internet

“The Internet’s Own Boy,” a documentary about the life and death of Aaron Swartz, premièred on Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation. The life of Swartz as a coder and an Internet thinker is well known. [...] The documentary, shot in the course of that year, gives us relatively little new information about the legal controversy, but it is deeply revealing about who Swartz was. Read More »

The OpenID Foundation announced today that its membership has ratified the OpenID Connect standard.  Organizations and businesses can now use OpenID Connect to develop secure, flexible, and interoperable identity Internet ecosystems so that digital identities can be easily used across websites and applications via any computing or mobile device. Read More »

With the fast expanding reach of the Internet and the approaching of the era of cloud computing, the HTML5 open platform enables quick development of cross-platform applications, easing concerns that there may be different user experience on different connected devices. [...] Read More »

The ITU has a long and venerable history.  Today that history and reputation are at risk.  Negotiations in Dubai this week on updating the International Telecommunications Regulations treaty contemplate expanding the ITU’s scope to regulate aspects of online life. Read More »

Most of our readers have no problem getting on the internet every day for communication or research or sharing LOLcats, but if you live or work in areas that don't have reliable internet access due to lack of basic communications or power infrastructure, that simple access that we take for granted can be quite difficult. Read More »

Everyone is worried about the wrong things. Since Edward Snowden exposed the incipient NSA panopticon, the civil libertarians are worried that their Internet conversations and phone metadata are being tracked; the national-security conservatives claim to be worried that terrorists will start hiding their tracks; but both sides should really be worried about different things entirely. Read More »

The Trans Pacific Partnership is the largest proposed trade deal in history impacting everything from how we use the internet to prescription drug prices. Public interest groups don’t have access to the negotiations, which involve 11 countries plus the U.S., but corporate lobbyists do. Given the potential for change, should the public have a say? Read More »