FCC approves controversial ‘Net Neutrality’ regulations

RawStory -  Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), who has championed "Net Neutrality" in the past, said the FCC's proposed rules would actually "destroy" the principle of "Net Neutrality."

The rules authored by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski would require ISPs to allow their customers to have access all legal online content, applications and services over their wired networks and prohibit unreasonable network discrimination.

But the plan would also allow for a greater fractioning of the Internet and data rationing on mobile and wired networks, according to analysis of the policies. Major network stakeholders like Verizon and AT&T would be able to sell bandwidth in capped tiers, with overage charges for users who download too much information, and certain types of data traffic like peer-to-peer file transfers could be banned altogether.

If they pass and telecoms are allowed to move forward with their plans, "the Internet as we know it would cease to exist," Sen. Franken concluded in an editorial published by Huffington Post.

"The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable." Read more at RawStory

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new cloud computing looks like a plan "to push people into careless computing"

Guardian...making extensive use of cloud computing was "worse than stupidity" because it meant a loss of control of data, warns Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the operating system GNU.

Now he says he is increasingly concerned about the release by Google of its ChromeOS operating system, which is based on GNU/Linux and designed to store the minimum possible data locally. Instead it relies on a data connection to link to Google's "cloud" of servers, which are at unknown locations, to store documents and other information.

The risks include loss of legal rights to data if it is stored on a company's machine's rather than your own, Stallman points out: "In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant."

...He sees a creeping problem: "I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute. The US government may try to encourage people to place their data where the US government can seize it without showing them a search warrant, rather than in their own property. However, as long as enough of us continue keeping our data under our own control, we can still do so. And we had better do so, or the option may disappear."

"I'd say the problem is in the nature of the job ChromeOS is designed to do. Namely, encourage you to keep your data elsewhere, and do your computing elsewhere, instead of doing it in your own computer."

Please read full at Guardian

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Steve Wozniak: 'We've lost a lot of control'

CNN -  "All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control," he said. "We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers."

"You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's not God," he quipped.

Earlier that day, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.

"Little things that work one day; they don't work the next day," he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. "I think it's much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have ... is going to work tomorrow."

Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.

"There is no solution," Wozniak said of tech troubles. "Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things," he said with a smile.