from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2007. This represents a significant increase in price erosion compared to the third quarter of 2007, in which 80 metros still recorded appreciation quarter-to-quarter. Of the 11 metro areas that saw appreciation in the fourth quarter, only six had consecutive gains in the third and fourth quarters: Kennewick-Richland-Pasco and Yakima in Washington, Oklahoma City, OK, Syracuse, NY, Atlantic City, NJ, and Raleigh, NC.. Aside from the latter two metros, the 11 metros reporting appreciation in the fourth quarter were in the more affordably priced-markets with a median price of less than $200,000 (the U.S. median price was $206,200). The credit crunch has lessened homebuyers' ability to garner higher priced mortgages, putting downward pressure on the median price. The map below shows the quarter-to-quarter change in the existing median price at a compound annual rate."

A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters: Why People First Went Online --and Why They Stayed, by Amy Tracy Wells, Research Fellow, Pew Internet & American Life Project, February 20, 2008

"The American Cancer Society’s annual cancer statistics report finds that death rates from cancer in the United States have decreased by 18.4 percent among men and by 10.5 percent among women since mortality rates began to decline in the early 1990s, which translates to the avoidance of more than half a million cancer deaths (534,500) in the United States. Society epidemiologists predict that in the U.S. in 2008 there will be 1,437,180 new cancer cases (745,180 in men and 692,000 in women) and 565,650 cancer deaths (294,120 among men and 271,530 among women)."

CODENOMICON White Paper - Wireless Security: Past, Present and Future, by Sami Petäjäsoja, Tommi Mäkilä, Mikko Varpiola, Miikka Saukko and Ari Takanen, Version 1.0, February 1st, 2008

Tracking Housing Prices - Why the Numbers Conflict, By David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal Online.

Press release: "Leading investors today published disclosure guidelines for the electric utilities sector which will make it easier for investors to assess and compare the risks and opportunities posed by climate change and climate policy to individual companies. The Global Climate Disclosure Framework for Electric Utilities captures those climate change issues that are relevant specifically for electric
utilities and power generators and provides a unique format for presenting quantitative and qualitative issues in a coherent and consistent way."

Countering Insurgency in the Muslim World - Rethinking U.S. Priorities and Capabilities, by: David C. Gompert, John Gordon, IV, Adam Grissom, David R. Frelinger, Seth G. Jones, Martin C. Libicki, Edward O'Connell, Brooke K. Stearns, Robert E. Hunter.

Creative Commons and Public.Resource.Org announced [February 11, 2008] that the first revision of a substantial corpus of U.S. federal case law is available for download by developers. The files are all clearly marked with the new Creative Commons CCØ label, indicating that the contents are Works of the United States Government and are thus free of copyright or other restrictions for their dissemination and reuse. Developers may access this information here. [This] release covers all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals
decisions from 1950 on. The release is equivalent to 1,858 volumes of case law in book form, a stack of books 348 feet tall. The files have all been converted to the XHTML standard and make extensive use of
CSS style sheets to allow developers to build new search engines and user interfaces."

Pew Hispanic Center: "If current trends continue, immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their descendants will account for 82% of the population growth in the United States during this period, according to new projections from the Pew Research Center. The nation's racial and ethnic mix will change markedly by mid-century, the projections show, with the Hispanic population tripling in size and increasing its share of the total to 29%. Among non-Hispanic race groups, the Asian share will rise to 9%, the black share will hold steady at 13% and the white share will fall to 47%."

New York Times: Pushing Paper Out the Door, by Hannah Fairfield

Audubon Naturalist Society: "Gardeners have long wanted pots made of biogradable and renewable materials. And now, at least for seedling pots, this alternative exists: CowPots™, invented by two Connecticut dairy farmers, are durable fiber pots made of cow poo. So far, though, these odorless pots are only available to us online."

"You've heard about global warming with its subsequent impending ecological disasters, but what's the real story? By connecting you with scientists in the field, current news and visual representations of data from NOAA and NASA, Earth Live will explore climate change and its consequences. The layers that spin across the globe are gathered over the latest 30 days giving you a near-real time glimpse of the state of the earth."

"The Committee for Economic Development (CED)...released a new report – Harnessing Openness to Transform American Health Care (94 pages, PDF) – that focuses on how to improve health care by giving people more access to information and making the information more responsive to their contributions. The report touches on the entire production system for health care from biomedical research to clinical trials to electronic health care records and patient/doc interactions. It also addresses open access publishing of research results and access to clinical trial data, openness in public health, the impact of greater openness on approval of medical devices, and open models of innovation. The report was prepared by CED's Digital Connections Council (DCC). The DCC is a group of information technology experts from CED-affiliated companies established to advise CED on the policy issues associated with the digital economy and emerging technologies. This report follows the late 2007 release of CED’s report, Quality, Affordable Health Care For All: Beyond The Employer-based Health-insurance System, which includes findings and recommendations on health care reform from CED."

Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization, A White Paper by Oya Y. Rieger, February, 2008. 52 pp. Published by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

"A joint project of the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Progress & Freedom Foundation tracks more than 30 pieces of federal legislation that seek to protect children online, some of which pose serious threats to free speech. The reports released today summarize and categorize child online safety bills introduced in the 110th Congress, analyze free speech implications of key bills, and provide recommendations to Congress on how it can promote child online safety without impinging on First Amendment rights. February 06, 2008."

Information Economy Report 2007-2008 (386 pages, PDF): "The Information Economy Report 2008 - Science and technology for development: the new paradigm of ICT, analyses the current and potential contribution of information technology to knowledge creation and diffusion. It explores how ICTs help generate innovations that improve the livelihoods of the poor and support enterprise competitiveness. The report examines how ICTs affect productivity and growth and reflects on the need for a development-oriented approach to intellectual property rights in order to enable effective access to technology. ICT has also given rise to new models for sharing knowledge and collective production of ideas and innovations, known as "open access" models, which often bypass the incentive system provided by intellectual property rights."

"China’s onerous media restrictions, the erosion of press freedom in African democracies, the criminalization of journalism in central Asia, and the use of vague “antistate” charges to jail journalists worldwide are among the troubling trends revealed in the new edition of Attacks on the Press."

Fact Sheet: "The Connectivity Scorecard is a groundbreaking new global information and communications technology (ICT) measure that ranks countries on the approximately 30 indicators of connectivity -- including broadband, fixed-line, mobile and computing technologies -- that contribute to the enhancement of a country’s social and economic prosperity. The Scorecard was created by Leonard Waverman, professor of economics at London Business School, and conducted under his direction by economic consulting firm LECG. It was commissioned by Nokia Siemens Networks to examine the contribution of connectivity to economic growth and positive social outcomes, and to draw conclusions from how individual countries score on the Index."

Washingtonpost.com" - Zip Code 'Redlining': A Sweeping View of Risk, By Kenneth R. Harney, February 2, 2008. "Critics call it the new redlining: Many of the country's largest mortgage lenders are imposing loan restrictions in entire counties or Zip codes that they rank as risky or "declining."

• How one clumsy ship cut off the web for 75 million people: "A flotilla of ships may have been dispatched to reinstate the broken submarine cable that has left the Middle East and India struggling to communicate with the rest of the world, but it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions."


• The internet's undersea world - "The vast majority of the world's communications are not carried by satellites but by an altogether older technology; cables under the earth's oceans. As a ship accidentally wipes out Asia's net access, this map shows how we rely on collections of wires of less than 10cm diameter to link us all together."


• Effects of Fibre Outage through Mediterranean, by Les Cottrell and Qasim Lone [both of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center]: "On January 31st, 2008, the NY Times, BBC, The Guardian, CNN and many others reported undersea cable cuts in the Mediterranean. One was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and another in the waters off Marseille, France. The two cables were damaged within hours of each other on Wednesday morning of January 30th 2008. Operators believe the damage was caused by ship's anchors during a heavy storm at sea. One of the cables, Sea Me We 4, is owned by 16 telecommunications companies along its route. The second cable, known as the Flag (for Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe) System, runs from Britain to Japan. The cables are separately managed and operated. The outages mainly affected the Middle East and Asia. Most disrupted communications were quickly rerouted through the remaining SEAMEW3 cable or fibres taking the other way around the globe. The cables involved are shown in the Telegeography map below. There are also world maps from Telegeography and Alcatel."

Solove, Daniel J., "The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet". The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, Daniel J. Solove, Yale University Press, October 2007 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1019177

Press release, February 1, 2008: "Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008."

"GreenPrint World is a free version of GreenPrint software for home users worldwide. GreenPrint solves a problem nearly every computer user has experienced: The wasteful pages that seem only to appear after a document has been printed (for example, pages with just a URL, banner ad, legal jargon, or a run-over Excel column). GreenPrint does this by analyzing the document and then highlighting and removing unnecessary pages. GreenPrint also incorporates an easy to use PDF writer, a print preview called GreenView, and a reporting feature, which keeps track of the number of pages, trees, and money saved."

A Blueprint for Big Broadband, An EDUCAUSE White Paper by John Windhausen Jr., President, Telepoly Consulting, January 2008.

Bush Order Expands Network Monitoring - Intelligence Agencies to Track Intrusions, by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post: "President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community's role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies' computer systems. The directive, whose content is classified, authorizes the intelligence agencies, in particular the National Security Agency, to monitor the computer networks of all federal agencies -- including ones they have not previously monitored."

