Posts by slfisher

According to a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 21 percent of American adults do not use the Internet. And of those, 90 percent say they have no intention of using the Internet in the future.

Among the non-internet users, 34 percent do have some relationship with the online world, ranging from living in a home with an Internet connection or having used the Internet at some point in the past.

As far as reasons, 48 percent say they are too busy or not interested, while 21 percent are concerned about the price and 18 percent cite usability concerns, such as that it is too difficult or they don't know how. Surprisingly, only 6 percent said they didn't have Internet access.

These statistics are down slightly from a similar study Pew did in January, 2009. In that study, 25 percent of adults weren't on the Internet at all and were unlikely to change, with 33 percent of them not being interested and 13 percent of them not having access.

In general, however, the statistics are not greatly changed from the 2009 study, Pew said. The one major exception is in African-Americans, where the broadband-adoption gap between blacks and whites has been cut nearly in half. (A survey earlier this year found a big jump in interest in the Latino population.)

Interestingly, the survey went on to ask users about government efforts to expand …

It's not unusual for a government IT department to warn its users about downloading malware onto their government-issued computers. It's more unusual, though, for the source of the malware to be the ads on the website of the newspaper of record.

In July, the cyber security coordinators in the state of Idaho took the unusual step of recommending that its users block or avoid the website of the Idaho Statesman, a Boise-based daily paper that covers most of the state, due to what was said to be malware in the website's ads, according to a memo sent to the security team.

Upon presumably reporting the problem to the paper, the paper began scanning the ads for malware before placing them on the site, and the state IT department also looked for malware in the paper's ads.

"Therefore, since there are many agencies or individual employees who must access the Idaho Statesman, their business needs must be met; particularly since the overall risk seems to have returned to a normal, cautious state. I no longer recommend blocking or avoiding the Idaho Statesman website, though anyone who does should be cautious," the memo continued, which alluded to a similar incident in January as well. (Boise State University, which is funded by the state, reported a similar incident in December, 2009.)

"The Statesman is not alone in having issues with malware; many local and national news sites (including the New York Times and the Seattle …

"It's unbelievable, the kind of data that's out there about you," Cisco's principal security strategist Patrick Gray told a crowd in Boise, Idaho, this morning.

The problem is that criminal hackers can use that kind of information to target a company, Gray said. He described one case where criminals in the Ukraine targeted a particular large company, went onto Facebook to look for employees of that company, and upon finding one, created a Facebook account in the name of one of her high-school friends and asked to "friend" her. When she did so, the "friend" then suggested she click on a link to see a picture of herself from high school -- which downloaded malicious software into the corporation's network, he said.

Before joining Cisco, Gray spent 20 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including forming one of the first cybercrime units.

In particular, Facebook is huge, Gray said, noting that if it were a country, it would be the third-largest worldwide, after China and India. In other Facebook statistics:

• 50 percent of active Facebook users log on to Facebook on any given day
• 60 million users update their status daily
• People spend more than 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• 3 billion photos are uploaded every month
• 5 billion pieces of content are shared each week
• Millions of local businesses have pages
• More than 20 million people become fans of pages
• There is a total of 5.3 billion fans
• 100 million people use …

A number of civil liberties groups announced today that they are fighting U.S. Department of Homeland Security policies that allow them to search all electronic devices -- including laptops, cameras, and smart phones -- that cross the border.

Between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, more than 6,500 people -- nearly 3,000 of them U.S. citizens -- were subjected to a search of their electronic devices as they crossed U.S. borders, reported the groups, which include the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

This is an issue for criminal defense lawyers because some of the people who had their equipment searched were criminal defense attorneys, who believe that the searches violate attorney-client privilege.

“The policies allow border agents to detain the devices even after a traveler has been permitted to enter the country so that they can continue their searches. The policies do not place any time limits on how long DHS can keep travelers’ devices, nor do they limit the scope of private information that may be searched, copied or detained,” according to the complaint.

In addition, while these searches are nominally only for border crossings, in practical terms they can cover a much broader area. "Border Patrol agents operating across the nation claim the authority to question Americans about their immigration status anywhere within 100 miles of the border," wrote Udi Ofer, …

Nations such as Russia and China who have malicious hackers should be held accountable for the actions of those criminals, according to a report from the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent, nonpartisan membership organization.

"Though the United States cannot expect countries to prevent all malicious behavior, it can expect them to secure their networks to a reasonable standard, pass laws outlawing international cyber crime, and have mechanisms in place to act on requests for assistance in shutting down attacks, and investigating and prosecuting them," wrote author Robert Knake. He is the coauthor, with Richard Clarke, of the book Cyber War.

In addition, the U.S. needs to lead by example, Knake said. "It should take steps to clean up its national network, work to stop its systems from being used in international cyberattacks, prioritize criminal investigation of cyberattacks with foreign victims, and make clear that the primary goal of its military efforts in cyberspace is to defend the United States and preserve international connectivity."

Steps the U.S. should take include developing a stronger set of international regimes to fight crime in cyberspace, moving beyond the current Council of Europe Convention to draw in non-Western states, and developing realtime mechanisms for collaborating to stop cyberattacks in progress and investigate attacks across borders; developing new norms and pursuing treaties to protect the core functions of the Internet and ban distributed denial-of-service attacks; and updating the Internet's underlying technologies to be more secure, …

Geolocation features in cameras are giving thieves new information when someone proudly posts a picture of their new acquisition, whether it's a boat, a flat-screen TV, or a new car, according to an article last week in the New York Times.

Some cameras and smart phones embed location-specific information, such as latitude and longitude, into the metadata, or information, about a picture. Canny thieves can click on the picture, check the metadata, and determine the location of the prize, or just the house or garage full of power tools behind it. Combined with information such as posts about a user’s plans, like “Going on vacation next week with my new boat!,” it provides a to-do list for burglars.

