Internet Archive

At the beginning of this year, the MPAA and six studios - Universal, Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Disney - joined together to begin a new campaign against piracy on the web. A January 25th email lays out a series of legally and technically ambitious new tools, including new measures that would block infringing sites from reaching customers of many major ISPs. Documents reviewed by The Verge detail the beginning of a new plan to attack piracy after the federal SOPA efforts failed by working with state attorneys general and major ISPs like Comcast to expand court power over the way data is served. If successful, the result would fundamentally alter the open nature of the internet.

When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we're living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn't seem so crazy.

In fact, DuckDuckGo is exploding.

At Open Whisper Systems, our goal is to make private communication simple. For the past three years, we've been developing a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make seamless end-to-end encrypted messaging possible.

Today we're excited to publicly announce a partnership with WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the world, to incorporate the TextSecure protocol into their clients and provide end-to-end encryption for their users by default.

A key feature of the FreeNAS 9.3 BETA release is its revamped user interface. It has been redesigned to place only the most common configuration options first in ‘Standard’ menus, moving the more esoteric options to ‘Advanced’ options, and this design pattern as has been used throughout the UI so everything is essentially more streamlined and less cluttered for novice users who essentially just want to use the defaults.

It begins with simple threats. You know, rape, dismemberment, the usual. It's a good place to start, those threats, because you might simply vanish once those threats include your family. Mission accomplished. But today, many women online - you women who are far braver than I am - you stick around. And now, since you stuck around through the first wave of threats, you are now a much BIGGER problem. Because the Worst Possible Thing has happened: as a result of those attacks, you are NOW serving Victim-Flavored Koolaid.

And Victim-Flavored Koolaid is the most dangerous substance on earth, apparently. And that just can't be allowed.

Maybe I sound exasperated. I am. I cannot believe it is 2014, and threats against women are still treated as fundamentally unserious. Here's why: One in five U.S. women has been raped in her lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One in six has been stalked. One in four women has experienced violence from a domestic partner. When women are murdered, two times out of five, the culprit is an intimate partner, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Domestic violence is a leading cause of death for pregnant women, the CDC warns. So it's in our best interest to take threats seriously, even when they're coming from internet strangers, because we know women to be at extremely high risk for violence at the hands of men.

Threats make the internet unsafe for me, and for Emma Watson, and for a lot of other women, too. Ask Anita Sarkeesian. Ask Kathy Sierra. Ask Catherine Mayer, Lindy West, or Alyssa Royce. This isn't even an exhaustive list, it's just the first women that came to mind, because the sick thing is that this never stops. And honestly, if we - all of us - don't make it stop, it never will.

If your monthly cellphone bill seems high, that may be because American cellphone service is among the most costly in the world. A comparison of two similar plans, one in the United States and one in Britain, reveals a marked difference.

Both plans include a new iPhone 5S with 16 gigabytes of memory. Both require a two-year commitment and allow unlimited voice minutes and unlimited texting. The plan offered by the British provider, Three UK, offers unlimited data and requires no upfront payment. With Britain's 20 percent tax included, the plan costs 41 pounds a month, or $67.97 at current exchange rates.

The plan provided by the American carrier, Verizon Wireless, has an upfront cost of $99.99 and then $90 a month, not including taxes. Spreading the upfront cost over 24 months and adding 17 percent tax - typical for the United States - comes to $109.47 a month. But while the British plan includes unlimited data, the American plan does not. It includes two gigabytes a month, with an additional gigabyte free during an introductory period.

Founded in 2010 and based in San Francisco, Nextdoor is a odd outlier among today's social networks. Signing up is an onerous process, requiring substantial proof of both your identification and address. People post messages, but they are seen only by others in the immediate area, and there is no share or retweet button to proliferate messages across the network. It feels more like a modern update on a message board or web forum than a social network. But it has struck a chord across the country. When The Verge first reported on Nextdoor back in July of 2012, it was in 3,500 neighborhoods. Today, the company is announcing that it reached 40,000 neighborhoods, or roughly one in four American communities, with 10 or more active users.

When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.

Stark evidence of this fact, the result of a European court ruling that individuals had the right to remove material about themselves from search engine results, arrived in the Guardian's inbox this morning, in the form of an automated notification that six Guardian articles have been scrubbed from search results.

The competition between Google and DuckDuckGo proved to be surprisingly fierce. In many respects the tiny DuckDuckGo holds its own against the giant that is Google, and even more so if the user is willing to slightly manipulate the search query to work around DuckDuckGo's temperamental intelligence layer. So it is heartening to see that DuckDuckGo is a viable alternative to Google by its own merits. But the elephant in the room here is Google's extensive tracking of user data. For that reason many users will staunchly avoid it on moral grounds, and for them the natural recourse is DuckDuckGo. Fortunately for them, it's a really great choice. In my case, privacy is not a primary concern. But having a top-notch search engine is. That's why I set DuckDuckGo as my browser's default search engine, and here's hoping it stays there for a long time.

Today DuckDuckGo is launching a reimagined and redesigned version that focuses on smarter answers and a more refined look. This new version adds often requested features like images, local search, auto-suggest and much more.

For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the US accused the Chinese of doing.