What if the Internet went down...and didn't come back up? By Lynn Greiner, CIO.com, 01/22/08

Top 60 Little-Known Technology Web Sites, By Charles Babcock, Thomas Claburn, John Foley, W. David Gardner, Antone Gonsalves, Nicholas J. Hoover, K.C. Jones, Elena Malykhina, Richard Martin, Paul McDougall, Marianne McGee, Chris Murphy, Cora Nucci, Art Wittman, and Serdar Yegulalp, InformationWeek, January 26, 2008

Press release, December 10, 2007 - "The way communicators dispense information is out of sync with the way consumers use media, according to Media, Myths & Realities, a comprehensive survey of media usage among consumers and communications professionals conducted by global public relations firm Ketchum and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center. Advice from family and friends is the No. 1 source that consumers turn to when making a variety of decisions – ranging from purchasing consumer electronics to planning a vacation – and advice from an expert rates highest when making medical decisions and purchases based on a product’s environmental impact. Despite the strong evidence that friends, family and experts play a key role in influencing decisions, only 24 percent of communicators report having a word-of-mouth program in place."

Press release: "W3C...published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web. The HTML Working Group is creating HTML 5 to be the open, royalty-free specification for rich Web content and Web applications. The group operates entirely in public with nearly five hundred participants, including representatives from W3C Members ACCESS, AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera."

"A new Institute of Medicine report, Knowing What Works in Health Care: A Roadmap for the Nation, provides a blueprint for a national program to assess the effectiveness of clinical services and to provide credible, unbiased information about what really works in health care. The report recommends that Congress direct the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to establish a program with the authority, expertise and resources necessary to set priorities for evaluating clinical services and to conduct systematic reviews of the evidence. The program would also develop and promote rigorous standards for creating clinical practice guidelines, which could help minimize use of questionable services and target services to the patients most likely to benefit."

WSJ: "The Wall Street Journal's Web site, WSJ.com, will keep a significant portion of its content behind its paid-subscription wall, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said Thursday."

"The State of the World’s Children 2008 assesses the state of child survival and primary health care for mothers, newborns and children today. These issues serve as sensitive barometers of a country’s development and wellbeing and as evidence of its priorities and values. Investing in the health of children and their mothers is a human rights imperative and one of the surest ways for a country to set its course towards a better future."

"Citizens can now track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates with free widgets for blogs, social networking pages, and personal web sites. MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group, released today customizable widgets – portable chunks of code that allow content to be displayed on any web page – that make political fundraising more transparent. Bloggers and reporters will be able to easily share the campaign finance data for any number of congressional races with their audiences." [Peggy Garvin]

"The California Broadband Task Force today released its final findings and recommendations in a report to the Governor and Legislature. The report, The State of Connectivity: Building Innovation Through Broadband, represents the culmination of more than a year of work by the Task Force, including maps of current broadband availability and speed, recommendations to achieve universal access and increased use, and a timeframe in which to meet these critical goals."

"The MoneyTree Report is a quarterly study of venture capital investment activity in the United States. As a collaboration between PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based upon data from Thomson Financial, it is the only industry-endorsed research of its kind. The MoneyTree Report is the definitive source of information on emerging companies that receive financing and the venture capital firms that provide it. The study is a staple of the financial community, entrepreneurs, government policymakers and the business press worldwide."

Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, January 9, 2008.

PC World: "Get to your favorite folders in a snap. Stream TV stations from around the globe. Add new power to Internet Explorer. All this and more, and all of it for free." by Scott Dunn.

Grants and Investments: "As of January 2008, Google.org has committed $75.4 million in grants and investments to further our five initiatives."

"The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School is pleased to present the results [full report/purchase only] of the seventh year of our project, Surveying the Digital Future [highlights]. The seven years of longitudinal research comprise an absolutely unique data base that completely captures broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and, now, social networking. This year's report contains a large module looking at on-line communities and social networking in great detail. Readers can compare the social networking data and correlate it to seven years of attitudes and behaviors on-line. As usual, the report continues to track off-line media use, purchasing both off-line and through e-commerce, social and political activity and a wealth of other data."

Press release: "A new report, commissioned by the UKL JISC [Joint Information Systems Committee] and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web. The report by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to asses the information that they find on the web. The report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future [11 January 2008] also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors. 'These findings add to our growing understanding of subjects that should concern all who work in further and higher education – the changing needs of our students and researchers and how libraries can meet their needs.'

The study calls for libraries to respond urgently to the changing needs of researchers and other users and to understand the new means of searching and navigating information. Learning what researchers want and need is crucial if libraries are not to become obsolete, the report warns."

