Today the Federal Communications Commission unveiled its plan to expand broadband Internet access to 100 million more Americans within the next five years. The plan calls both for the expansion of wired networks in under-serviced areas, and for the dedication of more wireless spectrum for Internet use as opposed to television. Largely deficit-neutral, the plan has bipartisan support in the current Congress, in part because contentious issues of net neutrality and privacy were not tackled by the FCC's plan. As you remember, PopSci called for an improvement to the nation's broadband infrastructure last year Read more »

The future of wireless: illumination as information

A bright idea coming out of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute could change the way we connect to the Internet in the future, as well as drive the nascent market for interior LED lighting. Researchers there have found a way to encode a visible-frequency wireless signal in the light coming from lamps and fixtures, turning the light that surrounds us into a high-speed broadband source.

That's not to say there's anything particularly wrong with radio-frequency wi-fi, but its limited bandwidth restricts it to a certain spectrum within an already crowded field of signals. It also leaks through walls -- a benefit for signal pirates but a detriment for those who want a signal that is both secure and free of interference. Read more »

The Israeli military cancelled a planned raid on a Palestinian village after one of its soldiers posted details of the operation on Facebook.

The unnamed soldier revealed the time and place of the raid and the name of his unit on the social networking site. He said on his status update that his unit planned a “clean up” raid.

The soldier was court-martialled and sentenced to 10 days in prison. He was also ousted from his battalion and relieved of combat duties.

“On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, God willing, we come home,” the soldier wrote on his Facebook page. Qatanah is a village in the West Bank near Ramallah.

His Facebook friends and fellow soldiers reported the post to the authorities.

The decision to cancel the raid was made by commanders after it was feared the leak would put the unit in danger. The operation went ahead several days later. Read more »

The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.

There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold: Read more »

Where do some nongs keep their brains - in a box down in the garden shed?
Somehow I'd always thought offering a reward for political assassination was just a trifle over the top, even if you're young and stupid enough to say it on a Facebook page displaying your own mug shot for any potential complaint laid with the Australian Federal Police about advertising a willingness to fund murder.

Google's search engine indexes 2,870 items which have this word sequence "kill kevin rudd" and the item with top ranking is a free game called, you guessed it, Kill Kevin Rudd by Pictogame
There are only 4 items for "kevin rudd must die". Read more »