chimpo13 - Slashdot User

Submission + - The First Fifty Years of the Internet (vanityfair.com)

Submitted by

chimpo13

on Wednesday June 04, 2008 @04:11PM

chimpo13 writes: "Techdirt posts to an article from Vanity Fair about The First Fifty Years of the Internet. Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough — network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser — inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology. Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story."

Submission + - MagicJack's evil EULA (boingboing.net)

Submitted by

chimpo13

on Monday April 14, 2008 @02:43PM

chimpo13 writes: "Boing Boing posts about MagicJack, a cheapie $20-a-year internet phone service, comes with a shriveled and shaking devil EULA that is hidden from the consumer. In short, it not only has one agree to ads with its paid-for system, but claims that the ads are necessary for it to work. It will also snoop on your calls to target ads more accurately, and has you sign away your legal right to take it to court if it defrauds or otherwise harms you. When you access MajicJack's instant web help page, a bizarre series of "compatibility tests" take place first, reporting lies like "Your MagicJack is functioning properly" even if you don't have one installed. Even the "look how many people came for a free trial" counter on the homepage is a fake, a javascript applet that increments itself automatically"

Submission + - Spoke.com is selling your address book

Submitted by

chimpo13

on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @06:07PM

chimpo13 writes: "Phil Yanov talks about how Spoke.com is stealing your soul. Spoke says that it launched it's free service in August and that they have added 3 million new names since August. How did they do that? It was easy! To get access to Spoke's "free" service, you must install the Spoke toolbar. The Spoke toolbar then copies all of the information from your address book into the Spoke database. It's at this point you should be able to smell the burning sulfur. Spoke can sell those names, titles, companies, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers (listed and unlisted), passwords and PIN numbers to direct marketing organizations."

Slashdot Top Deals