Last month it became apparent that not all VPN providers live up to their marketing after an alleged member of Lulzsec was tracked down after using a supposedly anonymous service from HideMyAss. We wanted to know which VPN providers take privacy extremely seriously so we asked many of the leading providers two very straightforward questions. Their responses will be of interest to anyone concerned with anonymity issues.

Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal. Freedom enforces freedom; a reboot is the only circumvention of the Freedom time limit you specify. The hassle of rebooting means you're less likely to cheat, and you'll enjoy enhanced productivity.

The European Commission's Digital Competitiveness report published today shows that Europe's digital sector has made strong progress since 2005: 56% of Europeans now regularly use the internet, 80% of them via a high-speed connection (compared to only one third in 2004), making Europe the world leader in broadband internet. Europe is the world's first truly mobile continent with more mobile subscribers than citizens (a take up rate of 119%). Europe can advance even further as a generation of "digitally savvy" young Europeans becomes a strong market driver for growth and innovation. Building on the potential of the digital economy is essential for Europe's sustainable recovery from the economic crisis. Today the Commission has asked the public what future strategy the EU should adopt to make the digital economy run at full speed.

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner. How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence.

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday. Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not. What’s even sneakier? Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being “killed,”

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty, but achievable, goal. To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data. To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books. Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone! This is an Open project - the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.

Spelletjes, 'speciale' acties; het kunnen er niet genoeg zijn voor SBS om de databank te vullen met persoonsgegevens, teneinde communicatie over programma's en (vooral) voor adverteerders persoonlijker te maken. Dat levert binding en geld op.

It may seem as unlikely as a publicly edited encyclopedia, but the internet needs publicly controlled search

User-generated content may have changed the Internet, but sites like YouTube are suffocating under the costs of storing it.

Documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed the following search privacy tips. They range from straightforward steps that offer a little protection to more complicated measures that offer near-complete safety. While we strongly urge users to follow all six tips, a lesser level of protection might be sufficient depending on your particular situation and willingness to accept risks to your privacy.

One of the paradoxes of early 20th Century management was the observation that companies are best run as dictatorships, while countries are best run as democracies. Why was this?

SlideShowPro for Lightroom installs as a "web engine" for Adobe Lightroom. You simply drag a folder to an existing location on your computer, launch Lightroom, and the engine is available in the application's "Web module" workspace. Click on "Web" in the top nav, select SlideShowPro as your gallery template, and you're off.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

Earlier this week, a Lifehacker reader caught downloading copyrighted material using BitTorrent told us about the scary warning letter she received from her ISP after a big media company filed a complaint. Fact is, whether you're downloading copyrighted material or not, no one likes to have their activities online monitored. Let's take a look at ways you can protect your downloading and file sharing privacy, and prevent the big media companies and other anti-P2P organizations from spying on your file sharing habits.

Anything goes on the web. We find out why we share personal details online and explain our obsession with social networking

While the information about me on the Web is not terribly exciting, I do leave a little bit of information on every site I visit. And therein lies the rub. Say something in passing on a social site and it may come back to haunt you.

Very likely, in the near future, I won't "own" any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won't buy – as in make a decision to own -- any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won't own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to "own" it.

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our television president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.

e Amerikaanse consumentenorganisatie Consumer Watchdog wil dat internetters Google kunnen verbieden gegevens over hun zoekgedrag te bewaren.

Google released a browser security handbook for Web developers that details the key security features of the main Web browsers. Released under a Creative Commons 3.0 license, the document provides a comprehensive comparison of security features of the commonly used browsers; IE (version 6 and 7), Firefox (version 2 and 3), Safari, Opera, Chrome and the lesser known Android embedded browser.

Een handzaam, praktisch boek over recht en internet, dat voor velen ook begrijpelijk zal zijn: zie hier ‘De Wet op internet’ van Arnoud Engelfriet. Maar hij is soms wel iets te beperkt.

I wrote a post back in April called ‘Should I Be Worried About Piracy?‘, to which my answer was, in a nutshell, “no”. This was meant to be a bit of a controversial post, though at the time I didn’t get much of the flak that I was bracing myself for. So I figured that most people saw the sense of it. I even had some good feedback about it elsewhere. But today, I received a passionate and very angry comment on that post - and it highlights some important issues and it raises some things that are both emotionally charged and based in the world of real, day-to-day economics.

The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force ISPs to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.

De afgelopen week heb ik een nieuwe afkorting gesignaleerd: BPI. Niet te verwarren met BPM (de belasting op nieuwe auto's) of BPO (business proces outsourcing). BPI staat voor burgerparticipatie innovatie: via internet kunnen burgers bij het vaststellen van overheidsbeleid worden betrokken.

Your favorite web applications have been running in a Browser for too long. They're trapped in tabs, crammed between a gossip column, driving directions and an image search for cats. With Bubbles, your web-apps are a click away. super-charged with new features like customized notification windows, even when your web-app is minimized.

