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Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

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The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org , that will inform them whether they’re infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won’t be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don’t even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

“We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because … if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service,” said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. “The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get `page not found’ and think the Internet is broken.”

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn’t enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, said Grasso, “the full court press is on to get people to address this problem.” And it’s up to computer users to check their PCs.

This is what happened:

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet’s domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address – such as www.ap.org – into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie’s clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.

FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won’t be the last.

“This is the future of what we will be doing,” said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations.”

Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, “we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system” without creating a bigger mess than before.

—

Online:

To check and clean computers: http://www.dcwg.org

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Documents in a Jacksonville, Florida case where a 12-year-old killed his 2-year-old brother for irritating him show their mother surfed the Web for hours while her child lay unconscious.

According to the documents, Biannela Susana, the mother of the two boys, surfed the Web looking for information on “when someone gets knocked out” and concussions.

The documents show that from 10:54 a.m. to 11:11 a.m., nearly 20 minutes, Susana went to a website about concussions 11 times.

Read more at Bossip.

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A new plan launched by Comcast dubbed “Internet Essentials” will help low-income families afford the internet for just $10 a month.

Comcast, whose lowest priced plans range between $40 and $60, have decided to bring the internet to more families across the country who can’t afford their current rates. The internet connection features 1.5 Mbps download and 384 Kbps upload speed. There’s also a guarantee of no price increases after the fact.

To join the program, however, families have to meet four different criteria: They have to be located in an area where Comcast can actually deliver Internet service (obviously), one of their children has to be receiving free school lunches via the National School Lunch Program, families must not have had Comcast Internet service up to 90 days prior to requesting to join the program, and families must not have an overdue Comcast bill or unreturned Comcast equipment.

Read more at PCMag

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About 200 of the cuts are from AOL’s content and technology departments in the U.S. The remaining 700 are at AOL’s offices in India, which mainly provide back-office support to the U.S. But AOL spokesman Graham James said 300 of those will move to other companies, which are taking over support functions.

Thursday’s cuts leave AOL with 3,500 employees in the U.S. and about 500 overseas. The total work force is a fifth of what the company had at its peak in 2004, when its staff numbered more than 20,000. The company pared thousands of workers in the years leading up to its separation from Time Warner Inc. in late 2009. After the companies broke up, AOL cut about 2,300 of its then-6,900 employees – or about a third of its work force – through layoffs and buyouts.

In the ’90s, AOL was the king of dial-up Internet access, known for its ubiquitous CD-ROMs and “You’ve got mail” greeting in its inboxes. The company even managed to buy Time Warner at the height of the dot-com boom in 2001. But the companies never successfully melded, and as consumers moved to faster Internet services from cable and phone companies, AOL’s main source of revenue dwindled.

Over the past several years, AOL has struggled to reinvent itself as a company focused on advertising and content, operating a variety of websites such as the popular tech blog Engadget. Since CEO Tim Armstrong was lured from Google Inc. to take the helm of AOL in April 2009, AOL has focused increasingly on the market for local content, helped by the purchase and expansion of its network of Patch local news sites.

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The company has continued to acquire sites, too: Most recently, it paid $315 million for The Huffington Post as part of its efforts to become a go-to source for news and other content. That deal closed Monday.

Armstrong, speaking at a conference in New York, said the company has no immediate plans for further layoffs. But he added, “in our situation we don’t have the luxury of long-term planning.”

Armstrong said AOL will hire this year and will try to have more full-time journalists in its ranks to rely less on freelancers. He said about half the employees now have content-producing roles, and he wants to increase that to 70 percent.

Armstrong maintained his confidence about AOL’s prospects for a comeback.

“AOL will turn around,” he said. “No doubt about that.”

But AOL’s revenue is contributing less and less to the overall online advertising market in the U.S., eMarketer Inc. analyst David Hallerman said.

“If they’re going to succeed, they’re going to be succeeding as a smaller company,” he said. “Therefore their success won’t be as big.”

Although Hallerman said he sees promise in the company’s efforts to establish itself as a local content provider, he said the ads that run on these sites bring in less revenue than those on its more popular websites. That means AOL will have to make that up by drawing a lot of traffic.

Clayton Moran, an analyst with The Benchmark Co., said that the changes made since Armstrong took control are sensible and probably the best route the company could take.

But he said the changes “haven’t shown a lot of financial progress. It’s taking time for the changes to have an impact.”

Shares of AOL fell 4 cents to $19.30 in afternoon trading Thursday.

