Tag: CONGRESS

The violent conflict between governmental and rebel forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo may not make the front pages of many Western news outlets, but it has definitely caught the attention of U.S. lawmakers. As the AP reports, a newly passed American law, which was signed into effect in conjunction with Obama's economic overhaul, will now require all gadget manufacturers to disclose ...

America's killers and drug dealers might soon find themselves without even a cell phone to distract them from the everyday rigors of federal penitentiaries. As of right now, cell phones and wireless gadgets aren't classified as contraband by federal law, and prisoners found in possession of them are hardly ever punished. In a vote yesterday, though, the House of Representatives decided to close ...

Most policemen, social workers and ER medics are subjected to a wide array of lurid sights and stories on a daily basis, simply because their jobs demand it. The same can be said, apparently, for Web content screeners. As more sites have adopted platforms that allow users to create and post their own content, demand for the workers who screen that content has skyrocketed. Although social ...

The halcyon days of freewheelin' file-sharing may be drawing to a quiet close today at universities across the country. As CNET reports, yesterday marked the final deadline for colleges receiving Title IV federal aid to comply with the anti-piracy measures outlined in the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008. The act covers a broad range of issues pertaining to higher education, but ...

In April, we told you about the unfortunate plight of Justin Kurtz, a 21-year-old college student who found himself battling defamation charges after creating a group on Facebook to publicize his dissatisfaction with a local towing company. Not long after its birth, the group began growing, with many Kalamazoo, Michigan locals flocking to the forum in order to air their own grievances with the ...

Share How's this for a reality show pitch? Take a bunch of Senators, representatives and Supreme Court justices, put them in a swanky, upscale apartment for six months -- and surround them with high-tech gadgets as their only means of survival. Want to order a pizza, Senator Byrd? You'll have to whip out your iPhone. In need of some new reading material, Justice Scalia? There's this thing called ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... Our favorite avant-garde entrepreneur/pop star just got a little more famous. Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' music video just took the number one spot for most viewed on YouTube -- which is kind of surprising. Considering the bated breath with which the world waited for 'Telephone,' you'd think her Tarantino/'Thelma and Louise' homage ...

The National Broadband Plan, Net neutrality and consumer advocates around the country took a major blow today when a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC had no authority to regulate how service providers manage network traffic. The ruling was handed down in favor of Comcast following a 2008 challenge leveled by the FCC against the cable provider for blocking and throttling P2P file-sharing ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. We promised ourselves we wouldn't mention Chatroulette today, but this dude improvising on the piano has got the Internet all hot and bothered. Our editors loved it, ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... The FCC is expected to present its national broadband plan to Congress this month, and the program will reportedly cost $25 billion. The FCC is hoping to help finance the proposition by auctioning frequencies, or "underutilized spectrums," to various wireless broadband services. [From: Yahoo! News] Twitter users tweeted more than ...

You've been there. Sitting in your living room, passively watching commercials on the TV while you wait for 'Mad Men' to come back on, maybe enjoying a cold beverage or getting lost in a daydream. When all of a sudden, you get hit with a freight train of sound that jolts you out of our reverie. After the shock passes and you crawl out from underneath the coffee table, you realize that no, that ...

The US is the most wired country in the world, according to a new study of industrialized counties that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. With 80,071,074 people connected to DSL, cable, or fiber (as of December 2008), America has nearly as many high-speed surfers as the next four countries combined (Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France). But tech ...

Republicans in Congress are pushing for a new data retention law that will require anyone providing access to electronic communication to keep records of users for at least two years. Europe has similar requirements for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and telephone providers, but the new proposal in the U.S. legislature goes far beyond the European regulations. The proposal requires all ...

With the economy in free-fall and Congress struggling to keep their own house in order, you would think that cell phone security would be the last thing on a Representative's mind. New York Republican Rep. Peter King sees it differently. King has introduced a bill that would require cell phone cameras to make some sort of sound when taking a picture. It is called the Camera Phone Predator ...

We knew it was bound to happen, and sure enough, it's happening. For the millions of Americans still waiting for their $40 voucher before buying one of those newfangled DTV converter boxes, the US Senate has just given its stamp of approval on providing them a four month reprieve as it attempts to get its act together. Oddly, there's no mention of Congress looking for new sources of funding, ...