Are you my friend? Should I friend you? Or you me? I have a very large backlog of inquiries on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all the rest.

Shirky distils his observations of passive and interactive activities into a general principle: "It’s better to do something than to do nothing." But Stephenson makes the case that both activities have their place. Sometimes switching off your brain and w

Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris, and their musical collaborators describe how a Web phenomenon grew out of the dark days of the writers' strike

A peer reviewed open access journal for empirical findings, methodology, and theory of social and behavioral science concerning the Internet and its implications for individuals, social groups, organizations, and society.

“Digital Piracy fulfilled the lacks of an old and slow distribution system“.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--ri

To blame all the woes of the music industry on illegal downloads is poppycock. It's time for some new thinking

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it.

PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. Photos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing a

I am a long-term StumbleUpon user, which means that I don’t get much sleep. Now, after almost 4 years of stumbling, I have decided to get my life back. Well, at least some sleep!

What would photoblog or photo forum visitors nowadays say about some the best photographs of the last century? Satire alert! ;-)

“The intended effects of new technology are nothing compared to the unintended effects… the Internet is an accident. When you put a US Defense Department think tank together with a bunch of acid heads in California, you get this big thing. Nobody plan

Het moderne communicatieproces kenmerkt zich in toenemende mate door de aanwezigheid van registratie en controle. Vanuit juridisch perspectief leidt deze ontwikkeling tot uiteenlopende vraagstukken rondom de identificeerbaarheid en anonimiteit van communi

Cyberspace can be made safer from the chaos and crime that threaten to overwhelm it. But most recipes for security and order come at a very steep price: the loss of the Internet’s creative potency.

Sure, Yahoo signed China’s “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry,” a voluntary agreement to monitor and restrict information deemed “harmful” by Beijing, but did it have to take it quite so seriously? Was it really

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 introduces new elements to HTML for the first time since the last millennium. New structural elements include aside, figure, and section. New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements incl

Opiniestuk van Francisco van Jole over het effect van 'gratis' diensten op internet op onze cultuur. Volgens mij is geen van de gratis diensten echt gratis. Er staan advertenties omheen, je persoonlijek informatie wordt gebruikt/verkocht, etc.

Imagine a device that sits inline in a major ISP's network and can throttle P2P traffic at differing levels depending on the time of day, allows one user access only to e-mail and the Web while allowing a higher-paying user to use VoIP and BitTorrent, pro

Grub is a distributed crawler for web indexing. It can become one of the 3 pillars of open source search: indexing, rating, and brokering web content search. That's why Wikia bought it to become part of their open source search engine.

De Zomaargasten aflevering over 'Copyright op internet' - door Marco Raaphorst e.a.

A great way to cut down on the amount of time spent online is by creating an internet ritual.

The media attributed the quote "invented the Internet" to Al Gore. That was completely incorrect, and this page lists the history of this historical misattribution (or even foul political play).

Prikkelend stuk van Marie-Jose Klaver, vanochtend in NRC Next, over vergelijkingssites als Kieskeurig.nl. Maar een kleine groep zogeheten ‘uploaders’ of ‘technofans’ schrijven recensies waarin ze producten beoordelen, blijkt volgens Klaver uit Ned

Internet Attention Deficit Disorder is the productivity killer affecting most office workers today - the stringent urge to “browse just a little more” in between your daily work tasks; to peek at the Digg homepage, check out the hottest YouTube video

"Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation

# Glubble Trusted Surfing for children under 12 years of age enables families to be sure they only see the best of the web they choose to allow. # Glubble Altered Search makes Google and Yahoo show results from childrens trusted Glubbleworld instead of th

Nieuwe opsporingstechnieken en overheidsdatabases ondermijnen de privacy van burgers steeds meer. De noodzakelijke discussie komt moeizaam: academische debatten, politieke stukken en opinieonderzoeken. Netkwesties maakt de balans op.

Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.

OpenDNS helps you navigate the Internet in a safer, faster, smarter and more reliable way. Our service is free and requires nothing to download. OpenDNS doesn't replace your existing Internet connection, it just makes it better.

There's an inverse correlation between the regulation of speech and the freedom of a society. Trying to filter the internet is ridiculous and dangerous.

Net Neutrality is the principle that consumers should be in control of what content, services and applications they use on the public Internet. It's a simple concept that has wide-ranging implications on how the Internet operates.

Relakks offers you not only to surf anonymously, but also to use clients and applications anonymously on the internet.

Online advertising is a revolution for marketers, who now can take advantage of previously unavailable data about readers' online behaviors and preferences to send commercial messages to individuals rather than to broad demographic groups. [..]

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources.

"Every week, a dozen or so times, your MP votes on changes to British law. This is their definitive exercise of power on your behalf. The Public Whip lets you see all their votes so you can hold them to account"

A one day conference with a focus on the near future of the web and how new technology, business models, innovation and culture-changes affect the direction of the web and the way we do business. The Conference for web industry thought leaders, leading co

World of Ends What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.