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The U.S. Congress has network neutrality under scrutiny and perhaps under threat. Network neutrality is the concept that broadband carriers will neither interfere with nor inhibit the free flow of information over the Internet. A bill, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Efficiency Act of 2006, or COPE (aka the Barton-Rush Act), is making its way through the House of Representatives. It could empower commercial broadband carriers like Sprint and AT&T to manipulate Internet transactions by prohibiting or slowing access to and transmission of specific sites. In effect, the buzz is that the House proposes to cede control of the Internet to the telecoms and cable companies. By contrast, there are bills being introduced in the Senate that seek to protect network neutrality. First among these is S. 2360, the proposed Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006. 1, 2

Starting in 2003, researchers at ISI have been collecting data about the Internet address space. As part of this work we have been probing all addresses in the allocated Internet address space. This web page summarizes this research, the datasets, and related papers. A second web page shows our plot of the entire internet at scale (one square is one host).

The American Library Association and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute (http://www.ii.fsu.edu) in the College of Information at Florida State University, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is surveying a national sample of public libraries regarding their Internet connectivity and computing access resources.

he data from the enhanced study will help you to identify the impacts of your library's public computer and Internet access on the community that your library serves.

This tutorial presents the substance of the Internet Workshops (current schedule) offered year-round by the Teaching Library at the University of California at Berkeley. The content on this site has been updated to reflect the latest trends in search engines, directories, and evaluating web pages.

New service eavesdrops on Internet callsSoftware monitors calls, displays computer ads based on subjects spoken

There is a problem of managing identity across the internet, so when I say Darren Waters I mean this person and all of the manifestations and representations and personas of that person. The ability to knit those together is a huge challenge and opportunity for us as an industry.

As an industry we're picking off these domains one-by-one, but we will need increased cooperation and standards for solving problems like identity.

This article focuses on the importance of public library Internet access in times of emergencies and for a range of electronic government (e–government) services at the individual and community–wide levels.

IBM just announced availability of a freely downloadable enterprise search product that installs with three clicks, packs the same features as a Google Mini, scales to half-a-million documents, and is built on open-source technology from the Apache Lucene project.

 Yahoo brings a familiar interface, Internet search, and consumer mind share.

Lucene offers a solid, open, full-text indexing core.

With the overall focus of this year’s conference being delivering Web 2.0 (interactive online activities and applications) programs to our library patrons, this presentation was based on how to deliver such programs when your library is on a tight budget. I came out of this presentation with some ideas about how we might implement some of these activities in the Tech Center, to compliment our excellent computer instruction classes. Here are some of the tools they recommend.

Enter then the broadband-transportation link. Fast, reliable Internet connection makes telecommuting far more feasible –– to transfer files, worksheets and video clips, access company databases, create videoconferences and more. But "telework" can't function well when employees don't have broadband access. Simple equation: Universal broadband equals increased telecommuting, which in turn means less roadway demand, fewer greenhouse gas emissions and less pollution. Even if a worker telecommutes a day or two a week, it can make a real difference.

Findability is the quality of an object (be it a physical object, a person, or a bit of data) to be locatable and navigable. While larger than the concept of search on the Internet, nevertheless this talk by Peter Morville from the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference deals principally with issues of search over the web.

This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including: The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues Opinions on privacy online Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking

A Seattle-based security researcher has devised a way to test for Net neutrality. Dan Kaminsky will share details of this technique, which will eventually be rolled into a free software tool, on Wednesday at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas. The software can tell if computers are treating some types of TCP/IP traffic better than others -- dropping data that is being used in VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls, for example, or treating encrypted data as second class.