While the geotagging feature can be disabled, it can be complicated, says the Times. “Disabling the geotag function generally involves going through several layers of menus until you find the “location” setting, then selecting “off” or “don’t allow,” the article said. “But doing this can sometimes turn off all GPS capabilities, including mapping, so it can get complicated.”

Browser plugins could enable burglars to use latitude and longitude to plot locations on a Google map. “By downloading free browser plug-ins like the Exif Viewer for Firefox or Opanda IExif for Internet Explorer, anyone can pinpoint the location where the photo was taken and create a Google map,” the Times said.

In fact, burglars with some technical savvy could even search for geotagged photographs accompanied …

A blogger for liberal sites such as AlterNet and News Junkie Post has reported discovering a conservative group of online users who systematically work together to bury, or vote down, stories on liberal subjects and by posters they believe to be liberal, in order to keep those stories from becoming more widely known.

"A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots (DP), and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites," reported the blogger, known as oleoleolson, who is the Senior News Editor and Chief New Media Strategist for News Junkie Post. "DP was founded on 21 May 2009. Since then, over 40,000 posts have been logged at a steady rate of around 3000-4000 per month. The “Patriots” Network on coRank is a tool to submit Diggs to a group list as opposed to sending an e-mail every time. It also has some tools that make submitting to the list as easy as clicking on a bookmark."

The group -- which has since been deleted from Yahoo! -- also discussed strategy on how to either come back after being banned for life from Digg for violating the rules, set up sleeper profiles, and how to use multiple accounts at once without getting caught, which is against the Digg rules of one account per user, oleoleolson reported. Many of the primary posters …

Google said on Wednesday that it was killing its Wave collaborative development environment, citing lack of interest, according to published reports such as in the Wall Street Journal.

Blog entries from Google appeared as recently as July 27; in fact, the Google Wave blog does not yet have any information about the shutdown, which was announced on the main Google blog.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," wrote Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow. "We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave."

Google Wave was intended to be a web application for real-time communication and collaboration, Google had described the application. "People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said …

The troubled newspaper industry has been railing for years about how the Internet is destroying their business model, and taking actions such as paywalls and talking about changing copyright law.

Now, one newspaper is going further -- it's taking bloggers that posted its stories to court, with the result that a number of blogs have been shut down and are facing multi-thousand-dollar settlement charges.

TheLas Vegas Review-Journal set up an agreement with Righthaven LLC that enables Righthaven to sue, on behalf of the Review-Journal, bloggers who reposted content from the paper. And it has done so, filing nearly 80 cases, regardless of whether the blog was commercial or gave credit to the source.

While some have claimed Righthaven has a right-wing agenda and is focusing on liberal blogs, conservative blogs have also been targeted.

"Righthaven has offered no prior contact, cease-and-desist warnings or any attempt at good-faith resolution whatsoever," reported The Armed Citizen , which posted six articles from the Las Vegas paper among 4,700 articles it has posted on the subject of Second Amendment rights. "The Armed Citizen has been excerpting articles from newspaper, TV station, and radio station websites for a number of years without a single complaint or infringement notice."

(Joe Strupp, of Media Matters, notes that, thus far, conservative Nevada political candidates who have posted entire articles have not yet been targeted, raising …

A New Zealand company is reporting that its Twitter account has been suspended due to “Updates consisting mainly of links, and not personal updates" -- which, if true, means that any other business that posts a lot of links could suffer the same fate.

"I suspect the Reuters account http://twitter.com/reuters will be suspended very soon as clearly 99% of their posts are links back to their site," noted the social media marketing company, Business Blogs, tongue-in-cheek, in describing the situation. "Of course its not just Reuters – all profiles controlled by news agencies should be suspended as well."

The company found that its account had been suspended on July 15. "The Twitter profile took our staff over 6 months to build up to a 5,000 follower count by updating the profile with content at least 3 times per day," the company wrote . "There was no selling, no spam and no abuse."

What the company did do -- like many other companies -- was to use a third-party social media company, CampaignHub , to automate the posting of items to sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as well as to hold contests and promotions. And in response to Twitter spammers that make a business out of promising to build up one's Twitter following, the company has been cracking down on automated postings.

"Automated or mass-created affiliate advertising …

A two-day marathon of almost real-time, personalized ads based on social media requests was so successful that it was causing Internet outages, according to an article on the campaign in AdWeek.

The 'Old Spice Guy,' actor Isaiah Mustafa, made more than 200 little videos over the course of two days from a studio in Portland -- in a campaign that has not only revitalized the Old Spice brand but which is likely to change the relationship between social media and advertising ongoing. “It just gives you a glimpse of where the world is going,” said Patrick Pichette, CFO of Google -- which owns YouTube, where the ads had their own channel -- during the company's earnings call. "In less than three days, the 65 response videos drew more than 5.2 million views on YouTube," and the brand’s Twitter followers grew to 48,000, from 3,000, reported the New York Times.

The effort involved a team of writers, art directors, producers, editors and social media strategists, Adweek described. "The social media experts initially identified a crop of popular bloggers in key areas like entertainment (Perez Hilton), technology (4chan) and advertising (Adweek's own AdFreak), as well as regular YouTube and Facebook commenters. The social media team scours the Web for comments related to the Old Spice campaign. They feed ones that are funny or from interesting sources to the creatives, who then determine which make good fodder for humorous videos."

Videos included …

Okay, this is cool -- a single screen that shows an aggregation of Google news stories, with size representing the number of stories on a topic, color representing the category, and hue representing the stories' age.

The site is designed by a company called Maramushi, headed by Marcos Weskamp, who describes himself as a San Francisco-based Design Engineer "who has a deep interest in playing with and visualizing lots of data. He is a self-taught technologist who constantly investigates the fields of Interaction Design and Information Visualization." He has studied in Argentina and Japan, and now works for an unnamed startup.

Newsmap works like this, according to the website: "A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
Newsmap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media."