Press release: "A new study showing that the heavily advertised cholesterol drug Vytorin doesn’t work any better than a newly available generic drug in slowing artery-clogging calls into question who should be taking the most potent cholesterol drugs. “This study gives us another important piece of the puzzle in the treatment of high cholesterol and heart disease risk,” said Steven Findlay, managing editor of Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs, a public information and education project of Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports. “While the results are not conclusive, they should compel doctors and patients to ask just who should be taking the strongest cholesterol lowering drugs.”

Ceres press release: "While encouraging progress is being made, the banking sector still has a long way to go in confronting the business challenges posed by global climate change, according to a first-ever report issued today by the Ceres investor coalition that analyzes climate change governance practices of 40 of the world’s largest banks...The report found that a growing number of European, U.S. banks and Japanese banks are responding to the risks and opportunities presented by climate change, primarily by setting internal greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets, boosting climate-related equity research and elevating lending and financing for clean energy projects. But many others are still not addressing climate change and only a handful of the 40 banks have begun integrating climate risks into their core business of lending by pricing carbon into their finance decisions or setting targets to reduce GHG emissions in their lending portfolios.."
Bank Profiles:

"This website is a companion to The Buying of the President 2008. Like the book, this site explores the roles that money and special interests play in presidential politics. But unlike the book, which will provide a behind-the-scenes examination of how big money influences the presidential election process, this site is a work in progress — a continually updated window into the 2008 race that’s also richly supplemented with details, insights, and revelations from previous campaigns and, where feasible, those who engineered them. In addition to details about the 2008 candidates and their political benefactors, for example, the site includes everything from a history of money in presidential politics to in-depth, on-the-record interviews with current and former presidential candidates, consultants and strategists, donors and fundraisers, and academics who have studied the intricacies of the political system. What’s more, the site offers the Center for Public Integrity’s complete body of work on presidential elections, most notably cover-to-cover, full-text-searchable copies of the three previous books in the Buying of the President series."

Scientific American: Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not. By M. Mitchell Waldrop: "The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations such as e-commerce, blogging, downloading and open-source software have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business. Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers--and not just the younger ones--have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement--yet--their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive."

Pew Research Center Report: Internet's Broader Role in Campaign 2008 - Social Networking and Online Videos Take Off, Released: January 11, 2008

New York Times - The Afterlife of Cellphones: "Americans threw out just shy of three million tons of household electronics in 2006. This so-called e-waste is the fastest-growing part of the municipal waste stream and, depending on your outlook, either an enormous problem or a bonanza. E-waste generally contains substances that, though safely sequestered during each product’s use, can become hazardous if not handled properly when disposed. Those products also hold bits of precious metals like silver, copper, platinum and gold."

"HealthyCar.org is based on research conducted by the Ecology Center that looks at the presence of key hazardous chemicals in vehicles and child car seats. While there are numerous substances in vehicles that can lead to health and environmental problems, HealthyCar.org focuses on bromine, chlorine, lead, as well as some other heavy metals, allergens and carcinogens. All of these substances were chosen because of their toxicity, persistence, and/or tendency to build up in people and the environment. All of them have also been subject to regulatory restrictions and/or voluntary limits set by industry associations or third party certification organizations.

HealthyCar.org includes test results from over 200 of the most popular vehicles in the U.S. market from the 2006 and 2007 model years. In each vehicle, 15 different components were sampled using a portable, hand-held X-Ray Fluoresence (XRF) spectrometry device. The components sampled include: steering wheel, shift knob, armrest/center console, dashboard, headliner, carpet, seat front, seat back, seat base, hard door-trim, soft door-trim, body sealer, wiring, window seal and wheel weights."

Press release: "Becta [British Educational Communications and Technology Agency], the education technology agency, has published a key report on Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 and on document interoperability which analyses the suitability of both software packages for adoption by schools and colleges."

Press release: "In October 2006, the Transportation Security Administration launched a website to help travelers whose names were erroneously listed on airline watch lists. This redress website had multiple security vulnerabilities: it was not hosted on a government domain; its homepage was not encrypted; one of its data submission pages was not encrypted; and its encrypted pages were not properly certified. These deficiencies exposed thousands of American travelers to potential identity theft. After an internet blogger identified these security vulnerabilities in February 2007, the website was taken offline and replaced by a website hosted on a Department of Homeland Security domain. At the request of Chairman Henry Waxman, Committee staff have been investigating how TSA could have launched a website that violated basic operating standards of web security and failed to protect travelers’ sensitive personal information. As this report describes, these security breaches can be traced to TSA’s poor acquisition practices, conflicts of interest, and inadequate oversight."

Press release: "The Library of Congress and Microsoft Corp. have signed a cooperative agreement that will change the way Library visitors experience history. The joint technology initiative will electronically deliver the Library’s immense collection of historical artifacts to patrons visiting its Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C., and will allow unparalleled and immersive interactive experiences that will bring the institution’s vast historical collections and exhibits to life–on-site and online–through the upcoming myloc.gov Web site."

