What the USA makes its ISPs do is an internal matter. Pressuring registrars to kill domains is another. Grey market and fake pharmaceuticals is one thing but when you get into matters of opinion and national ethics then it is something completely different. At least ICANN stayed away, however they are still under the influence of the USA courts and the Whitehouse - look at the farce about the XXX TLD.

I'm not a great fan of the ITU as it is slow and cumbersome but I do feel that ICANN, IANA and the rest should be moved under their control. The Internet doesn't belong to any single country regardless of who came up with the original protocols. This is preferable to having multiple organisations running different root servers which can lead to the same URL being resolved to different IP addresses.

Andy
Doha, Qatar

I've had a freecom Internet Radio[1] for about 2 years now which cost about $100 (GBP 60).

Its a flexible unit with WLAN, Ethernet etc.

Andy

[1] http://www.freecom.com/product.asp?CatID=1148017

Its possible the retroactive parts of these changes are in breach of UK/EU data protection laws. The issue is that a holder of personal data may only use information for the purposes for which it was provided. If the person supplying the data wished to keep it relatively private and Facebook then later make it public without the informed prior consent of the user then there is a probable breach of the regulations.

Of course Facebook will say that they are not based in the EU but they probably do have servers and interests there and gain revenue from EU based advertisers.

rocamargo writes
"I've been thinking a lot lately about the end of the Space Shuttle. For someone my age, the shuttle really *IS* space travel. I'm going to be really sad to see STS-133 land."

I suspect the crew will be really happy to see STS-133 land! :-)

Consider:

1. If the person in charge of the incident considered the 'object' a security risk why did they wait almost an hour before getting everyone off the plane after it landed? A fire in that environment would almost certainly resulted in people being killed or injured. Thats what the emergency exits are for.

2. If the person in charge of the incident considered the 'object' to be of no risk then they should have parked at a normal gate and deplaned as normal. The possible charge of vandalism (blocking the toilet with an iPod) does not even remotely justify the impact on the other passengers.

There is no middle ground in this decision process.

What I suspect happened is that the pilot decided that there was no risk to the passengers once he landed as he had been satisfied as to the object in the toilet at this point. Unfortunately the ground commander didn't want to accept the pilots asscessment and decided to continue as 'planned'. This does raise the question as to who was in charge.

All in all a complete fsck up and farce.