If you haven’t already contacted your congress-critter about SOPA, the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act, please do. This awful bill has the potential to destroy everything that’s good about the internet. It would make it illegal to even link to copyright-infringing material, which would completely annihilate the search engines. Additionally, this oppressive law wouldn’t even accomplish what it purports to address, because inevitably, alternet darknets would spontaneously form to host all the information that wants to be free.

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011. Music: Jan Jelinek Editing: Michael König | koenigm.com Image Courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center, The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth 

Love is a holistic experience that cannot be contained merely in the mind or the body. Without physical chemistry, there is no sexuality. Without common interests or attitudes, there is no friendship. However, even if both mind and body are perfectly matched, there is still no guarantee that the subjects will “fall in love,” and perhaps those who would never think of associating with each other based on appearance or behavior are missing out on the love of their lives.

The story of Stuxnet reads like a cross between a work of cyberpunk fiction and an international spy novel. In 2009 the world community was intensely debating the immediacy of Iran’s nuclear weapon program readiness. Meanwhile, a clandestine software project, sponsored by a cyber superpower with vast resources, was engaged in coding the first known malware rootkit to monitor and subvert the programmable logic controllers of an industrial system, allegedly the Iranian Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

Since its mainstream popularity blossomed in the late 1990’s, the Internet has become tightly woven into the fabric of modern society. Linking together many formerly disconnected institutions and technics, the invention of this high-speed communication medium has also pushed freedom of speech issues to the forefront of the debate about protecting the highly pervasive technology and the critical infrastructure it serves from disruptive events. There is a protectable national security interest in ensuring that the Internet does not serve as a route for terrorists or hackers to commit digital attacks on the many vital services which are now inextricably connected to the network.

Sebastopol is a bucolic little hamlet seated in the western portion of Sonoma County, California. Formerly known for its Gravenstein apples, most orchards have long been planted with vineyards, or converted into the corporate grounds of the tech publishing firm O’Reilly Media. But several years ago a heated battle served to overturn the relative serenity of this community. The conflict erupted over the town’s implementation of a contract for a public Wi-Fi network in its main plaza.

I'm very concerned about the corporate malfeasance and possible government complicity revealed in the 75,000+ leaked #HBGary emails. First of all, I have to say it's rather pathetic that these guys considered themselves an elite private security company, when they had such poor practices securing their own website and servers, and couldn't even restrain their own executive from vigorously prodding a ginormous hacking collective. Reading this article helped me understand how #Anonymous penetrated the defenses of a company which had been (previously) esteemed enough to be contracted by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

It’s been about fifteen years since the Internet really started infiltrating human society and look how far we’ve come. Today will live on in the memories of many around the world forever: some two million Egyptians crowded into Tahrir Square to voice their strong opposition to a dictatorial regime. This inevitable day comes after a dark 30 year era of brutal repression and a people silenced by fear. What took away the hesitation of the Egyptian people to speak out against their deplorable conditions?

It started out as a graduate project at Stanford University and has grown to almost world-taking-over proportions. Rather than just indexing the words on a site, Google’s pioneering search algorithm rated a page’s authority by how many links it received, thereby tapping into the distributed power of the web. To this day I tell people to “Google it”: this search engine has become part of the lexicon of the Internet forever.