Arianna Huffington, Founder

Los Angeles–An LA Times correspondent recently criticized they way Huffington Post compensates their writers and journalists.  LA Times’ Tim Rutten believes that the Huffington Post’s editorial quality will decline after the AOL acquisition, because the writers are allegedly underpaid.

Rutten says their model can be compared to a “gallery rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates”, because the contributors typically are paid less than $50 for their articles.
Rutten:

Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL‘s $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape, it’s already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.

Read more at LAtimes.com

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AOL has purchased the liberal blog-turned-Internet sensation the Huffington Post for $315 million. In a move that is sure to rock both the worlds of journalism and the Internet, AOL has placed all of its editorial properties under the supervision of Arianna Huffington, who will be the newly-formed Huffington Post Media Group’s editor-in-chief. The New York Times reports:

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and were expected to announce the deal Monday morning. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

Arianna Huffington announced the deal on the home page of the Huffington Post:

There were many more meetings, back-and-forth emails, and phone calls about what our merger would mean for the two companies. Things moved very quickly. A term sheet was produced, due diligence began, and on Super Bowl Sunday the deal was signed. In fact, it was actually was signed at the Super Bowl, where Tim was hosting a group of wounded vets from the Screamin’ Eagles. It was my first Super Bowl – an incredibly exciting backdrop that mirrored my excitement about the merger and the future ahead.

By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform.

Read more about the merger on Huffington Post, and some analysis at the New York Times

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We’ve seen in the past how important the Internet is as a medium of communication in mass demonstrations of this kind. During the Iranian “Green Revolution” of 2009, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites helped rally international support for the movement and played a pivotal role in the mobilization effort.

But not even Tehran forced the country’s service providers to shut down all connections to the Internet.

Communication is fundamental to human existence. The Egyptian government’s attempt to silence its people during the last few days by barring Internet access is an affront to democracy and a testament to the regime’s blatant disregard for human rights.

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Hate speech permeates blogs, social networking sites, and discussion forums all over the world. Though inflammatory content may be protected as free speech by the U.S. Constitution, on the Internet it can have a greater potential to create a violent and fatal backlash.  Attacks on American soil are consistently linked to online hate speech:

• James Von Brunn, the murderer who killed a Holocaust museum guard in Washington in 2009 was found to have been a frequent poster on many anti-Semitic and white supremacist websites. The FBI stated they had been monitoring Von Brunn’s internet activity, but were unable to take action because his comments had not crossed the line from free speech into hate speech.

• Benjamin Smith was the killer who went on a racially motivated shooting spree in Illinois and Indiana over July 4th weekend in 1999. Months before the murders, he told a documentary filmmaker, “It wasn’t really ’til I got on the Internet, read some literature of these groups that…it all really came together. It’s a slow, gradual process to become racially conscious.”

• Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old killer in the recent Tuscon shootings that left six people dead, including a 9-year-old-girl. A series of YouTube videos apparently posted by Loughner accuse the government of “mind control” and “brainwashing.”

The Internet allows people to get information solely from sources they like,  allowing them to hear things without ever challenging their beliefs. You get some insanity on the Internet you would never see anywhere in real life. For instance:

• VictoryForever.com: The point of the game is to bomb survivors of the Haiti earthquake.  Posted on white supremacist and neo-Nazi internet forum, Stormfront.org. Launched in 1995, Stormfront now attracts more than 40,000 unique visitors a day. In a 2009 shooting, Richard Poplawski, a poster on the site, was charged with ambushing and killing three Pittsburgh Police officers and attempting to kill nine others.

See the offensive game for yourself

• “DEAR LORD…”: This Facebook page boasts over a million members and its forum has numerous offensive discussions about race and nationalism, filled with comments wishing death on the President.

• NO TO ISLAM, No To Mosques: The description for this Facebook page reads:

“Islam is a mind-control and information-control cult found by a murderer, torturer, brigand, rapist, and pedophile called Mohammed.”

Combating hate speech in a World Wide Web that is constantly multiplying it’s content is a daunting task. At the same time, the First Amendment provides the highest level of protection to offensive, repugnant, and hateful expression.

The thousands of members on many Facebook groups are constantly scanning the social network’s content, linking to offensive material in order to get it reported and successfully removed. Here are some groups actively policing hate speech on Facebook

Stop Hate Speech On Facebook

Stop Racist/Bigoted/Ignorant/Hate Groups On Facebook

Answer this question in the comments below: Should there be greater restrictions imposed on Internet hate speech?