Users can specify which country's perspective on news they want -- more than a dozen countries are available -- and users can also choose not to receive certain types of news, such as sports or entertainment.

The site has about 15,000 registered users in November -- in fact, so …

Some industry experts are expressing concern about a proposal from the White House to develop a "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace," now up for public comment, saying it is vague, might no longer allow online anonymity, potentially gives government too much access to personal information, and provides a single point of failure for identity thieves.

The plan postulates security tokens such as a "smart identity card," possibly from state government, or a digital certificate from a smart phone, that would contain all sorts of identity information about a person, rather than people having to remember a long string of user names and passwords for different websites. The person would need to possess the token to have access to their online information, which the plan says would make identity theft more difficult.

However, while the plan talks a lot about different security layers, and different providers, it doesn't talk much about who would actually be doing the providing. Indeed, Appendix B -- "Participants" -- is blank.

And in an era when people supposedly posting anonymously are finding out that their postings aren't anonymous after all, some people are concerned that the proposal will eliminate anonymous posting altogether. While the potential smart identity card would allow for anonymous posting, the very aspect of using an identity card makes it inherently un-anonymous, say critics.

"[A]nonymous to what extent?" wrote Lauren Weinstein on his blog. "Perhaps a blog comment would appear on …

Just weeks after Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales came under criticism for being overly zealous about removing information, particularly images, that could be considered to be child pornography from the electronic encyclopedia, the site is being accused by Fox News of harboring pedophiles.

"Wikipedia has become home base for a loose worldwide network of pedophiles who are campaigning to spin the popular online encyclopedia in their favor and are trying to lure more people into their world, an investigation by FoxNews.com confirms," according to an article on Fox News.

Eek.

In reading the article on the investigation, one learns that it is based on the fact that people who hang out in pedophile chat rooms have talked about writing Wikipedia articles in order to ensure that the subject was covered in a fair and balanced way.

"This means that students who use Wikipedia to research the academic subject of pedophilia will immediately find a page on the topic that is being targeted by the pedophiles," Fox News exclaimed. "Wikipedia's "Pedophilia" page also is the first "hit" when you search the term in Google or Bing."

Um, isn't that the idea? Assuming that a student would actually be researching "the academic subject of pedophilia"?

Fox News also accused pedophiles of "gaming" the Wikipedia system by voting against removing pedophiliac content -- in other words, using the Wikipedia system just like any number of other groups. (Including conservatives -- who set …

In a move that some are hailing as a new frontier for independent political candidates, the Utah Supreme Court ruled today that nominating petitions can be signed electronically as well as on paper and still be valid.

"[W]e conclude that the plain language of section 20A-9-502 is not limited to handwritten signatures," wrote the court in its decision.

"The Court’s opinion, the first of its kind nationwide, has the potential to increase significantly the ability of independent candidates to access the general election ballot, and thus to increase the opportunity for minority viewpoints to be heard and considered in election years," trumpeted the Utah chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued the case.

Well, yes and no.

Background first, from the Associated Press: "In March, Utah Lt. Gov. Greg Bell rejected a nominating petition from Farley Anderson, an independent gubernatorial candidate, saying state law did not allow for e-signatures. Anderson had included more than 150 e-signatures on his petition. In its unanimous ruling, the court said Bell's decision "exceeded the bounds of discretion" afforded his office and he would need specific rules in place to exempt the election process from laws that allow electronic signatures in other settings."

So what does this mean?

First of all, the court ruled narrowly, rejecting a memorandum from The Utahns for Ethical Government that suggested the court should also determine that an electronic signature satisfies the signature requirement …

Remember Richard Blumenthal? The Connecticut Attorney General who has led a pack of other state Attorneys General for more than a year chasing pedophiles (who may or may not have been there) on social networks and prostitutes on Craigslist?

And who, in what is surely just a coincidence, is running for the U.S. Senate, and whose campaign is slipping following revelations that he lied about serving in Vietnam?

He's back -- and now he's jumping on the outrage bandwagon about privacy issues with Google Streetview. The company came under fire earlier this year amidst revelations that while taking pictures for the mapping service, Google cars were also collecting data from wifi networks -- not only publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) but also payload data (information sent over the network).

Google says it was a mistake. "In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data," the company wrote in its blog. "A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."

The company went on to outline steps it …

As it turns out, if you give people the ability to have other people look at them anonymously via the computer, some of them do very, very nasty things.

Imagine.

Chatroulette, released in November, 2009, by a 17-year-old Russian boy, is often described as a website for voyeurs, but really, it's a website for exhibitionists. Log into the site, and one is randomly connected -- over video, audio, and text -- with another person logged into the site.

You could think of it as an opportunity for performance art, but instead, it's turning into speed-dating for wankers. An analysis of Chatroulette traffic earlier this year by RJMetrics provided the following results:

• 89% of single people were male, 11% female. In fact, you are more likely to encounter nobody at all than a single female, and twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity
• 1 in 8 sessions result in something R-rated or worse, such as appear to not be wearing any clothes whatsoever, are displaying explicit nudity, or appear to be committing a lewd act
• The UK is, er, head and shoulders over other countries in having its residents be more likely to fall in this category -- Turkey, France, and Germany tie for second place; the U.S. is last

It is this last category that is the problem. After explosive growth for the first few months, it was reported …

Go Google the term "oil spill." I'll wait.

First item? "BP www.BP.com/OilSpillNews Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill Learn More about How BP is Helping."

It's a "sponsored link," meaning that BP paid for it to be there and to come up as the first item when someone searched for the term.

It was first spotted by ABC News, which did a report on it Saturday, including an admission by BP that it had done so.

"We have bought search terms on search engines like Google to make it easier for people to find out more about our efforts in the Gulf and make it easier for people to find key links to information on filing claims, reporting oil on the beach and signing up to volunteer," BP spokesman Toby Odone told ABC News.

