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"The free OpenCalais service and open API is the fastest way to tag the people, places, facts and events in your content.  It can help you improve your SEO, increase your reader engagement, create search-engine-friendly 'topic hubs' and streamline content operations - saving you time and money. OpenCalais is free to use in both commercial and non-commercial settings, but can only be used on public content (don't run your confidential or competitive company information through it!). OpenCalais does not keep a copy of your content, but it does keep a copy of the metadata it extracts there from. To repeat, OpenCalais is not a private service, and there is no secure, enterprise version that you can buy to operate behind a firewall. It is your responsibility to police the content that you submit, so make sure you are comfortable with our Terms of Service (TOS) before you jump in. You can process up to 50,000 documents per day (blog posts, news stories, Web pages, etc.) free of charge.  If you need to process more than that - say you are an aggregator or a media monitoring service - then see this page to learn about Calais Professional. We offer a very affordable license. OpenCalais' early adopters include CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, The White House and more. Already more than 30,000 developers have signed up, and more than 50 publishers and 75 entrepreneurs are using the free service to help build their businesses. You can read about the pioneering work of these publishers, entrepreneurs and developers here. To get started, scroll to the bottom section of this page. To build OpenCalais into an existing site or publishing platform (CMS), you will need to work with your developers.  Why OpenCalais Matters The reason OpenCalais - and so-called "Web 3.0" in general (concepts like the Semantic Web, Linked Data, etc.) - are important is that these technologies make it easy to automatically conne

"But connectivity alone cannot be global policy. Respect for privacy and the freedom of expression must go hand in glove with the drive to connection."

I didn't see this one coming. I've got a Comcast account and their Arris Gateway modem. In our area, several coffeehouses, etc., that already offered free wireless connections are now broadcasting Comcast Xfinity wireless. So I'm guessing that this is a planned rollout nationwide. 

"Last updated on October 9, 2014 Authored by Dan Nanni Leave a comment A traditional VPN (e.g., OpenVPN, PPTP) is composed of a VPN server and one or more VPN clients connected to the server. When any two VPN clients talk to each other, the VPN server needs to relay VPN traffic between them. The problem of such a hub-and-spoke type of VPN topology is that the VPN server can easily become a performance bottleneck as the number of connected clients increase"

"Last updated on October 9, 2014 Authored by Dan Nanni Leave a comment A traditional VPN (e.g., OpenVPN, PPTP) is composed of a VPN server and one or more VPN clients connected to the server. When any two VPN clients talk to each other, the VPN server needs to relay VPN traffic between them. The problem of such a hub-and-spoke type of VPN topology is that the VPN server can easily become a performance bottleneck as the number of connected clients increase"

" Rick Falkvinge on May 18, 2014 C: 21 Opinion There is a direct connection between copyright monopoly enforcement and mass surveillance, and between mass surveillance and lack of free speech. If you want to keep free speech, the copyright monopoly must be reduced sharply."

" Rick Falkvinge on May 18, 2014 C: 21 Opinion There is a direct connection between copyright monopoly enforcement and mass surveillance, and between mass surveillance and lack of free speech. If you want to keep free speech, the copyright monopoly must be reduced sharply."

"Paris, 15 February 2016 - The French Council of State has released an eagerly awaited decision (fr) on the validity of administrative access to connection data. La Quadrature du Net, French Data Network and the FDN Federation have been calling into question the Military Programmation Law (LPM) and its application decree that enables the administration to access connection data without requiring any judicial control. By refusing to repeal the decree and to transmit the question to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for a preliminary ruling, the Council of State avoids any judicial debate and isolates French vis-à-vis EU case law."

"...there isn't a way to transform a slow internet connection into a lighting-speed one if your provider is just not giving you enough bandwidth, no matter what you do. This post is only aiming to provide generic advice on how to make things a little bit better if possible, and if applicable to each case."

"...there isn't a way to transform a slow internet connection into a lighting-speed one if your provider is just not giving you enough bandwidth, no matter what you do. This post is only aiming to provide generic advice on how to make things a little bit better if possible, and if applicable to each case."

