Practical Technology

People often think that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks-you know like the ones that knocked the Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Universal Music recently–require hundreds of attackers generating gigabytes of traffic per second to pound a Website down into the ground. Ah, [...]

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President Barack Obama recently held a Google+ video Hangout; Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich promised to have a permanent U.S. moon-base by 2020; and fellow Republican Mitt Romney, along with Gingrich and Obama, are against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA). So, as politicians go, these guys are all pretty tech-savvy [...]

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Google has unified its privacy policies, Facebook is rolling out its Timeline feature, and the FBI is looking for help to monitor all the social networks. All that has people feeling a little twitchy about the personal information they’ve placed online. And, now some people have noticed that LinkedIn, the business and jobs social network, [...]

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Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski recently announced a plan that would expand the Universal Service Fund’s Lifeline program to include broadband Internet service. The concept of universal service dates to the Communications Act of 1934 and was expanded by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Today, the Lifeline program provides land-line telephone service to [...]

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The U.S. Department of Justice working in conjunction with New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies has taken down the popular file-storage and sharing site Megaupload. So, since Megaupload has been shut down, Internet piracy has gone down significantly, right? Right? Well, probably not, NPD market researcher Russ Crupnick said, “Only about 3 percent of the U.S. [...]

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