The notion isn't new; political campaigns such as John McCain's made an art out of buying sponsored links on Google (though some were more successful than others).

But the ABC News piece quoted expert Kevin Ryan saying that typical users don't see the difference between a legitimate search result and a sponsored one, and cited BP's move -- which he said was the first time it had been done in such a situation -- as an example of how the company is trying to spin the situation.

Another expert in the ABC News story estimated that BP was spending $10,000 …

We've all seen them -- a user survey, often performed by Respected Independent Firm, but promoted by Vendor Y -- which just happens to come up with the result that users want the products, or the features, that vendor Y provides. Amazing how that works.

Here's the six telltale signs to take such a survey with a grain of salt.

1. Lack of detail about how the participants came to be included. For survey results to be statistically significant, the people need to be randomly chosen. Even if they're all high-powered executives, you don't want them all to be in the same geographic area or industry. (You may even find that all the users just happen to be customers of Vendor Y.) Also, to make sure there's a representative sample, a reputable survey will typically be calling or mailing the user. Surveys that are performed by having users decide to go to a website are what's called self-selected; the people who participate are either doing so because they're really happy -- or they have an ax to grind.

2. Look for the line "Respected independent firm X was commissioned by Vendor Y." That means Vendor Y paid for it. How likely is it that the results are going to be something Vendor Y doesn't like?

3. Meaningless graphs. Look for a graph measuring something impossible to quantify, such as "User satisfaction," typically with no units on the graph, and with the graph forming a perfect line …

It's not clear whether it's an application, a virus, or Facebook itself, but in the past couple of days something is sending out large numbers of friend suggestions that the original friend didn't make.

Typically, it works like this. You have a friend, B, and a friend, C, and you think B and C would be copacetic together, or you think B and C are already friends but don't know each other is in Facebook, so you suggest that B and C become friends, and B and C each receive a message from Facebook, in your name, with the suggestion.

But something's gone haywire.

Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I received 51 friend suggestions from two friends, including family members I would have no reason of knowing or friending. I confirmed with one of these friends thus far that she was not sending out the requests.

Meanwhile, in Facebook's Help Center, under Friends -- Suggestions, are dozens of new questions on the subject. "Some of my friends got friend suggestions from me that I didn't suggest." "Is there a virus on FB re. friend suggestions?" "Is there a virus on FB that is sending out random Friend Suggestions?" and so on.

With Facebook being battered in the media lately regarding privacy issues, some people are suggesting this is the latest move by Facebook to "help" its users become more strongly connected.

To add insult to injury, the Help Center is broken, meaning that …

The Washington State Supreme Court ruled earlier this month on a 6-3 decision that libraries had the right not only to use Internet blocking software, but to refuse to lift the block for a particular site even when an adult requested it.

The case was significant because it's thought that Washington's freedom of speech act is even broader than that of the First Amendment.

The suit was brought against the North Central Regional Library District, which covers Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant and Okanogan counties with 28 branch libraries, some of which double as school libraries, according to the legal opinion. "In October 2006, following its earlier use of other software, NCRL implemented the "FortiGuard Web Filtering Service," a widely used filtering service," the opinion went on to say. "Using proprietary algorithms and human review, FortiGuard sorts web sites into 76 categories based upon predominant content. The database catalogues over 43 million web sites and over 2 billion individual web pages."

Certain categories of sites are forbidden, including hacking, proxy avoidance, phishing, "adult materials," gambling, nudity, pornography, web chat, instant messaging, malware, and spyware, the opinion continued. In addition, "NCRL also blocks the Image Search, Video Search, and Spam classifications, certain specific image search web sites, and the "personals" section of craigslist.org. NCRL also initially blocked but subsequently unblocked access to youtube.com, myspace.com, and craigslist.org (except for the "personals" section)."

The opinion itself is fascinating reading (no, …

In response to criticism of the way it was testing broadband Internet speeds, the Federal Communications Commission, following up a promise it made last month, announced it had hired a vendor to help it perform more accurate tests.

"In a couple of weeks, we will be asking for consumers from across the country to voluntarily install hardware in their homes (on an opt-in basis) that is capable of measuring broadband performance," said the FCC's Dave Vorhaus, an expert advisor in economic opportunity, on the FCC's blog. "The measurements will give us results across a broad swath of providers, service tiers and geographic areas."

The FCC is working with a UK company called SamKnows that has recently performed similar testing there, Vorhaus said. "The FCC will also release a Public Notice in the coming days with details on SamKnows’ technical approach and methodology to allow for comment and new ideas," he added. The company will receive about $600,000 for the work, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Other companies that bid on the contract, which will create five to 10 U.S. jobs, included the Nielson Co., the Wall Street Journal said. SamKnows UK said it would be licensing its technology without charge to a new American company that will be set-up, and based in Washington, specifically for this project.

Approximately 10,000 people are expected to volunteer for the speed test. "The specially developed ‘White Box’ does not monitor …

A news article was making the Facebook rounds today, warning about a site called Spokeo.com that aggregates publicly available information.

"It can list your address, a picture of your home, how much it cost, how long you have lived there, your approximate age and income, your relationship status and more," the article warned. "And it is online for anyone to see."

Well, sort of.

Around a year ago, Spokeo.com was encouraging people to sign up and link their address books to the site, ostensibly so someone who had friends on multiple social media sites could track them down.

"Enter any single email address, and Spokeo will search across 41 social networks for all related online profiles," the company said, in an email message from January, 2009. "If you import an entire address book, Spokeo will show you all your friends' photos, videos, and blogs."

Apparently, the site did a little more with the information than that.

The article warned that some users had found that the information on the site was incorrect, and so it was for me -- it listed me as married to someone ten years older than his actual age whom I divorced in 2002, that my house was worth $1 million (let me tell you, my *town* is hardly worth that much), that I played hockey and football, and that my 60+ year-old house was built in 2003.