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Although you rarely hear racial insults on Main Street these days, there’s a place where unashamed bigotry is all too easy to find: tossed off in the comments sections of some of the Internet’s most popular websites, today’s virtual Main Street.

Internet anonymity has removed one of the strongest barriers to the type of language that can ruin reputations and end careers.

Do these comments reflect a reversal of racial progress? Is that progress an illusion while racism thrives underground? What kind of harm are these statements doing? Could there be any value in such venting? And what, if anything, should a free society do about it?

“We’ve seen comments that people would not make in the public square or any type of civic discussion, maybe even within their own families,” said Dennis Ryerson, editor of The Indianapolis Star. “There is no question in my mind that the process, because it’s largely anonymous, enables people who would never speak up on Main Street to communicate their thoughts.”

At the newspaper’s website, moderators delete individual racist comments that are brought to their attention, and will take down a whole thread if such comments persist. On some stories that are expected to provoke racism, the entire comments section is disabled beforehand, a practice shared by a growing number of newspapers.

On a single day recently, racially offensive online remarks were not hard to find:

In a comment on a Yahoo News story about a black civil rights era photographer revealed to be an FBI informant, someone called blacks farm animals who “were not and are not wanted in this society.”

Another commenter wrote, “We all know who MADE America what it is today, and we also know which group is receiving hefty tax dollar pay outs… so until the tables turn the only thing you should be saying is ‘thank you’ to all the hard working (whites) who gave you the life you now take for granted.”

Black racism was evident, too. One person on the site wondered if the FBI beat information out of the photographer: “You know how white people do.” On a BlackVoices.com story about two black sisters jailed 20 years for an $11 robbery, someone used several crude epithets to suggest that the judge was a white racist.

A USAToday.com story about demographic changes in the nation’s kindergartens turned into open season on Latinos. “Go to any ER, school, jail and see first hand what race is over consuming precious US resources?” one comment said. Another complained in ugly terms about Latino birthrates.

Some believe such comments indicate that racism has not declined as much as people may think. Joe Feagin, a sociologist at Texas A&M University, said a study he conducted of 626 white college students at 28 institutions revealed thousands of examples of racism in “backstage,” all-white settings.

Are these comments cause for alarm?

“Like the loudest ambulance siren you’ve ever heard,” Feagin replied. “All this stuff was already there. It’s just the Internet has opened a window into it that we normally would not have had.”

Linda Chavez, chairman of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, says racist comments come from a “very small but often vocal minority of people. Most Americans do not like this type of coarse race hatred.”

Chavez has received plenty of racist comments in response to her online writings. “My sense, based on their grammar and spelling, is they’re not the people who are hiring. These are not influential people who make policy.” But she does see a destructive aspect: “It may actually increase the percentage who will feel comfortable expressing these views. Social pressure is important.”

Racist comments may scare average people away from productive conversations about race — conversations that are moving rapidly into the digital domain from print publications, town halls, street corners and shopping malls.

“When there are forums about race, people flock there to do battle,” said Eric Deggans, a reporter and blogger for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. Whenever he blogs about race, “about 20 percent of the comments will be straight-up racist. Another 20 percent are questionable.”

The racial comments and other personal attacks have made Deggans, who is black, feel more defensive, as if he’s always under attack: “It wears you down after a while.”

“I have to constantly coach myself to dial down the hurt and the anger, because you get three comments that are really hurtful and prejudiced, but the fourth is someone who wants to have a genuine conversation,” he said.

Some journalism observers believe real names should be required to post comments, some of which would never be chosen for publication in the traditional “letters to the editor” section.

“It astonishes me that they allow such blatant expressions,” said Robert Steele, a journalism scholar at DePauw University and The Poynter Institute.

The comments sections of media websites are meant to foster community discussion and keep people engaged with the site, which in turn generates revenue for an industry still struggling to make money online.

“Even if it’s legitimate to try and draw viewers to sites, is it legitimate to allow individuals who are swinging a sharp ax, and often doing so with a hood over their heads in anonymous fashion, to have this forum that can not only create harm but breed hatred?” Steele asked.

As champions of free speech and enemies of censorship, journalists take care to tailor any proposed limits.

“I recognize the value of citizen dialogue,” Steele said. “But when the comments are poisonous … you have to go back to the issue of why you would allow the dialogue.”

“For me, all the problems of online anonymity and comments outweigh any imagined benefits,” said Herb Strentz, a retired journalism professor and dean at Drake University in Des Moines. “If people want to contribute thoughtful things, they should be willing to stand up for them and be quoted.”

