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PATH: BS | Technology
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Welcome
Posted by Admin
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 Welcome to BSAlert.com - This is the place to rant and rave about stuff that bothers you. Illogical things in the news, legal issues, class action lawsuits, toxic substances, government goofs, corporate hanky panky, misleading advertising, lies in politics or whatever!
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What is Net Neutrality And Why Should You Care?
Posted by Pile
(23327 views) [E-Mail link]
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 What is Net Neutrality and why should people care about it?
In a nutshell, NN is the idea that the Internet is a shared, global network that should not be tampered with at its base level. If you want to be part of the network, you have to respect the network. This means, if you want your sites to be accessible to everybody else, then you have to make sure your customers have access to the entirety of the Internet. You can't break it into pieces and show either prejudice or favoritism in determining which content can be accessed over your system.
Simple as that. You want in? All or nothing. Play FAIR. Treat others the way you like to be treated.
Beyond this, it's important to note that before the Internet came around, there were plenty of private networks created and run by private companies. They could do what they wanted. But the Internet was created by taxpayer money and made wide open to anybody because it was a public resource. Because nobody "owned" the Internet, it prospered and eventually became the default network.
Now private companies want to take control of it and slice it into pieces and charge extra for parts, or deny you access to parts of it if the content isn't something they agree with. That's really bad.
Net Neutrality opponents argue that Net Neutrality is anti-freedom-of-speech, but they are lying. What they really mean, is that they believe they should have the freedom to deny you access to content over their network, and if you don't allow it, you're denying them their rights. It's a bizarro, irrational argument.
Why do some companies want Net Neutrality abolished?
Simple. They can make more money charging their customers for access. They can shut down competitive Internet services so they're the only game in town. The abolishment of Net Neutrality will cost consumers more and offer them less choices.
The Net Neutrality fight is split clearly along party lines.
The Republicans and the Libertarian parties are in favor of abolishing Net Neutrality. Their corporate benefactors have paid them well to push a variety of narratives convincing people it's a good thing to get rid of. To them, it's about money and control. Their idea of "freedom of speech" is refusing to carry anyone else's traffic on their network if they can't monetize it the way they want.
The Democrats have been the only party to consistently fight to protect the neutrality of the Internet. If you care about this issue, there is a party you can vote for that will protect it. Remember this in 2018. It's really important if you want full access to information, news and everything else.
It's quite popular to say, "both parties are the same" and they both are pawns to special interests, but not all parties are equally beholden to special interests, and the Net Neutrality issue is another clear example of this. If you care about the Internet, protest, contact your representatives. If you don't want to have to keep doing this over and over, vote for people who have a clear respect for the Internet. Pay attention to which parties are easier to reach and more attentive to your needs.
Some corporations are being deceitful.
You may on occasion hear that AT&T or Verizon is in favor of Net Neutrality. In reality, they and other large providers have spent millions to shut it down. Now they're muddying the waters trying to re-define what Net Neutrality means. If they can't get it abolished, then they'll write their own series of bills that re-defines what NN is, and includes the loopholes they want to filter and control traffic on their network. No matter what they say, the large providers are not friends of Net Neutrality. Beware of ANY legislation they propose which supposedly "protects" the sanctity of the Internet.
VOTE IN 2018! |
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MPAA Caught Pirating Software
Posted by Pile
(24063 views) [E-Mail link]
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 The Chairman of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). You remember the MPAA right? This is the high-and-mighty organization that is in charge of convincing and threatening people with legal action if they violate copyright or licensing terms of movies and music.
It turns out the MPAA blog is run by a piece of software called "Forest Blog" - a Freeware blog, and one of the few things the author asks is that if you use the software in a commercial environment, pay about $40 for the registration, and don't remove the links to the author's original site.
Of course, the MPAA apparently installed the software, didn't register and removed the links and credits from it before they let their executives use the blog software to rant and rave about the evils of piracy.