On the other hand, it …

Craig Newmark, the man that newspaper editors love to hate, celebrated the 15th anniversary of Craigslist -- the garage sale listing of the Internet -- this month.

In Newmark's blog, he posted a copy of a message from March 28, 1995, from the seminal online service The WElL.

"My focus, on this page, is on events around San Francisco that involve arts and technology, privacy rights, local writers and artists, and any other item that strikes my fancy. This includes stuff like the Anon Salon, Spoonman's TeleCircus, Joe's Digital Diner, Eric's Jacking In series, the upcoming conference on Feminist Activism and Art, etc." Newmark described in the 1995 posting.

And, showing that Craigslist hasn't changed much since then, "The approach is as minimalist as I could make, with the exception of the Cole Valley stuff, where I display maps of its location, and a photo of parking hell overlooked by Sutro Tower. I'd really appreciate any feedback..."

A 2005 BBC report predicted that newspaper classified advertisements could be shut down entirely because of Craigslist. And a Wired article from last summer said 47 million people -- a fifth of the adult population -- used the service every month.

Alternative newsweeklies, which are given away, were particularly hard hit. "The poster of a smiling man's face in a red circle with a diagonal no-parking-style slash through it hung on walls at the most recent convention of the Association of Alternative …

Those of us who still read newspapers have seen them -- the pages and pages of teeny type describing changes in zoning, foreclosure notices, and all sorts of other arcane information. Most of us just turn the page.

But in publishing, it's big money, and newspapers that have already lost such lucrative revenue sources as want ads to Craiglist are fighting attempts in a number of states to change the law requiring such legal notices to be printed in the newspaper and instead allow them to be posted online.

Websites say that few people read the paper any more and that the legal notice requirements cost municipalities much more than an online source. Newspapers say it gives people interested in the legal notices a single source for the information.

Such fights are going on in a number of states, including Connecticut, Michigan, and Tennessee.

"The legislation will allow public notices to appear exclusively on government websites, despite the fact that less than 10% of the U.S. population views a local, state or federal government
website daily and more than 25% of adults don’t even have access to the Internet," said a press release from the Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association. "In comparison, 83% of adults read a community newspaper at least once per week, according to the National Newspaper Association (NNA)."

On the other hand, placers of such advertisements, such as attorneys, are pointing out that Connecticut newspapers such as the …

One of the biggest security stories so far this year is that of the high school that remotely triggered webcams in laptops given to students -- which the school said it only did to help track stolen laptops, and which some students and families said was a violation of their privacy, with the student in question filing a class-action lawsuit.

The school, Harriton in the Lower Merion School District, in a suburb of Philadelphia, said it has activated the cameras -- which parents reportedly didn't know about -- on 42 of the laptops.

An extremely detailed post in a security blog includes links to high school administrators talking about the technology collects student reports about the camera randomly blinking on, and lists requirements that the school had for students with the laptops.

"Possession of a monitored Macbook was required for classes

Possession of an unmonitored personal computer was forbidden and would be confiscated

Disabling the camera was impossible

Jailbreaking a school laptop in order to secure it or monitor it against intrusion was an offense which merited expulsion"

Parents have also posted online, with some of them -- including one who posted on the Facebook page of Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, saying that some parents were aware of the feature, that students weren't upset, and that the student who filed the lawsuit -- who was made aware of the program when …

Legislators around the country are scrambling to look at their states' laws about lewd messages to minors after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned a conviction, saying state law didn't support it because it didn't specify online messaging.

“The online conversations in this case, as they were not written with pen or pencil, cannot be considered `handwritten’ materials,’’ Justice Francis X. Spina wrote on behalf of the Supreme Judicial Court, in a unanimous decision. “If the Legislature wishes to include instant messaging or other electronically transmitted text in the definition, it is for the Legislature, not the court, to do so.’’

Many states have similar phrasing in their lewd messaging laws, so it is likely that this is a problem that goes beyond just Massachusetts.

Matt H. Zubiel had been charged with four counts of sending sexually explicit instant messages in February 2006 to a Plymouth County deputy sheriff posing as a girl online. Each count carried a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Ironically, noted the Boston Globe, the legislature had changed those laws four years ago to make the penalties harsher, but had not added language to include electronically transmitted messages.

The Massachusetts Governor, as well as the chair of the state legislature's judiciary committee, plans to file legislation next week to amend the law, local papers reported.

Scrapping scissors and knitting needles at the ready, sellers on the handcrafting site www.etsy.com are up in arms over what they say are sites stealing their designs and images and then hiring other crafters to produce them.

Discussion on the topic started earlier today, with more than 600 postings at this writing.

In a real-to-life embodiment of John Naisbitt's "High Tech, High Touch," first publicized in his book Megatrends, Etsy -- a sort of eBay for the crafty -- has became a runaway success. The website, which bills itself as "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade," raised $27 million in startup funding two years ago.

While sites such as "Regretsy" have spoofed Etsy and certain items on it, the handcrafters claim that sites such as Trader Lou and A.H. Smith -- reportedly all registered to a Robert Frechette -- are going a step further and actually promoting Etsy pieces as their own.

"Here are the legitimate earrings, and here they are on the AH Smith site," reported one commenter.

Interestingly, artisans on the site are working together to find examples of duplications, alert the local and national media, contact Frechette, comment on the items and on his sites, do legal research, report the incidents to law enforcement, and so on -- another example of the power of the Internet mob as described by Clay …

Authors of books published by Macmillan discovered early Saturday morning that all their electronic books been pulled from Amazon sales, and even wishlists, in a dispute between Amazon and their publisher over e-book pricing.

How the dispute is resolved will help determine the price of e-books in the future.

"Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15," reported the New York Times in its technology blog. "Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter."

Part of the dispute is related to the Apple iPad, using iBooks technology, the Times reported. "Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBooks store," the blog read. Apple will allow publishers more leeway to set their own prices for e-books, the Times said in an earlier story.