Pew Internet Project Data Memo, Video Sharing Websites, January 9, 2008: "The audience for YouTube and other internet video sites has risen sharply the past year. Nearly half of online adults now say they have visited such sites. On a typical day at the end of 2007, the share of internet users going to video sites was nearly twice as large as it had been at the end of 2006."

"Science and technology (S&T) play increasingly important roles in our society and for those who govern. From energy policy to the environment, from health care to economic competitiveness, and from science education to immigration, S&T research and its products are critical to many issues on the agendas of Congress and the Executive Branch. Yet, very little of the campaign coverage and candidates' discussion focuses on S&T issues. In response, the AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] Center for Science, Technology and Congress, with support from the Lounsbery Foundation, has created this Web site as a resource on candidates' S&T positions, and to provide the research community with a vehicle for informing the candidates on emerging S&T issues. The Web site includes news updates, highlights of and links to candidates' S&T statements and positions, links to other S&T presidential projects, reports, surveys, and events."

"In a Commonwealth Fund-supported study comparing preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries, researchers found that the United States placed last. While the other nations improved dramatically between the two study periods—1997–98 and 2002–03—the U.S. improved only slightly on the measure."

Current notions of defence, foreign affairs, intelligence and development are redundant in the new security environment... National Security for the Twenty-first Century, Charlie Edwards, DEMOS: "The government remains structured around functions and services with separate budgets for defence, foreign affairs, intelligence and development. Whitehall departments, intelligence agencies and the police forces that make up the security architecture have changed very little in the past two decades, despite the end of the Cold War and the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. Based on a 12 month research project, this pamphlet sets out an approach to national security drawing on reforms and innovations from governments elsewhere in Europe and the United States and suggests some new ideas designed to shape the future of the national security architecture."

How the World Rates Women as Leaders, by Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Research Associate, Pew Global Attitudes Project, December 5, 2007: "The countries of Western Europe, North America and Latin America generally include the highest proportions of respondents who rate men and women as equally good political leaders. Roughly two-thirds in [Argentina - with the country's first woman president] (68%) express that view, while 17% say men are better leaders and 9% prefer women. In the United States, fully three-quarters say men and women make equally good political leaders, and that opinion is even more widespread in Western Europe."

Background: "The proposed architecture of the 787 is different from that of existing production (and retrofitted) airplanes. It allows new kinds of passenger connectivity to previously isolated data networks connected to systems that perform functions required for the safe operation of the airplane. Because of this new passenger connectivity, the proposed data network design and integration may result in security vulnerabilities from intentional or unintentional corruption of data and systems critical to the safety and maintenance of the airplane. The existing regulations and guidance material did not anticipate this type of system architecture or electronic access to aircraft systems that provide flight critical functions. Furthermore, 14 CFR regulations and current system safety assessment policy and techniques do not address potential security vulnerabilities that could be caused by unauthorized access to aircraft data buses and servers. Therefore, special conditions are imposed to ensure that security, integrity, and availability of the aircraft systems and data networks are not compromised by certain wired or wireless electronic connections between airplane data buses and networks." Federal Register: January 2, 2008 (Volume 73, Number 1)][Rules and Regulations][Page 27-29]

"In January 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a donation of a photograph album. The inscription "Auschwitz 21.6.1944" on its first page signaled the uniqueness of the album—there are very few wartime photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, which included Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi killing center. Though his name does not appear anywhere in the album, the dates of the photographs and various decorations including adjutant cords on the uniform of the album's owner, indicate that the album almost certainly belonged to and was created by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. Höcker was stationed at Auschwitz from May 1944 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945."

America's Best Big Companies: "This is our 10th year of selecting the 400 Best Big Companies in America. Our methodology for choosing the winners is so stringent that 165 companies from last year's 400 did not make the cut for 2008. Not only must companies pass our benchmarks for financial growth rates and returns, but they must also meet our approval for their corporate governance, accounting standards and background checks."

New Study on Copyright and Creativity from the Center for Social Media, Posted by Hugh DAndrade: "Free video hosting sites like YouTube, Yahoo! Video, and Daily Motion are enabling creators to share video instantly with millions of viewers around the world. A new report from the Center for Social Media takes a close look at these user generated sites, and finds that there is much more at stake than the SNL and Daily Show clips often referenced in the usual Viacom v. YouTube debates on copyright infringement. Recut, Reframe, Recycle shows that far from simply uploading content, more and more users are remixing prior works to create new (and often surprising) works of transformative creativity. Users are borrowing from film, television, and pop culture at large to create parodies and satires, commentaries, pastiche, quotations, as well as archives of important work that cannot be shown due to copyright restriction. By illustrating each category with some of the best examples of user-generated content from the past few years, the study attempts to clarify "the difference between quoting for new cultural creation and simple piracy."