Polls and studies that measure racism are hotly debated because most people won’t acknowledge prejudice to a stranger, the subject is so subjective and politically charged, and many people of all races may not even recognize their own biases.

On one side sits evidence that racism remains a major challenge: For instance, some 40 percent of white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, according to a 2008 Associated Press-Yahoo poll that focused on racial attitudes and the presidential election.

On the other are signs of progress: The percentage of African-Americans saying black people’s situation improved over the last five years has doubled since 2007, to 39 percent, according to a 2010 Pew poll. The poll also found that 70 percent of whites and 60 percent of blacks believe the values of the two groups have become more similar.

These surveys all measured racial attitudes in what used to be known as the “real world.” Today, “the digital space IS the real world,” said Pablo Boczkowski, a professor in Northwestern University’s Media, Technology and Society program.

“We always had people shouting on the street,” Boczkowski said. “It was a handful of people, and the sender of the message could be clearly identified. Now the audience is much bigger, it’s more unknown, it’s more diverse potentially, and this has changed the dynamics of the game.”

The dynamics of racism on the recipient can be powerful online, said Brendesha Tynes, a professor of psychology and African-American studies at the University of Illinois.

Her study of 264 Midwestern high school students found that 20 percent of whites, 29 percent of blacks and 42 percent of “other” or multiple races reported being personally subjected to racial epithets or other discrimination online — and that these youths were more likely to feel depression or anxiety. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“We’ve made a lot of progress online and offline on race relations, but you can go into some of these spaces and it will take you back to pre-civil rights times,” Tynes said.

“The danger is, people see other folks online saying whatever they want to say, and they think it’s acceptable online behavior,” she said. “Over time, that might become an acceptable way to talk about race online.”

Public disapproval has played a major role in reducing face-to-face racist speech, and Tynes noted that public complaints can get racist comments removed from popular places like Facebook. But, she added, “the Internet is just too vast to say that certain groups’ disapproval will impact the way people express race online.”

She believes more education and discussion are needed: “Even though we talk about a post-racial America, race has never been more salient than it is right now.”

So what types of people are typing these anonymous attacks? The white homeowner who smiles at his black neighbor? Minorities trying to make whites look bad? People of any race just looking for a thrill?

Jared Taylor, who is white and calls himself a “race realist,” believes that whites and Asians are more intelligent than Hispanics and blacks. He avoids using racial slurs, and his organization’s website does not allow racial insults — but he has an explanation for the source of the comments: “Intense frustration among ordinary whites at what they see as coddling and excuse-making for blacks and Hispanics.”

“Many, many whites are hopping mad about that kind of double standard,” he said in an e-mail interview. “Their frustrations are never voiced in the mainstream media, and anger provokes crude language. … Most of those people probably never use racial slurs when they speak. This gives them a chance to commit what is considered a great and shocking sin and get away with it.”

Is there any value in venting online? Ryerson, the newspaper editor, said a mental health professional once told him that the act of writing virulent letters to the editor probably provided a “safety valve” — because knowing the letter would be read, if only by the editor, could deter the writer from violence.

“The only problem,” Ryerson said, “is we didn’t print those letters.”

Nathan Schroeder, national secretary for the Supreme White Alliance — whose website warns visitors of its “racist overtone” — says people who share his views benefit from online anonymity.

He said many white people “aren’t to that point yet where they will openly come out and say, ‘I stand for this. I am proud of my heritage. I want to preserve my people.’ They don’t want their close friends, families, what have you, to find out so they are more comfortable speaking about it on the Internet.

“Regardless, they still feel the same feelings that we do, whether they want to be open right now about it or not.”

The number of U.S. hate groups has more than doubled in the last 10 years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, up to 932 hate groups in 2009. Deborah Lauter, civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League, said there are thousands of hate websites — “more than we can possibly keep track of.”

The most popular hate websites draw tens of thousands of visitors each month. Mainstream sites draw into the millions — and some comments there would not be out of place within the Supreme White Alliance.

Many people were angered by recent stories on the Des Moines Register website about black youths who attacked white patrons at the Iowa State Fair. An early report said the black youths were heard saying it was an occasion to beat whites, although police later said that could not be verified and did not press hate crime charges.

One anonymous commenter said slavery should never have been ended, while another wrote that blacks should be put in a coliseum with guns and left to kill each other, said Strentz, the retired professor.

