internet

Los Angeles Review of Books: Evgeny Morozov is done with the Internet. In his latest book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, Morozov dismantles the myth that the Internet is inherently a force for social change; it can no more fix higher education, save the economy, or topple a dictator than [...]

When online communication first took shape, it often involved exchanges between individuals who had professional reasons to want to conceal their identities. Software engineers, who tend to be libertarian by nature, wanted to be able to engage in freewheeling discussions with like-minded cyber-adventurers without being constrained too much by overbearing managers or corporate dictates. Free [...]

Michael Eisen writes: As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around [...]

I don’t make it a habit to copy and paste whole articles. Instead, I generally engage in an informal exchange — take an extract and send some readers to the source. It seems like an equitable arrangement. But once in a while a piece just seems too good to break apart and so I take [...]

The Independent reports: The head of the internet giant Google has defiantly defended his company’s tax avoidance strategy claiming he was “proud” of the steps it had taken to cut its tax bill which were just “capitalism”. In an interview in New York Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman, confirmed the company had no intention of paying [...]

Wired: It’s becoming the trademark move of failing regimes: silence your critics and cripple their communications by cutting off the internet. Libya did it. Egypt too. And last week, Syria pulled the plug on its own internet system. According to new research from network monitoring company Renesys, it could just as easily happen in many [...]

Alexis Madrigal writes: Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that’s the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you’re drawing from when you ask Google [...]

A director of a global internet services company writes: I like the internet. I use it a lot. In fact, I work at a senior level in the industry and from here the internet does not look like a fad that will pass any time soon. Hundreds of millions think Facebook is fun, that Google [...]

By Peter Maass, ProPublica, June 28, 2012 June 28: This story has been corrected. This story was co-published with Wired. Jonathan Mayer had a hunch. A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, [...]