Tag: SENATE

The House of Representatives has voted to overturn a controversial FCC ruling on net neutrality, though it's not clear whether or not the resolution will advance much further. In December, the FCC voted to prohibit Internet service providers from blocking legal content on their networks, while allowing them to restrict access according to bandwidth use. The 3-2 ruling elicited uproars from free ...

Illinois Democratic Senator Richard Durbin wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg last week, asking the Facebook CEO to offer stronger online protection to political dissidents who use the social network for organizing protests. Citing the recent upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia, Durbin argued that Facebook should allow people to use fake names in order to avoid persecution from authoritarian regimes. ...

Al Franken thinks Net neutrality is "the most important free speech issue of our time," and he seems determined to fight for it. On Saturday, the Democratic senator delivered a blistering floor speech, in which he criticized the new online regulations proposed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. On Tuesday, the FCC will vote on both the regulations and a proposed merger between NBC and Comcast. ...

Don't adjust your TV sets. Democrats and Republicans really did just find a solution to one of the world's biggest problems: commercial decibel levels. After having already breezed through the Senate in October, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act received a final stamp of approval yesterday from the House of Representatives. It's now headed to the White House, where it ...

With mid-term elections rearing their ugly head this fall, Congressional incumbents and challengers alike are doing everything they can to squeeze every possible vote out of their constituents. This season, though, candidates have added an extra weapon to their campaign arsenal: text messages. Democratic Senatorial candidate Robin Carnahan, for example, has begun posting signs around Missouri, ...

Your TV watching experience may be getting a lot calmer very soon, thanks to a newly Senate-approved bill that would put a limit on how loud advertisers can make their commercials. The appropriately titled Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) calls for the FCC to draft new regulations which would guarantee that televised commercials can't be obscenely loud, or broadcast at a ...

Google has made tracking the upcoming midterm elections a little easier with its 2010 U.S. Election Ratings map. The map breaks down rankings from outlets like Cook, Rothenberg, CQ-Roll Call, and RealClearPolitics (what, no Five Thirty Eight?) for senate, house and governor races in all their color-coded glory. Via the menus on the left, you can select your sources, and the races whose results ...

Considering how notoriously image-conscious they are, you'd think most high-level politicians would've secured their own online domain names a long time ago. A recent survey from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA), however, finds that many lawmakers still aren't doing enough to protect their own names from online desecration. As the New York Times reports, only about half of all ...

Whereas most political campaign ads tend to focus on a candidate's baby-holding or construction-hat-wearing capabilities, the latest spot for Senator Chuck Grassley's reelection campaign (after the break) emphasizes one of the Iowa Republican's more unique (and somewhat notorious) skills: his tweeting. The 76-year-old politician has garnered attention in recent months for his prolific use of ...

He may be older than dust, but, make no mistake about it, John McCain is a certified "Twitter Genius." According to a recent study (PDF) conducted by researchers from George Washington University and New York University, the 73-year-old Arizona Senator ranks at the very top of the U.S. Senate's "Twitter Geniuses." The academics came to their conclusion after calculating every Senator's "Digital ...

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 ...

The Louisiana Senate recently passed a bill requiring a minimum 10-year sentence for any terrorist who uses virtual online maps to plan his or her attack. And no one's really sure why. According to NOLA.com, the bill, proposed by Republican Senator Robert Adley, "defines a 'virtual street-level map' as one that is available on the Internet and can generate the location or picture of a home or ...

When it comes to financial regulatory reform, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer may be caught between a rock and a hard place. But when it comes to Facebook reform, the New Yorker finds himself spearheading a movement that, if successful, would enhance the transparency of the social networking site's data-sharing practices. According to a press release from Schumer's office, the Senator has written ...

While the Federal government might throw a hundred million dollars at cyber-attacks, the real solution to the problem is much easier and cheaper -- at least that's what National Security Agency information assurance director Richard Schaeffer told the U.S. Senate Tuesday. According to Wired, Schaeffer says about 80-percent of the attacks could be prevented if network administrators were to ...

The Senate investigation into anti-competitive practices among the major cellular carriers is moving forward, and AT&T and Verizon have vehemently denied any accusations of price-fixing, Reuters reported earlier this week. A few years ago, every major carrier decided that individual text messages should cost $0.20, instead of the $0.10 that had been the standard for years. But, as ...