February 7, 2012
Before the Web blacked out to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) — the Internet-censorship bills that faced massive opposition online — there was another SOPA blackout. This one came courtesy of the TV news networks, which almost uniformly ignored SOPA and PIPA until it was...
February 3, 2012
Arizona State University might need to change its name to Censorship U after deciding to block students’ access to popular petition site Change.org.
Change.org happens to be hosting a petition created by ASU student Eric Haywood that protests rising...
January 31, 2012
Remember Carrier IQ, the company that makes the secret spying software that’s installed on more than 140 million phones? You know, the software that can record our most sensitive personal data?
Cellphone companies including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile use Carrier IQ to track what smartphone users are doing...
January 24, 2012
People inside the D.C. bubble often tell stories about lavish fundraisers and the use of campaign cash to shore up votes in Congress. Conspiracy theories about who uses their PAC money, or direct contributions, to bend the ear of powerful committee chairmen and party leaders circulate throughout the capital faster than the Metro.
Still, the stories are usually hard to substantiate, and publicly members of Congress and their staffs are quick to deny that money has any influence at all...
Under the leadership of our friends at New Mexico’s Media Literacy Project, ninth graders Jack Folkner, Martin Jencka and Jay Jewell-Roth created a video about the recently shelved Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
January 19, 2012
Yesterday was unbelievable. In an unprecedented show of strength, millions of Internet users rose up against the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s Protect IP Act, with Wikipedia, reddit, Boing Boing, SavetheInternet.com and thousands of other sites going black to join in the protest (even Google hid its logo behind a black bar for the day). Millions sent letters to Congress, and tens of thousands...
Wikipedia and Google blacked out? Redditers in an uproar? Thousands of geeks abandoning their cubicles to take to the streets?
What's happening here?
January 17, 2012
Tomorrow you might be wondering who turned out the lights. Don’t worry — it will simply be one of the biggest days in the history of the open Internet.
Thousands of websites — including Wikipedia, reddit, BoingBoing, FreePress.net and SavetheInternet.com — will go dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), bills in the House and Senate that could open the door to widespread censorship online.
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January 12, 2012
Earlier this week we pointed to a Media Matters for America study showing that most of the major networks — ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC — have failed to cover opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
Online piracy is definitely a problem. But these bills would do little to solve it. They’re the latest...
The first-ever study on mobile donors found that charitable donations made via cellphones have jumped in recent years. The report from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Pew Research Center analyzed the “Text to Haiti” campaign that followed the devastating 2010 earthquake.
The study shows that most text donors contributed on impulse as news about the campaign spread via friend networks...