" There are four billion people on the planet without PCs or access to affordable personal computers. That figure should surely be tempered with some contextualization i.e. not everybody actually wants to have an Internet connection and many traditional, native or bucolic ways of live do still exist on the planet"

"In the face of the deep crisis affecting its economy and society, Europe needs to tap into new sources of growth in areas that will reinforce its competitiveness, drive innovation and create new job opportunities. " [Key information: Communication Regulation Recommendation Impact assessment Press release - Watch the press conference Memo Speech: We must act now - time for a Connected Continent Press conference opening remarks by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the EC in charge of Digital Agenda Statement by Ryan Heath, Spokesperson for Digital Agenda on the Telecom Package Tags: Telecoms telecoms single market growth and jobs]

Direct P2P encrypted file syncing, no cloud intermediate, which should translate to far more secure exchange of files, with less opportunity for snooping by governments or others, than with cloud-based services. 

Re: Google. I don't know if it's the 'kiss of death" but they're definitely going to take a hit, particularly outside the U.S. BTW, I'm remembering from a few years back when the ODF Foundation was still kicking. I did a fair bit of research on the bureaucratic forces in the E.U. that were pushing for the Open Document Exchange Formats. That grew out of a then-ongoing push to get all of the E.U. nations connected via a network that is not dependent on the Internet. It was fairly complete at the time down to the national level and was branching out to the local level and the plan from there was to push connections to business and then to Joe Sixpack and wife. Interop was key, hence ODEF. The E.U. might not be that far away from an ability to sever the digital connections with the U.S. Say a bunch of daisy-chained proxy anonymizers for communications with the U.S. Of course they'd have to block the UK from the network and treat it like it is the U.S. There's a formal signals intelligence service collaboration/integration dating back to WW 2, as I recall, among the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Don't remember its name. But it's the same group of nations that were collaborating on Echelon. So the E.U. wouldn't want to let the UK fox inside their new chicken coop. Ah, it's just a fantasy. The U.S. and the E.U. are too interdependent. I have no idea hard it would be for the Zoho folk to come up with desktop/side encryption/decryption. And I don't know whether their servers are located outside the reach of a U.S. court's search warrant. But I think Google is going to have to move in that direction fast if it wants to minimize the damage. Or get way out in front of the hounds chomping at the NSA's ankles and reduce the NSA to compost. OTOH, Google might be a government covert op. for all I know. :-) I'm really enjoying watching the NSA show. Who knows what facet of their Big Brother operation gets revealed next?

ZOHO is an Indian company with USA marketing offices. No idea where the server farm is located, but they were not on the NSA list. I've known Raju Vegesna for years, mostly from the old Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 Conferences. Raju runs the USA offices in Santa Clara. I'll try to catch up with him on Thursday. How he could miss this once in a lifetime moment to clean out Google, Microsoft and SalesForce.com is something I'd like to find out about. Thanks for the Wuala tip. You sent me that years ago, when i was working on research and design for the SurDocs project. Incredible that all our notes, research, designs and correspondence was left to rot in Google Wave! Too too funny. I recall telling Alex from SurDocs that he had to use a USA host, like Amazon, that could be trusted by USA customers to keep their docs safe and secure. Now look what i've done! I've tossed his entire company information set into the laps of the NSA and their cabal of connected corporatists :)

Vaporware, but interesting. More info on the developers' website at .  Basic idea is a computer on a stick that can be plugged into either other computers or into an HDMI flatscreen TV. In the latter scenario, Bluetooth connectivity for keyboard/mouse combo, provided by e.g., a smartphone. The USB connection is v. 2.0, but I'll guess that USB 3.0 would soon be an option in newer models.  According to the specs it can run either Android or Ubunutu. If you check the developer's website, they definitely have their eyes on the growth in the numbers of HDMI-equipped TVs. Note that if delivered as described, this breaks boundaries of mobile devices, tending toward a convergence of TV monitors and mobile devices in an unexpected way. 