In a published advertisement today, Macmillan CEO John Sargent said he had met with Amazon in Seattle on Thursday, and gave them a proposal for new terms of sale for e-books -- or, as an alternative, greatly reducing the number of titles it would sell with Amazon. "By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon [Friday] they informed me that they were taking all our books off the …

Perhaps taking the lead from Connecticut Republicans who set up fake Twitter accounts and websites for their Democratic opponents, other political campaigns are doing it, too.

In California, an intern for the campaign of Beth Krom for Congress noticed that the website of incumbent Representative John Campbell had a misspelled link: CampbellforCongres.com, with a missing s. "Krom's supporters bought the misspelled domain name and redirected it to Krom's website," explained NBC News.

Moreover, the link was unnoticed from mid-November until just the other day, when the OC Register's blog pointed it out.

On the other hand, Republican Rita Meyer, candidate for Governor in Wyoming, cut ties with a volunteer staffer who had performed a similar trick, according to the Associated Press. Opponent Matt Mead had the website meadforgovernor.com, and Meyer staffer Paul Montoya reportedly registered the URL mattmeadforgovernor.com and redirected it to Meyer's site.

According to the AP, Mead learned about it from supporters and confronted Meyer, who said she didn't know about it and wouldn't have done it because it would reflect badly on her campaign. The site was switched back to the legitimate Mead site on Wednesday.

Montoya, for his part, reportedly claimed it was meant to demonstrate the importance of securing pertinent domain names.

Well, there's one advantage to global warming: The Kodiak-Kenai Cable Company (KKCC) has announced plans to finance, design, build and operate an express undersea fiber optic cable connecting Asia and Europe, routed through the Arctic, according to an article in the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

Construction of the $1.2 billion, 10,000-mile ArcticLink is expected to start in 2011 and be completed by 2013. It uses "a politically stable and secure route" through Japan, the United States, Canada, Greenland, the Arctic region, and the United Kingdom.

"The project will also utilize four, 40 gigabit per second sub sea fiber pairs, providing four times the existing capacity per wavelength for a combined system capacity of 6.4 terabits per second," the Kodiak Daily Mirror said. "It will also have record setting latencies of less than 90 milliseconds. That is nearly a 50 percent reduction compared to today’s preferred Asia-Europe route latency times."

However, while it will bring faster Internet to Unalaska and Prudhoe Bay, it won't improve service to other parts of western Alaska, said KUCB News. The Northern Fiber Optic Link project, another KKCC project that is aimed at bringing high speed Internet to all of the communities in western Alaska, is a separate project to be funded, if accepted, by the stimulus.

While waiting for federal legislation legalizing online gambling -- a vote that could happen as early as next month -- individual states are looking to legalize online gambling as well.

States such as New Jersey, California, and Florida are considering legislation that would permit online gambling within their states -- and which would also put them in a position for being a center of interstate gambling as well, should it be legalized on a federal level. "[D]ifferent players [are] attempting to use the political process as essentially a land grab – to position the legislation to give them either a monopoly or special position if intrastate wagering should become legal," noted Anthony Cabot, partner and gaming group leader at Lewis & Roca, in his blog.

In addition, with many states in dire financial straits, a piece of the estimated $48 billion that legalized online gambling could make for the U.S. is tempting. Other states, such as Florida, are concerned that without legalization, citizens will be taken advantage of by unscrupulous operators.

However, some say that gambling within a state -- even one as large as California -- isn't likely to attract enough people to make it viable to offer as many games and as big tournaments as offshore sites such as PokerStars and Full Tilt, where most U.S. online poker users currently play, unless such sites are shut down at the …

Online legal experts are salivating over cookies.

Specifically, they are leaping to comment on the legal precedents involved over a lawsuit by Dr. Sanford Siegal, creator of the "Cookie Diet," and his company, Dr. Siegal's Direct Nutritionals, LLC, against celebrity, model, socialite, and actress Kim Kardashian over what they allege is libelous material in a Tweet.

“According to the complaint, Dr. Siegal's company sent diet samples to Kardashian's publicist last Spring after the company's CEO read an article claiming Kardashian, and other celebrities, had lost weight using the cookie diet,” noted David Obrien on the Citizen Media Law Project, which is monitoring the case. “The complaint states that neither Kardashian nor her publicist confirmed or denied the accuracy of the article, but acknowledged they received the samples. Subsequently, the company posted a hyperlink on its website, alongside other news articles written about the diet, to a subsequent article that again stated that Kardashian and other celebrities had lost weight using the cookie diet.

"On October 29, 2009, two tweets posted to Kardashian's Twitter account:
14(a). Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet is falsely promoting that I'm on this diet. NOT TRUE! I would never do this unhealthy diet! I do QuickTrim!
14(b). If this Dr. Siegal is lying about me being on this diet, what else are they lying about? Not cool!

"More than a month later, on December 11, 2009, Kardashian's legal team took aim at the …

Facebook is now being blamed for up to 1 in 5 divorces, according to an analysis performed on an online database of divorce documents.

The website, called Divorce-Online, had Facebook mentioned 989 times out of 5,000 documents, according to Mark Keenan, managing director of the site.

The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats, Keenan said in an article in the Sun.

Facebook has changed how relationships and breakups are conducted for a while now, with divorce attorneys mining it for evidence and with people announcing the state of their relationship using it.

Other social media sites were also mentioned in divorce papers, but Facebook received more attention.

If you've ever wanted to read Sprague's Journal of Maine History, or Pioneers of Scioto County, but couldn't because they were too old, you're in luck. They're among nearly 60,000 books -- many too fragile to be safely handled -- that have been digitally scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project of the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC), the world’s largest library. You can read and download these books for free.

The project is called Digitizing American Imprints and consists of books published before 1923, because they are in the public domain in the United States after the expiration of their U.S. copyrights (which helps it avoid some of the copyright issues Google Books has had). Many of these books cover a period of Western settlement of the United States, starting in 1865, but they date as far back as 1707, covering the trial of two Presbyterian ministers in New York.