Google Docs Blog: "It's been two months since we launched Google Presentations and already we've got new toys [Link to the presentation detailing the new features]...Embeddable Presentations, Importing slides from other presentations, Drag and drop image insertion, Rearranging slides, Changing the background, Prettier toolbar."

"The European Library launched a new version of its website on the 4th of December; the changes involve significant lay-out improvements and reflect a constant care for understanding user needs. It also introduces the latest partners’ collections and the first The European Library web-exhibition."

"The Institute of Medicine report Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care said that racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive lower-quality health care than whites do, even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable. It recommends first and foremost to increase awareness about racial and ethnic disparities in health care among the general public, health care providers, insurance companies, and policymakers. Consistency and equity of care also should be promoted through the use of "evidence-based" guidelines to help providers and health plans make decisions about which procedures to order or pay for based on the best available science."

Association of Insurance with Cancer Care Utilization and Outcomes,
Elizabeth Ward, PhD, Michael Halpern, MD, PhD, Nicole Schrag, MSPH, Vilma Cokkinides, PhD, MSPH, Carol DeSantis, MPH, Priti Bandi, MS, Rebecca Siegel, MPH, Andrew Stewart, MA and Ahmedin Jemal, DVM, PhD. CA Cancer J Clin, January 1, 2008; 58(1): 7 - 8.

"TechPresident presents our 2007 Campaign Web Index, a year-end study of which campaigns are best at using the various elements of the web. For the survey we've tapped the very brightest minds working in tech and politics, who happen to be our own bloggers and other friends (some respondents have asked to remain anonymous). Check out their votes and opinions for who's best at online video, advertising, social networking, rapid response, and much more. Some of their responses may surprise you, and some may be entirely predictable."

"TechPresident presents our 2007 Campaign Web Index, a year-end study of which campaigns are best at using the various elements of the web. For the survey we've tapped the very brightest minds working in tech and politics, who happen to be our own bloggers and other friends (some respondents have asked to remain anonymous). Check out their votes and opinions for who's best at online video, advertising, social networking, rapid response, and much more. Some of their responses may surprise you, and some may be entirely predictable."

Internet2 and Libraries - Serving Your Communities at the Speed of Light, by James Werle and Louis Fox.

"The gethuman™ movement has been created from the voices of millions of consumers who want to be treated with dignity when they contact a company for customer support." The gethuman 500 database, regularly updated, includes telephone numbers for customer service contacts in the following sectors, located in the United States: automotive, credit, finance, government, hardware, insurance, internet, mobile, pharmacy, products, shipping, software, telco, travel, TV/satellite, and utilities.

"Each year since 1997, the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International have undertaken what has now become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The Privacy & Human Rights Report surveys developments in 70 countries, assessing the state of surveillance and privacy protection. The most recent report published in 2007 is probably the most comprehensive single volume report published in the human rights field. The report runs over 1,100 pages and includes 6,000 footnotes. More than 200 experts from around the world have provided materials and commentary. The participants range from eminent privacy scholars to high-level officials charged with safeguarding constitutional freedoms in their countries. Academics, human rights advocates, journalists and researchers provided reports, insight, documents and advice. In 2006 Privacy International took the decision to use this annual report as the basis for a ranking assessment of the state of privacy in all EU countries together with eleven non-EU benchmark countries."

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Information Searches That Solve Problems, 12/30/2007

The State of the Media Democracy: Are You Ready for the Future of Media?: "To shed light on how different generations are “consuming” media — and what their future media preferences are likely to be — Deloitte & Touche USA LLP’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) practice commissioned an extensive survey on the evolving role of media in America. This State of the Media Democracy survey offers a generational reality check on the usage of current media platforms/devices and what the future may hold. Fielded by Harrison Group (an independent research services firm) from February 23 through March 6, 2007, the survey used an online methodology to collect information from 2,200 U.S. consumers between the ages of 13 and 75."

"CDT has created a list to alert consumers about music download Web sites that charge fees and claim a large selection, but do not appear to have obtained licenses to ensure that users' downloads from the site are legal. Consumers looking to download music lawfully for the new computers and MP3 players they receive this holiday season may want to check CDT's list before paying money to unfamiliar but legitimate-looking music services. CDT hopes that warning consumers about these sites can help avoid confusion and promote the continued growth of the lawful online music market."

All the best wishes for a wonderful holiday season.