He believes there is still much racial progress to be made in America.

“Even if we do away with anonymity, we clean up the comments online, well, that’s just treating the symptoms,” he said. “We really haven’t solved anything, except on the surface.”

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Shaquille O’Neal is being sued in Dade County, Florida, by a former employee of his, Shawn Darling.

This type of thing (people suing rich, famous people) happens every single day. But the details of Shaq’s lawsuit aren’t your average, every day civil complaint from an ex-employee.

Radar Online reports that Darling is suing Shaq for some pretty heavy stuff: computer hacking and destruction of evidence. (A PDF of the public document is here.)

Darling claims that he worked for O’Neal — and O’Neal’s wife, Shaunie, as well as his “associates” and children as well — from late 2007 until November 2009, and that during that time, Shaq had him “wipe” Shaq’s computers and delete the information in his “AOL” account in relation to other legal issues.

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Facebook photos, posts, and even “pokes” have all got people in trouble with the law. The case of a Florida man, Harry Bruder, 54, suggests you may want to watch who you “friend” as well.

Bruder was arrested and jailed for violating a domestic order by sending his estranged wife Carole a Facebook “friend” request. According to a police report, Carole, separated from Bruder for around two years, had obtained a domestic violence injunction against Bruder.

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Broadband adoption in the home is slowing in the U.S. That’s what the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project is saying in a fascinating report that is just out.

Sixty-six percent of American adults now have a broadband Internet connection at home, the report says, little changed from the 63% mark recorded a year ago. That follows years of double-digit growth.

What’s more, Pew says that most demographic groups had flat to modest broadband adoption growth over the last year with one major exception: 56% of the African-American community now have broadband connections in the home, compared to 46% in 2009.

There are a variety of reasons why African-Americans are bucking the trend, starting with the notion that the group was starting out from a smaller base of users. But Pew’s Senior Research Specialist Aaron Smith, the author of the report, also thinks African- Americans are now more likely to own cellphones, use the mobile Web and social media apps, and that Internet providers themselves may be more aggressive in targeting populations with historically lower adoption rates.

Click here to read more at USA Today

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So Google and Verizon went public today with their “policy framework” — better known as the pact to end the Internet as we know it.

News of this deal broke this week, sparking a public outcry that’s seen hundreds of thousands of Internet users calling on Google to live up to its “Don’t Be Evil” pledge.

But cut through the platitudes the two companies (Googizon, anyone?) offered on today’s press call, and you’ll find this deal is even worse than advertised.

The proposal is one massive loophole that sets the stage for the corporate takeover of the Internet.

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The bedtime story is one of the most sacred of childhood rituals. We curl up on our parents’ laps, snuggle up with our blankets and velveteen bunnies, as we listen, follow along with our fingertips, and eventually sound out the words of our favorite stories.

A famous publisher and author of children’s books, Emilie Buchwald, said that “children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” We know this to be true, because for generations, this is how we learned and taught our own children to read. When it was illegal to teach Black people how to read in this country, our forefathers and foremothers got their hands on books, by any means necessary, so that their children might learn to read and have a better life. How will the next and future generations adapt to this world of iPads, electronic media, and, yes, even blogs like the one you’re reading?

A while back, I was doing a reading at a library in Alexandria, VA. The parents were really into my reading, I thought was doing a pretty good job, it seemed as if I’d engaged the children. But not long after I finished, a fifth grader ran up to me and said, “Ms. Charisse, your books are cool and all, but can I get them on my iPhone?!” Children don’t know a world without the Internet. Their brains are changing to keep up with the times, and the times are changing fast.

E-books are not going away. Earlier this month, Amazon announced a hard but not surprising fact – eBook are outselling hard cover books. Days later industry experts confirmed the same stats from major publishers. Electronic publishing brings up a lot of interesting considerations and possible changes: how will media change the way children learn? How will children change the way adults publish and produce new technologies? What does all this mean for the future of children’s books, which currently aren’t even available on the Kindle? Once the technology catches up with itself and with our needs, what about the costs? Will everyone be able to afford a Kindle? Will everyone be able to afford the e-books, or will they be available for free, just like at the public library? And, what will happen to the libraries? Will the digital divide grow wider at the same rate as the technology, leaving those who cannot afford to keep up in the dust? Will the book, as we know it, become obsolete?