These and the other digitized books can be accessed through the Library’s catalog Web site and the Internet Archive (IA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free online digital library founded by Internet pioneer Brewster Kahle. The project was funded by a $2 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Using overhead cameras, 1000 books can be scanned per week. In addition, the Library of Congress is producing a report on best practices for dealing with brittle books and fold-out materials that it plans to make …

Hewlett-Packard is scrambling to respond to an issue brought up by a Dec. 10 YouTube video demonstrating that the facial tracking software used in some of its laptops doesn't recognize black people.

HP responded to the issue yesterday in its blog, and it's starting to go viral today.

In the light-hearted but pointed video, black "Desi" and white "Wanda" show how the software tracks Wanda but not Desi, even though they're in the same room, at the same angle, with the same lighting. The tracking works when Wanda enters the frame, and stops working when Desi enters.

A mortified HP blamed the problem on insufficient contrast between the eyes and the skin of the upper cheek and nose. "We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting," HP said, referring people to information about optimum lighting for facial-tracking software.

Meanwhile, the company is pledging to work on the problem with its partners.

The federal government today made the first awards aimed toward improving broadband access in the U.S.

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The deadline for applications for the first round was earlier this year.

At an event at Impulse Manufacturing in Dawsonville, Georgia, with Governor Sonny Perdue (R-GA), Vice President Joe Biden announced an initial $183 million investment in eighteen broadband projects benefiting seventeen states, which has already been matched by more than $46 million in public and private sector capital, the White House said.

The following Middle Mile awards were made through the Department of Commerce:

• GEORGIA: North Georgia Network Cooperative, Inc., $33.5 million grant with an additional $8.8 million in matching funds to deploy a 260-mile regional fiber-optic ring to deliver gigabit broadband in the North Georgia foothills.
• MAINE: Biddeford Internet Corp. (d.b.a. GWI), $25.4 million grant with an additional $6.4 million in matching funds to build a 1,100-mile open access fiber-optic network extending to the most rural and disadvantaged areas of the state of Maine, from the Saint John Valley in the north, to the rocky coastline of downeast Maine, to the mountainous regions of western Maine.
• NEW YORK: ION Hold Co., LLC, $39.7 million grant with an additional $9.9 …

An increasing number of cities in the United States and Canada are releasing data to developers to use in applications.

While regions have released geographic information system (GIS) data for some time, such data required complicated software to use. Cities are now releasing all kinds of data, some of them as simple as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

In October, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom required that City departments make all non-confidential datasets under their authority available on DataSF.org. Dozens are available, ranging from city surveys, election statements and ballot measures, and performance measures, as well as a great deal of GIS data.

New York has a similar program called the New York Data Mine, while the District of Columbia's is called the Data Catalog. Portland announced such an initiative in September.

In Canada, Toronto has also made a great deal of city data available, while Vancouver has announced its intention to do so.

Such initiatives enable developers -- not just for computers, but also for smart phones such as the iPhone -- to say "there's an app for that" regarding all sorts of city services, including mashups between them. New York is having a contest to develop interesting applications, while San Francisco has posted a showcase of interesting apps online.

The other advantage, notes the New York Times in an article about the phenomenon, is …

Keeping the Internet safe for satire, the World Intellectual Property Organization ruled that the domain name glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com was not a violation of the conservative political commentator's intellectual property.

The WIPO ruling "dismissed Beck's argument that Internet users could be confused by the domain name and its accompanying Web site," noted an NPR article. "'Even a 'moron in a hurry,'" read the decision, quoting Eiland-Hall's attorney, "would not likely conclude that Complainant sponsored, endorsed or was affiliated with the website addressed by the disputed domain name.""

Indeed, in an excellent example of the Streisand Effect, Beck's September lawsuit actually brought more attention to the website, noted the site's founder, Isaac Eiland-Hall, in a letter to Beck upon the WIPO's decision.

"It bears observing that by bringing the WIPO complaint, you took what was merely one small critique meme, in a seas of internet memes, and turned it into a super-meme," Eiland-Hall said. "Then, in pressing forward (by not withdrawing the complaint and instead filing additional briefs), you turned the super-meme into an object lesson in First Amendment principles."

The point of the website -- riffing upon an August, 2008, joke that was itself a reference to a joke about comedian Bob Saget -- was to mock Beck's rhetorical style by accusing him of something that, as former president Lyndon Johnson would have said, the b*****d hadn't denied.

Upon making his …

In 1968, a teacher named Jane Elliott performed a seminal experiment with her class of third-graders. Wishing to teach them about prejudice, she told them that kids with blue eyes were superior to those with brown eyes, gave the blue-eyed kids all sorts of privileges, and made the brown-eyed kids second-class citizens. Soon enough, the kids had internalized the differences, with the blue-eyed kids picking on the brown-eyed ones.

Now, students across Canada and the U.S. have taken it upon themselves to set up a similar scenario, except with prejudice against redheaded kids, inspired by a four-year-old South Park episode.

Four redheaded children in Los Angeles-area schools were attacked on Friday, based on a Facebook group declaring it to be "Kick a Ginger Day," according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, while two dozen children in an Ontario, Canada, school were suspended after a similar incident and other students in the Vancouver area reported being kicked as many as 80 times during the day.

In the U.S., it was not considered to be a hate crime, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are considering classing it as such.

Facebook has since taken the group down, saying it had not been aware of it, but a cached version indicated that it had more than 4,500 fans.

In fact, at this point there are now eleven pages and more than 180 groups, the …

We're already heard about people being fired for calling in sick and then posting on Facebook.

Now a woman has lost her insurance.

According to CBCNews, Nathalie Blanchard, 29, has been on leave from her job at IBM for the past year and a half after she was diagnosed with major depression. She was receiving monthly sick-leave benefits from Manulife, her insurance company. When the payments stopped, she called the insurance company and was told she was "available to work, because of Facebook."