Clay Johnson III, OMB: "I am announcing the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative to optimize our individual network services into a common solution for the federal government. This common solution facilitates the reduction of our external connections, including our Internet points of presence, to a target of fifty. Additionally, the role of the US-CERT will be enhanced to improve our response capabilities. Each agency will be required to develop a comprehensive plan of action and milestones (POA&M) with a target completion date of June 2008. Initial agency POA&Ms must be sent to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) by January 8, 2008, for review and agreement with OMB, DHS, and the agency."

Online Journalism Review: As the U.S. approaches the 2008 Presidential voting, website journalists are using interactive graphics to provide coverage at a glance, by Robert Niles: "Every election cycle inspires innovation at newspaper websites. This year, leading U.S. newspapers are offering some stunning online graphic tools to help their readers get an overview of the many elements of the campaign, at a glance."

Official Google Blog: "Here's a suggestion for everyone to save energy over the holidays (and at other times!): turn off your computer and monitor or put them into "sleep" mode when you're not using them. Why? The typical desktop PC uses 100-200 watts even when it's idle. That's the equivalent of 1-2 bright incandescent (read: inefficient) light bulbs. (Note: new PCs that comply with the latest Energy Star specifications consume less than 50-60 watts when idle.) You wouldn't leave your car running for hours when it's just sitting there. Most of us wouldn't leave a bright light bulb burning for hours when no one is nearby to need the light. So why leave your computer on? If you're leaving your office for the holidays, turn off your PC. If it consumes 100 watts, that will save 2.4 kWh/day, or over 25 kWh for the next 11 days through January 1st. In California, that will stop about 40 kg of CO2 from being put into the air, and save about $2.50. For every 1 million people who do this, that will stop 40,000 tonnes (metric tons) of CO2 from being emitted, and save $2.5 million. In many areas, it will reduce emissions even further, and save even more money. The same issue applies at home: turn off your computer or put it to sleep when you're not using it. The automatic power management settings on most computers will put them to sleep automatically after a specified idle period."

Washington Post: "The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad. Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law."

The Inquirer: "Norway's Government has mandated that its websites must use Open Document Format (ODF) for files published for use by the Norwegian public.

"The government has decided that all information on governmental websites should be available in the open formats HTML, PDF or ODF. With this decision the times when public documents where only available in Microsoft's Word-format is coming to an end. "'Everybody should have equal access to public information. From 2009 the citizens will be able to chose which software to use in order to gain access to public information. The government's decision will also improve the competition between suppliers of office applications,' says IT-minister Heidi Grande Røys."

Press release: "...in a statement to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the American Library Association (ALA) addressed the critical yet unacknowledged role public libraries play in delivering E-government services to the American people. Increasingly, government agencies refer individuals to their local public libraries for assistance and access to the Internet for citizen-government interactions. Yet public libraries are not considered members of the E-government team. ALA's statement (PDF), for the Committee's hearing on E-government, highlighted the stress these E-government services are placing on public libraries' infrastructure and suggested taking steps toward creating a partnership between public libraries and the government in order to improve E-government delivery to citizens."

Center for Social Development, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Surveying Internet Usage in China, and its Impact in Seven Chinese Cities, Report by Professor Guo Liang, CASS, November 2007 (126 pages, PDF)

IBM Reveals Five Innovations that Will Change Our Lives Over the Next Five Years: "Unveiled today, the second annual "IBM Next Five in Five" is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The list is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that could make these innovations possible."

Press release: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today concluded its quadrennial review of the broadcast ownership rules. The Commission amended the 32-year-old absolute ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership by crafting an approach that would presumptively allow a newspaper to own one television station or one radio station in the 20 largest markets, subject to strict criteria and limitations. The newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule currently prohibits common ownership of a broadcast station and a daily newspaper in the same market. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Court), affirmed the Commission’s determination that this blanket ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership was no longer in the public interest while remanding the specific cross-media ownership limits drawn by the Commission in 2003. The Court agreed that “…reasoned analysis supports the Commission’s determination that the blanket ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership was no longer in the public interest.”

The State of State Disclosure: An Evaluation of Online Public Information About Economic Development Subsidies, Procurement Contracts and Lobbying Activities by Philip Mattera, Karla Walter, Julie Farb Blain and Michelle Lee, November 2007, (Revised 11/19/07), Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First.

"Cancer will claim 7.6 million lives worldwide this year, and more than 12 million people will receive cancer diagnoses, according to Global Cancer Facts and Figures 2007, the newest edition to the American Cancer Society's family of Facts and Figures reports. The report, based on data compiled by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), reveals disparities in how cancer affects the developed and developing world. Infection plays a greater role in shaping cancer incidence in developing countries, where the number of infection-related cancers is 3 times higher than in developed nations."

Press release: "Forty-seven percent of internet users have searched for their own name online, but few monitor their online presence with great regularity. Fifty-three percent of internet users have searched online for information about personal and business contacts. These findings represent a significant change from when the Pew Internet Project first reported on this activity in 2002, at which time 22% of internet users had searched online for their own name."