We are just beginning to explore these newfound technologies, assessing their capabilities and challenging their limitations as well as our own. Our classrooms have gone from chalkboards, to dry erase boards, to smart boards, in order to help our children keep up with the speed of our own technological evolution. As a parent, anything that furthers my children’s education, increasing their imagination and chances of future success is something to which I can happily subscribe. As an author of children’s books, however, I cannot help but wonder about the fate of my own imagination and future successes.

I think, what matters now, is that we remember the words of Frederick Douglass: “once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” Whether we teach or learn on a paper page or multi-pixel screen, the lessons are what really matters.

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From Gawker.com:

Everyone knows that white people love Facebook and hate MySpace. But why? In a sure-to-be-controversial new essay, a famous internet sociologist says it’s a lot like white flight.

Facebook users tend to be wealthier and more educated. And, thus, they have been disproportionately white, until very recently. This should not be a controversial observation. (Though, we are sure it will be!) What’s trickier is explaining this discrepancy. Everyone’s favorite Internet scholar, Danah Boyd, has come up with an intriguing theory in a new book chapter (PDF), as first reported by MIT’s Technology Review. White people fled MySpace first because they got scared of it—eventually coming to see it as a sort of “digital ghetto” filled with creepy spammers, weirdo goth kids and people of color.

If you are of a certain age, you probably switched from a MySpace account to Facebook at some point during your youth. Boyd wants to understand this switch, and why white kids have made it quicker and more frequently than others. The obvious explanation is that all their white friends were doing it: Facebook was started at (predominately white, upperclass) Harvard, was built around (predominantly white, upperclass) college students and only opened to the general riffraff around 2006. So, duh, white kids are going to join Facebook at a higher rate than other races who happen to be poorer and less likely to go to college.

But this does nothing to explain the racially-tinged language Boyd turned up in her interviews with high school students when they tried to explain their social network preferences. One white interviewee, for example, described Myspace users as “like ghetto and hip hop rap lovers.” (Boyd interviewed over 100 for her study from 2004-2009.) Nor does it touch on aesthetic and functional differences between Facebook and Myspace, and how those might influence the racial and class makeup of the sites.

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The image of the affluent and white cellphone owner as the prototypical mobile Web user seems to be a misnomer, according to a report published Wednesday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Center.
The study found that African-Americans and Latinos continue to be more likely to own cellphones than whites and more likely to use their phones for a greater range of activities.

This increase in mobile Web use, first noticed in a similar study by the Pew Center last summer, is driven both by age and economics, according to Aaron W. Smith of the Pew Center. Younger people and people living in households making less than $30,000 a year are increasing their mobile Web use at particularly fast rates, he said, and the African American and Latino populations are younger and poorer relative to the white population.

Because mobile Web use has grown among groups like African Americans and Latinos that have traditionally lagged in Web access, it has been cited as evidence that the distinction between the digital haves and have-nots is eroding.

But the mobile Web means different things to different people. For more affluent populations, it generally means wireless access with a laptop computer. For poorer people it means a cellphone, which is not a perfect replacement for other forms of online access, said Mr. Smith and several others who study social issues related to technology.

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Americans in general are accessing the Internet through mobile devices in increasing numbers, according to the Pew report, with 59 percent of those surveyed saying they accessed the mobile Web, compared with 51 percent a year ago.

Notably, rates of laptop ownership among African Americans grew dramatically to 51 percent from 34 percent in 2009, according to the study, a survey of 2,252 adults aged 18 and older.

But 18 percent of African Americans use a cellphone as their only form of Internet access, compared to 10 percent of whites. People with low incomes and low levels of education were also much more likely to access the Internet through their cellphones alone.

Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Digital Sisters and a consultant on social media campaigns focused on women and minorities, said that the way in which people access the Internet should remain a part of the conversation about the digital divide.

“The quality of what is available through cell only is limited access,” she said. “We are moving in a positive direction about true cellphone usage and it’s relevant to online access but there are still some challenges ahead.”

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Obama Could Shut Down Internet Under New Emergency Powers

From PrisonPlanet.com:

President Obama will be handed the power to shut down the Internet for at least four months without Congressional oversight if the Senate votes for the infamous Internet ‘kill switch’ bill, which was approved by a key Senate committee yesterday and now moves to the floor.

The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which is being pushed hard by Senator Joe Lieberman, would hand absolute power to the federal government to close down networks, and block incoming Internet traffic from certain countries under a declared national emergency.

Despite the Center for Democracy and Technology and 23 other privacy and technology organizations sending letters to Lieberman and other backers of the bill expressing concerns that the legislation could be used to stifle free speech, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed in the bill in advance of a vote on the Senate floor.