The insurance agent reportedly described several pictures Blanchard had posted, including ones showing her at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party, and at the beach — evidence that she is no longer depressed.

Blanchard said she had taken the vacation on her doctor's advice and that she had informed the company of the trip.

In addition, Blanchard said she didn't understand how Manulife accessed her photos, because her Facebook profile is locked and only people she approves can look at what she posts. Ironically, it was due to pressure from the Canadian government that Facebook recently revised its privacy policy. Online speculation is that one of the woman's coworkers at IBM may have turned her in.

The company confirmed that it uses the social networking site to investigate clients but said it would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook.

Here's a switch. Instead of newspapers trying to protect the identities of the people posting to their websites, the newspaper is the one outing them.

As described by editor Kurt Greenbaum of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, someone posted a vulgar word in the paper's online commenting system, and re-posted it after a newspaper staffer deleted it.

"I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school," Greenbaum reported. "So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included."

The school managed to track down the offending (literally) poster, who turned out to be a school employee, and when confronted, the person resigned.

Since then, however, the incident has resulted in a great deal of discussion about whether Greenbaum acted responsibly, especially for a newspaper.

"t's still troubling that a journalist with 27 years of experience didn't question whether it was wise to out one of the paper's readers -- a decision that certainly seems to violate the paper's own policies," noted The Daily Online Examiner. "The site's privacy policy states: "We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials.""

The blog went on to …

Calling social media sites a "productivity black hole," the UK IT services group Morse said that staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year, according to the BBC.

More than half those surveyed said they used social networking sites during the working day for personal use, with the average being 40 minutes per week on these sites. While this doesn't sound like much, it adds up to almost a week a year, Morse said.

Other responses from the study, which surveyed 1,460 people:

• More than three-quarters of respondents said their employer had not given them specific guidelines with regards to using Twitter.
  
• A third of workers said they had seen sensitive information posted on social networks.
  
• 84 percent said they felt it should be up to them what they posted online.

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously earlier this week to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. The contract is worth $7.25 million and covers 30,000 employees.

In June, Washington, D.C. made a similar decision, signing a contract worth almost $500,000 for its 38,000 municipal employees to use Google's e-mail, spreadsheet and word- processing programs, giving them an Internet-based alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Office software, installed on computers, according to Bloomberg.

Interestingly, the chief technical officer responsible for the decision was Vivek Kundra, now Chief Information Officer of the United States. The White House recently decided to migrate its website from proprietary software to Drupal.

Los Angeles plans to complete implementation of the Google system by June and will begin with a pilot period during which a limited number of employees will test the system, the Times said. City law enforcement agencies including the Los Angeles Police Department will migrate to the new system once they are satisfied with the security and functioning of the system.

Los Angeles worked on the decision for nearly a year, where Google competed with other software vendors, including Microsoft. "Parties on all sides believe that if smaller cities see Los Angeles successfully transition to Google's cloud system, they may be more likely to follow suit," the Times said.

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The deadline for submissions was earlier this year.

Now, you can search the database yourself to find what projects were submitted.

Endeavour Partners, a consulting company, downloaded the data to see what it could find out about the proposals.

First of all, $28 billion in requests was submitted for $7.2 billion in funding.

Other observations include:

• 2,186 applications were received
• The average application size was $12.7 million, but the median application size was $2.7 million
• Alaska had the largest total dollar amount requested, at $1.3 billion
• The largest application was from RADgov, a proposal to build and connect computer learning centers in underserved communities across the US for $938 million
• The top 10 states requesting the most money were California, Florida, Colorado, Alaska, New York, Texas, Virginia, Missouri, Maryland, and Illinois.
• The top 10 states requesting the most money per capita were Alaska, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Hawaii, Vermont, Colorado, New Mexico, and Maryland.

While a number of the top 10 per capita states actually are laggards in terms of broadband availability, "three of the top 10 states ranked on funding requests per capita are in …

A company that has been attempting to obtain licensing fees from adult companies, as well as other providers such as Internet radio stations and leading satellite and cable companies such Echostar, DirectTV, Time Warner Cable, and CSC Holdings, Inc., has had its patent thrown out by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Acacia Research's patent on streaming media technology had been targeted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of its Patent Busting Project for being overly broad. "Laughably broad patent would cover everything from online distribution of home movies to scanned documents and MP3s," the EFF described it.

The company systematically acquired a number of patents on streaming media, with an eye toward making money on licensing fees, according to a 2003 CNET article.

"The company's digital media strategy began in earnest several years ago," the article said. "It had determined that it owned about a third of the patents it needed to mount a licensing strategy for Web streaming, and its attorneys spent considerable time researching the rights held by another set of companies that Acacia ultimately purchased in 2001. By the time Acacia finished, it owned five U.S. patents and 17 international patents dating back to 1991."

Acacia started with the adult website market. "The case reaches all the way back to 2002, when Acacia began sending out media packets to online adult companies asserting that the companies were violating patents associated with …

GovLoop, an online social network for government workers that was started by a federal worker, has been sold to GovDelivery Inc., a venture-backed government communications platform, with GovLoop founder Steve Ressler as its head of social networking.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

The service currently has about 20,000 members, and Ressler would like to increase it to 100,000, he told the Wall Street Journal.

GovDelivery is "a supplier of government-to-citizen email and wireless communication systems (mostly for mass notification) to state and local but also to some federal agencies," according to Gartner government analyst Andrea DiMaio. However, noting that government users are now allowed to use mainstream services such as Facebook (though not Twitter), he wondered in his blog how much relevance GovLoop would continue to have -- comments that Ressler himself agreed with. "I see the future of GovLoop as a “knowledge network” for government – a place where government people can go to get their questions answered to do their job better," he said. "That can be asking a question on their government career, on a niche topic like how to implement a wiki, or a broad scope like talking about the future of cloud in government."