New York Times: Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft - "The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict."

Follow up to December 13, 2007 posting Senator George J. Mitchell Releases Report on Major League Baseball Investigation, this news: "A free, searchable database of The Mitchell Report has been released by askSam Systems. The askSam database contains a full-text searchable archive of George J. Mitchell's report to the commissioner of baseball on the investigation into steroid and other performance enhancing substance use by players in Major League Baseball."

Nuclear Power in a Warming World - Findings and Recommendations in Brief: "Global warming demands a profound transformation in the ways we generate and consume energy. Because nuclear power results in few global warming emissions, an increase in nuclear power could help reduce global warming—but it could also increase the threats to human safety and security. The risks include a massive release of radiation due to a power plant meltdown or terrorist attack, and the death of hundreds of thousands due to the detonation of a nuclear weapon made with materials obtained from a civilian nuclear power system. Minimizing these risks is simply pragmatic: nothing will affect the public acceptability of nuclear power as much as a serious nuclear accident, a terrorist strike on a reactor or spent fuel pool, or the terrorist detonation of a nuclear weapon made from stolen nuclear reactor materials."

Press release: "Vital government information appears “invisible” to millions of Americans who are combing the Internet and looking for answers via the most popular search engines, according to a report released today by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OMB Watch. The report, Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found through Commercial Search Engines, highlights the shortcomings some federal agencies exhibit when trying to comply with the mandates of the E-Government Act of 2002, a landmark law that promotes access to government information and services."

"This edition of eJournal USA presents an introduction to the upcoming 2008 U.S. elections. In these elections, U.S. voters will have the opportunity to vote for president and vice president, congressional representatives, state and local officials, and ballot initiatives. The journal describes aspects of this election which make it different from most recent elections and includes a pro-con debate of the Electoral College."

Acceptance Speech, Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize in Literature 2007, December 7, 2007: "...We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers. What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc."

"This week the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider a number of online safety bills that pose significant risks for free speech and innovation on the Internet. No less than seven bills relating to online safety are in play in Congress this week; CDT today released an analysis of each. CDT supports S. 2344, which promote online safety education, and H.R. 719, which focuses Internet restrictions on sex offenders who might pose risks to children online. CDT strongly opposes all or portions of five other bills now pending in the Senate."

Press release: "A new study released today by the Newspaper National Network LP reports that Newspaper Website Users are 52% more likely to be “Influencers,” based on the MRI definition, as compared with Newspaper Website Non-Users. Study findings highlight the power Newspaper Website Users have to shape opinions about new products, technologies, and issues. Adults who use Newspaper Websites and read printed newspapers influence 18 people, on average, weekly 38% more than the web user who does not use a newspaper website (13 people average per week). Immediate family, friends and co-workers are core beneficiaries within their influence circle."

Trafficking in human beings: Internet recruitment. Misuse of the Internet for the recruitment of victims of trafficking in human beings, prepared by Athanassia P. Sykiotou, Lecturer in Criminology, Faculty of Law, Democritus University of Thrace (Greece). Directorate General of Human Rights and Legal Affairs Council of Europe 2007. (150 pages, PDF)

Via OpenCRS - CRS Report, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Issues for Congress, December 5, 2007 (27 pages, PDF).

Role of Health Insurance Coverage in Women's Access to Prescription Medicines: "This article presents findings from the 2004 Kaiser Women's Health Survey examining how health insurance coverage affects access to prescription medicines for non-elderly women. Results from the nationally representative telephone survey indicate that a lack of health insurance coverage is significantly associated with experiencing cost barriers to prescription medications, regardless of income level. These findings underscore the important role that insurance coverage plays in protecting women from out-of-pocket costs and for accessing prescription medicines....It was published in the journal Women's Health Issues.

A Report of the California Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery (CA ACTS) Task Force

How the World Rates Women as Leaders by Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Research Associate, Pew Global Attitudes Project, December 5, 2007: "On December 10, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner will be inaugurated as Argentina's first female president. The senator and first lady will join 11 other women who currently serve as their countries' presidents or prime ministers, including Michelle Bachelet in neighboring Chile. But while women worldwide are making gains in all levels of government, the most recent Pew Global Attitudes survey of 46 countries and the Palestinian territories finds that publics around the world express mixed opinions about women and political leadership."

Press release: "A report released today by the Washington, DC-based National Environmental Trust demonstrates that many U.S. states individually emit more greenhouse gases than hundreds of developing nations combined. The report, Taking Responsibility: Why the United States Must Lead the World in Reducing Global Warming Pollution (99 pages, PDF) compares annual state emissions data to that of developing and developed nations, graphically illustrating the scope of individual U