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NAACP To Use Latest Technology To Fight Racism

From TheGrio.com:

Rosa Parks refused to stand. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. Barack Obama won the presidential election. America’ s plight for racial equality has had its struggles, its heroes and its progress. But on the nearby island of Cuba, some say modern-day racism against blacks is blatant, and fighting it isn’t as simple as public protest.

According to Afro-Cuban activists, racism against blacks in Cuba is systemic and institutional. They say, to this day, blacks are excluded from tourism related jobs, relegated to poor housing, have poor access to health care, are excluded from managerial positions and are more likely to be imprisoned.

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Carlos Moore is an Afro-Cuban activist who has spent his life writing about racial injustice in Cuba and says race is the country’s most pressing issue. In 2008, he sent a scathing letter to Cuban leader Raul Castro demanding racial reform. In it, he states: “You are a descendant of Europeans born in Spain; I am a descendant of Africans born in the Caribbean. We are both Cubans. However, being Cuban confers no specific privilege on either of us as human beings”.

It was a luxury of civil protest he could only afford to write while exiled in Brazil. According to Moore, “There is an unstated threat. Blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore, the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead”. He says a new generation of Cubans are looking at politics in another way.

That new generation is going the way of the world wide web. Henry Gomez, a White Cuban living in Florida, noticed that some of the most outspoken voices against racism in Cuba are bloggers. So he founded Bloggers United for Cuban Liberty (BUCL).

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – The launch of Wikipedia, emergence of the iPhone and the election of President Barack Obama were among the 10 most influential moments on the Internet in the past decade, according to the annual Webby awards.

Other events singled out by the New York-based International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which has presented the annual Webby awards since 1996, were the Iranian election in 2009 when protests demonstrated the power of Twitter and other social network in reshaping democracy.

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“The Internet is the story of the decade because it was the catalyst for change in not just every aspect of our everyday lives, but in everything from commerce and communication to politics and pop culture,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of The Webby Awards, in a statement.

“The recurring theme among all of the milestones on our list is the Internet’s capacity to circumvent old systems and put more power into the hands of ordinary people.”

Here is the Webby’s list of the 10 most influential Internet moments of the decade:

1. Craigslist, the free classifieds site, expands outside San Francisco in 2000, impacting newspaper publishers everywhere

2. Google AdWords launched in 2000 allowing advertisers to target their customers with laser-sharp precision

3. Wikipedia, the free open-source encyclopedia, launches in 2001 and today boasts more than 14 million articles in 271 different languages and bringing strangers together on projects

4. Napster shutdown in 2001, opening the file-sharing floodgates

5. Google’s IPO in 2004 put the search engine on the path to powering countless aspects of our everyday lives

6. Online video revolution in 2006 that led to a boom in homemade and professional content on the Internet and helped reshape everything from pop culture to politics

7. Facebook opens to non-college students and Twitter takes off in 2006

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Blackbird, the custom browser for African-Americans that debuted in 2008, launched a new version for Mac computers today. Previously available only for PCs, the browser already has a quarter of a million users.

Blackbird aims to offer a distinctively Black internet experience, and provides one-click access to a number of destinations of interest to its audience. The browser, which is built on top of the Mozilla Firefox interface, integrates email and social networking, points users toward Black-oriented news and video websites, and can optimize Google searches so that Black websites are pushed to the top of the results. It also includes job-searching tools and links to community service initiatives.

The Blackbird browser is free, supported by sponsors and advertising revenues.

Find out more at the Blackbird website.

From WebProNews.com:

Facebook’s reach in Africa may have been extended today.  A Swahili version of the social networking site was formally released, and there’s word that alternatives in both Hausa and Zulu are liable to appear in the near future, as well.

Swahili is spoken in at least seven countries, including Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda.  A BBC report notes that, following Afrikaans, it’s the second African language in which a version of Facebook’s been released.

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From PrisonPlanet.com:

Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a strange response when asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content, declaring, “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

He was making reference to the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model.

The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.

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There has been recent controversy over a brawl posted on the internet at HBCU, Cheyney University. A party at Cheyney University resulted in a massive brawl which was posted on youtube. Students were invited from nearby colleges Lincoln and West Chester. The party was promoted “Cheyney vs. Lincoln vs. West Chester,” according to Cheyney Student Body President, George Bush.

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From Alex Mindlin at The New York Times:

The Internet overtook print newspapers as a news source this year, according to a report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which asked more than a thousand people where they got “most of” their national and international news. (Respondents were allowed to name more than one medium.)

