Reppler is a service launched last month to help keep your Facebook image clean by monitoring your Facebook profile, making you aware of inappropriate content and highlighting public information that should be private. Jackie Cohen of All Facebook reports that of the 30,000-plus Facebook members’ walls Reppler looked at over the past two months: 47 percent of our users have profanity on their Facebook...

Historian Elin Whitney-Smith is publishing a book online, chapter by chapter, titled Winning Information Revolutions: From the Ice Age to the Internet. In it she looks at previous periods of disruption to understand what we are going through today. She says there have been six information revolutions in human history, each representing a major change in the organizational paradigm — a change in how we organize...

A report out this week made quite a splash by claiming that Netflix, YouTube and other online video sites create nerly 46 percent of all Internet downloads during peak hours. See, for example, here, here, here and here. But Kevin Fogarty at CoreIT says not so fast. Netflix isn’t swamping the Internet; ISPs are overstating their congestion problems: Netflix doesn’t swamp the ISPs’ backbones...

Days ago, Germany’s Die Welt published an investigative report on a secret agreement between Venezuela and Iran for a joint medium-range missile base on Venezuelan soil. The 1,100 word article by columnist Clemens Wergin, outlines not only the location of the base, but offers details on its design and strategic purpose, which will not only pose a threat to the United States, but to Venezuela’s...

Can Viagra make you deaf? This item from Newser also gets our award for lede of the day: Could Viagra make you, ahem, hard of hearing? Researchers are uncovering evidence that it and other anti-impotence drugs may do just that. The FDA has been warning about possible hearing complications associated with anti-impotence medicine since 2007, but two new reports are raising concerns. UK researchers who surveyed...

Gadgetwise reports Facebok is about to announce a new effort to fight the distribution of child pornography using Microsoft technology: Microsoft says it has refined a technology it created called PhotoDNA to identify the worst of these disturbing images — even if they are cropped or otherwise altered — and cull through large amounts of data quickly and accurately enough to police the world’s largest online...

The internet is not a toy, it is a strategic infrastructure. It may have at one time been envisioned as a defense strategic infrastructure, but today it nurtures global business and connection. Why, then, does the U.S. have such lousy broadband when we look at our European neighbors? Or Japan? Or South Korea? One reason is the geographic scale: those countries are sized more like one of our states. But another,...

A federal appeals court today declined to review a legal challenge from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who say that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. NY Mag, Even Federal-Appeals Courts Are Over the Winklevii’s Facebook Suit. NYTimes Bits, “it is hard for anyone to feel too bad about their failure. The settlement they signed with Facebook in 2008 is now worth around $200 million.” Winklevii’s...

If you get all of your news from the corporate media in the US you would think that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was over. You have to look very hard to find a story at all. In reality the nuclear accident that couldn’t happen is much worse. In a development that is likely to delay efforts to bring the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station under control, the plant’s...

For Americans who yearn for life in Europe, with its more generous social safety net and strict rules for firing employees, columnist Andrzej Lubowski of Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza has some disheartening news: the idyllic lifestyle Europeans have come to expect is in its death throes. For Gazeta Wyborcza, Andrzej Lubowski writes in part: “There is nothing more enjoyable than an evening stroll in early...

The 1947 Roswell Incident, allegedly the crash of an extra-terrestrial spacecraft filled with alien occupants, caused intense controversy and spawned conspiracy theories by the score. Now comes a stranger-than-conspiracy-fiction explanation: Area 51, the new book by Annie Jacobsen…puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s famous radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel War of the...

It’s really cheep now in London. The reason: a big explosion in the number of wild parakeets: Native to the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, the rose-ringed parakeet is enjoying a population explosion in many London suburbs, turning a once-exotic bird into a notorious pest that awakens children, monopolizes garden bird feeders and might even threaten British crops. When I lived in India as...

Popups Are Back by Hart Williams I was looking for the raw footage of Osama bin Laden released by the Pentagon. Not on the Pentagon site that I could find. Not on the CIA site, that the Pentagon implies that you ought to go to. Nope. Brought to you by these fine sponsors … It seems that this taxpayer-paid footage isn’t available to actual taxpayers. No. It was released to major media outlets, and...

This is not a moral judgment; it is a biological fact. Someone needs to tell the Florida Senate.

Loopy Wisconsin Republican and U.S. Representative Paul Ryan proposed last month a much-maligned Medicare Voucher Plan to replace the current system for people under 55 today. It would be phased in when they eventually retire during the next decade. Perhaps the original proposal could be modified to improve the entire U.S. healthcare system. This idea might also fit in with the current House Republican demands...

Three days after 9/11 Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). That authorization gave the president the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force against those involved in 9/11 and anyone who harbored the perpetrators. AUMF has served as the basis for the Afghan War and the retention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay for the past 10 years. Now there are those...

According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will announce an $8 billion purchase of Skype as soon as Tuesday. A deal could be announced as early as Tuesday, people familiar with the matter said, though they cautioned that negotiations aren’t yet final and a deal could still fall apart. Including Skype’s long-term debt, the total value of the deal is about $8.5 billion. Gigaom reported at midnight...

If searching for the news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing the news may be among the most important of the next. – Navigating News Online, May 9, 2011 According to research released today by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, in the first nine months of 2010, Facebook drove 8 percent of the traffic at the HuffingtonPost.com. Overall, the giant...

In a world where nothing is private and the most vulgar images and ideas are bandied about with little concern, is there a place for keeping photos like that of the death of Osama bin Laden private? Der Tagesspiegel columnist Juliane Schauble writes that when it comes to holding the moral high ground on the public’s right to know, President Obama is a cut about George W. Bush. For Der Tagesspiegel, Juliane...

We have gotten use to peak resources denial from the plutocrats of the Republican party and the people of the western world who simply can’t imagine a world without growth.  But we have this from the United Nations: The population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United...

Guest post by Christopher Miller Chris Miller, a Truman National Security Project fellow, was a sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division through two tours in Iraq, during which he earned a Purple Heart, and an adviser to the Iraqi Army. After returning to the U.S., he was involved with VoteVets.org and Operation Free, travelling the country as part of the Veterans for American Power Tour. He is...

Today is Star Wars Day. The original movie was released on May 25, 1977, but fans enjoy the pun. “May the Force be with you” achieved cult status, ahem, a long time ago in a gala… Well. You know. The official Star Wars site has featured a countdown clock with a promise that “All will be revealed” at 9 a.m. eastern. It’s 9:20, and maythe4th.starwars.com redirects to Fox Movies....

Computerworld: The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation warned computer users Tuesday that messages claiming to include photos and videos of Osama bin Laden’s death actually contain a virus that could steal personal information. The warning comes as security companies said that they’ve spotted the first samples of malicious software disguised as photos of the dead Al Qaeda leader.[...] Scammers have...

Not exactly a surprise, but telling nonetheless: Google says that between 7:30 and 8:30 pm PST (which was right around the time the news broke over Twitter), Google saw an one million percent increase in searches for the term ‘bin laden.’ For basis of comparison, you can see a chart below comparing searches for the Royal Wedding on Google Trends. The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton...

It was very good news to hear that U.S. Joint Special Operations Command forces killed Osama Bin Laden (OBL) in his exclusive Pakistani retirement compound this past weekend. It came just under 10 years after the 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC. Congratulations are due to the many anonymous U.S. servicemen and intelligence personnel who patiently...