The founder of the filesharing website Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, was granted bail and released on Wednesday after a New Zealand judge determined that authorities have seized any funds he might have used to flee the country.

Read the rest here.

Top-down, international regulation is antithetical to the Net, which has flourished under its current governance model. 

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year's end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish "international control over the Internet" through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet's flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

Since the Net's inception, engineers, academics, user groups and others have convened in bottom-up nongovernmental organizations to keep it operating and thriving through what is known as a "multi-stakeholder" governance model. This consensus-driven private-sector approach has been the key to the Net's phenomenal success.

In 1995, shortly after it was privatized, only 16 million people used the Internet world-wide. By 2011, more than two billion were online—and that number is growing by as much as half a million every day. This explosive growth is the direct result of governments generally keeping their hands off the Internet sphere.

Net access, especially through mobile devices, is improving the human condition more quickly—and more fundamentally—than any other technology in history. Nowhere is this more true than in the developing world, where unfettered Internet technologies are expanding economies and raising living standards. 

Read the rest here: U.N. Internet Lock Down

Written by W.R. McAfee, Senior for The PPJ Gazette

Opinion

The First Gulf war, fought to check Saddam Hussein’s attempt to take over Kuwait and its oil reserves, set off a series of Middle East military conflicts that have lasted more than two decades. Tragically, many veterans of these conflicts have returned home with serious medical problems; both physical and mental.

The VA, charged with meeting the medical needs of these veterans’  has been found lacking; sheer numbers, lack of funding, and incompetence being the most often cited reasons.


The First Gulf war, fought to check Saddam Hussein’s attempt to take over Kuwait and its oil reserves, set off a series of Middle East military conflicts that have lasted more than two decades. Tragically, many veterans of these conflicts have returned home with serious medical problems; both physical and mental.

The VA, charged with meeting the medical needs of these veterans’  has been found lacking; sheer numbers, lack of funding, and incompetence being the most often cited reasons.

Medical problems for a large portion of these veterans  may very well have originated from the handling of—and battlefield exposure to—contaminated areas where U.S. ordinance containing depleted uranium (DU, or U238); used in the First Gulf war and all subsequent Middle East conflicts.

Radiation sickness at first appeared an obvious option for the veterans’ illnesses, but this was quickly tossed into the  Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) kettle, and later repositioned in the public’s mind as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Depression, headaches, weakness, fatigue, and multiple physical complications that varied among individuals, often accompany this exposure. Yet, federally funded researchers didn’t make the radiation connection  following the First Gulf war—over in a few days because the distribution of the world’s oil supply was threatened—because congress and their handlers knew from the get-go there was not, and would not be, enough money in their U.S. piggy bank to fund the medical needs of these returning veterans’ once lawyers sunk their teeth into the causes of their illnesses, in my opinion.

Investigative reporter Katherine Russ wrote an accurate summary about the results of this  delayed medical care for our veterans , and a May 2011 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals  directly addressed their mental health needs.   Continue Reading »