The change does not represent a decline in the popularity of newspapers, which actually picked up a percentage point over last year. Rather, it represents a near-doubling, from 24 percent last year, in the number of people naming the Internet as their primary news source.

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Obama’s political e-mail list tops 13 million names, a digital force that the incoming White House can tap to push for his legislation, tamp down critics or bolster popular support. It’s also a way for Obama to reach into every state, every city, and every neighborhood.

A study released Tuesday found that a quarter of Obama voters said they would continue to work online to support the new administration. The nonpartisan Pew Internet and American Life Project also found 62 percent of Obama’s voters say they would ask others to support Obama’s policies.

Welcome to the Democrats’ new permanent campaign, one planned online and executed on Main Street.

If it works the way Obama’s top lieutenants plan, the White House would marshal hundreds of thousands of phone calls within hours if it looked as if the president-elect were losing a policy battle. With the click of a keyboard, Obama’s aides could ask supporters to flood the phone lines of Congress, making it untenable to ignore the clamor.

That, at least, is the idea.

Obama’s unmatched database gives his incoming administration a clear advantage over its Republican rivals, who have seen decades of datamining overcome in the matter of months. GOP leaders, though, insist they are not deterred.

“I’m impressed with what Obama did, but did they do anything innovative? No,” said Cyrus Krohn, the Republican National Committee’s online director. “They did things creatively.”

During past election cycles, campaign Web sites were little more than digital versions of their campaign pamphlets. But during the last few elections, campaign strategists have turned to the Internet as a way to reach more voters — typically, the uninvolved or youth — and their donations. Now, Obama’s team is turning that strategy into governance.

Howard Dean‘s primary campaign in 2004 brought together massive first-time online support and donors, but that did not translate to real-world votes. Similarly, John Edwards tried to mobilize his supporters in the name of national service ahead of his second presidential campaign; those single-issue voters were not there, however, when Activist Edwards became Candidate Edwards.

Obama, though, has been the most successful so far. Obama’s online supporters raised some $500 million for him, created 2 million online profiles at MyBarackObama.com and used his database to make phone calls during the campaign’s final days.

According to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 59 percent of all voters took part in the campaign online, whether it was sending e-mail, reading political blogs or researching candidates. Obama clearly had the advantage.

The Pew survey asked 2,254 adults about their Internet usage and politics from Nov. 20 to Dec. 4. The margin of error in the overall sample is plus or minus 2 percentage points. Among the 1,591 Internet users, the margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

It’s been a careful dance between Obama and his supporters. His aides have avoided bulk e-mail and have tailored each message to its intended audience. For instance, Latinos and Hispanics who supported Obama received an e-mail announcing Linda Sanchez would be a co-chairman of Obama’s inauguration committee.

It’s the only way to break through bulk e-mails that flood voters’ inboxes, consultants say.

“I think we’ve seen them think critically about every single e-mail that they send,” said Tracy Russo, a Democratic consultant who worked with Dean’s and Edwards’ online campaigns.

For decades, politicians have sought ways to harness public sentiment to outflank troublesome opponents, news organizations and rival interest groups. Obama’s vast network can be a powerful weapon if he can control it, or a dangerous and unpredictable force if he cannot.

Liberal groups in recent weeks have joined the plan. MoveOn in recent weeks sent an e-mail to some of its 4.2 million supporters asking them to get involved, for example.

If Obama and his allies play this right, they could send phone lines crashing within minutes of a declared protest. Similarly, the instant communication of the Internet and cellular phone text messages could end it just by typing one word: “Stop.”

That power gives Obama’s online advisers a potentially bigger role than many of his Cabinet picks and major hires in pushing through an agenda. A Cabinet secretary stumping for a new bill has been rendered less powerful than a million e-mails crashing the Capitol; a visit to the Hill from top aides is unmatched to online petitions that clog legislative offices.

Since the election, 27 percent of wired Obama voters have visited Obama’s Web site to discuss the transition, according to Pew. Even 10 percent of those who supported Republican nominee John McCain have visited the transition Web site, change.gov.

The RNC, however, is not ceding the Internet.

Engineers and political hands have collaborated to identify 40 million GOP voters online, using commercial databases and their internal voter files.

“It doesn’t take a lot to inspire movement and community online,” said Krohn, the RNC’s top Internet operative. “The notion that we can’t catch up, I don’t buy that premise because change happens so quickly on the Internet.”