"The AIR "robot" application connects to a Java backend that controls the robot through Mindstorm's public Java api, and Java and AIR are then glued together through an open source technology called Merapi. Merapi is an open-source project for connecting AIR and Java run by Adam Flater, and is sure to have an exciting future." This is an excellent example of how many applications are using Adobe AiR. Java is used on the backend with the sophisticated Flash GUI on the front

"Posted by Gavin Thomas No network connection on your laptop or problems with your web hosting? We're here to help "The Network is the computer," is the famous, prescient quote made by Sun Microsystem's chief scientist and employee number five, John Gage, in 1984. The growth of the web, mobile and cloud computing have borne out that phrase, and a computer without a network connection is just an expensive paperweight."

"Grace Hopper Open Source Day, an interview with uProxy uProxy is a browser extension that lets you share your Internet connection with people living in repressive societies. Much of the world lives in countries that severely censor and restrict Internet access. uProxy makes it a little easier to bring the free and open Internet to some of the darkest corners of the world."

"uProxy is a browser extension that lets friends route their connection to their Internet through each other's computers. It can help people with restricted or insecure access to the Internet get to the content they care about safely. Learn more"

"uProxy is a browser extension that lets friends route their connection to their Internet through each other's computers. It can help people with restricted or insecure access to the Internet get to the content they care about safely. Learn more"

The blurb is a bit misleading. This is a project that's been under way since last year; what's new is that they're moving under the Linux Foundation umbrella for various non-technical suoport purposes. By sometime this summer, encrypting web site data and broadcasting it over https is  slated to become a two-click process. Or on the linux command line: $ sudo apt-get install lets-encrypt $ lets-encrypt example.com This is a project that grew out of public disgust with NSA surveillance, designed to flood the NSA (and other bad actors) with so much encrypted data that they will be able to decrypt only a tiny fraction (decryption without the decryption key takes gobs of computer cycles).  The other half of the solution is already available, the HTTPS Everywhere extension for the Chrome, FIrefox, and Opera web browsers by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the TOR Project that translates your every request for a http address into an effort to connect to an https address preferentially before establishing an http connection if https is not available. HTTPS Everywhere is fast and does not noticeably add to your page loading time. If you'd like to effortlessly imoprove your online security and help burden NSA, install HTTPS Everywhere. Get it at https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Mid-Clinton-era government document giving the overview of the then-current U.S. government strategy for building a connected world. Chapter IX, "The Internet," is a particularly interesting short read, particularly the central nature of the "hands off" regulatory policy that anticipates minimal regulatory involvement. The policy statement does not rule out regulation, but suggests that it should be the minimal amount of regulation necessary to make things work.

Title II is for "common carriers." See http://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf pg. 35. Under Section 202: "(a) It shall be unlawful for any common carrier to make any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services for or in connection with like communication service, directly or indirectly, by any means or device, or to make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, or locality, or to subject any particular person, class of persons, or locality to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage. (b) Charges or services, whenever referred to in this Act, include charges for, or services in connection with, the use of common carrier lines of communication, whether derived from wire or radio facilities, in chain broadcasting or incidental to radio communication of any kind. (c) Any carrier who knowingly violates the provisions of this section shall forfeit to the United States the sum of $6,000 for each such offense and $300 for each and every day of the continuance of such offense. 

"These companies don't have to agree in writing to carry this out or even raise their prices; they can simply, within their separate geographic and product territories, bundle and tie their services, buy up inputs that a competitor might need, and refuse to connect to competitors - among many other potential tactics. It's in their interest for these local monopolists to cooperate, because any defection would make the whole system crumble."

"These companies don't have to agree in writing to carry this out or even raise their prices; they can simply, within their separate geographic and product territories, bundle and tie their services, buy up inputs that a competitor might need, and refuse to connect to competitors - among many other potential tactics. It's in their interest for these local monopolists to cooperate, because any defection would make the whole system crumble."

"These companies don't have to agree in writing to carry this out or even raise their prices; they can simply, within their separate geographic and product territories, bundle and tie their services, buy up inputs that a competitor might need, and refuse to connect to competitors - among many other potential tactics. It's in their interest for these local monopolists to cooperate, because any defection would make the whole system crumble."