To make matters worse, the MPAA ignored the author's initial requests to legitimize the software, until it became public, then they pulled the site and sent him a letter saying the blog they installed was a "proof of concept" and didn't have its own domain, so therefore it wasn't an issue. Even though then, they didn't pay for the software! |
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"Vagina Institute" Poorly Disguised Sham
Posted by wizeGurl
(26996 views) [E-Mail link]
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 Finally...a group devoted to serious scientific study of female sexuality. "The Vagina Institute specializes in collecting and processing, data and information about the vulva and vagina." Or is it?
As if the serious grammatical error in the very sentence describing the institute's mission weren't already a dead giveaway that something is up here, it takes about five seconds to figure out that the site is a gigantic fraud...not-very-good porn and, what's more, propaganda for various ineffective techniques to "enhance" women's naughty bits poorly disguised as clinical study of real medical and sexual issues. (URL withheld because we don't want to help its page rank...Google it if you must see for yourself.)
I've got no problem with porn, and hey, the Internet is unregulated...if you want to put up a site suggesting that poontang is ugly and needs dubiously effective, costly fixes at the earliest possible opportunity, have at it. But come on...let's at least be honest about it. The sad thing about this site is that a few women might actually come here looking for information about their vaginas and whether they are "normal," and come away convinced that they need to spend thousands of dollars on "natural, non-surgical solutions" before any guy would ever deign to look at them down there. (After all, everyone knows that looking is the #1 priority for guys when they've got a willing naked woman on their hands.) This site is no different from spam telling you how to make your penis bigger, except that it's not as up-front about it. |
READ MORE | 4 comments since 2012-07-08 03:21:40 | Comment on this Article |
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Have you ever wondered why the computer/console video game industry is so male-dominated? Are computer games inherently "male" in design and appeal? It wasnt always this way, and the story about how the gender bias happened is fascinating...
There's a huge mutiny in progress over at Reddit.com. This is an Internet-first as far as I know and it'll probably be big news soon. The company fired an employee that was responsible for helping a bunch of moderators of different subs, and left them in chaos. They decided to make their part of Reddit private, and then in solidarity hundreds of other moderators joined and have been turning off parts of Reddit one-by-one since yesterday.
These days everybody is using Facebook. But did you know if you pay to promote something, you might actually hurt your business and waste your money? A diligent Internet truth-seeker shows you in this video that all is not what it seems when it comes to advertising on Facebook, and even Facebook itself is at least indirectly involved in phony and fraudulent activity.
It's no secret I like Reddit. I myself run a few popular subreddits. But like many, it's impossible to have a love-love relationship with this site. For every cool section, there's another one that makes your skin crawl. For every person you can relate to, there's eighteen dozen who appear to be Tourettes-infected-6-year-olds. 
If you've been wondering where we've been to these last few months, not cranking out as many stories as we usually do, it's because we've been working on a super secret project that is now time to be revealed. 
A huge Internet outrage has erupted in the wake of GoDaddy's latest commercial leak online of what was apparently going to be their Superbowl commercial. Which has now been pulled.
It came as a surprise to some folks at a recent SXSW talk that Apple’s Siri “personal assistant” isn’t just working for us, it’s working full-time for Apple too by sending lots of our personal voice and user info to Apple to stockpile in its databases. Take a peek at Siri’s privacy policy (which, by the way, is pretty difficult to find) and you’ll realize what’s happening behind the scenes.
Radiation from cell phones can possibly cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization. The agency now lists mobile phone use in the same "carcinogenic hazard" category as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform.
In an incredible act of hubris, the latest Windows Update patch secretly installs a plug in to Firefox what implements the exact kinds of vulnerabilities that prompted users to abandon Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser!
We're making up a new word: SPORN
Virginia's Supreme Court on Friday upheld the first US felony conviction for spamming. The spammer will serve nine years in prison for sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003.
When you're using Microsoft Excel.
Oklahoma is the latest state to have a video game law permanently thrown out. Following a preliminary injunction against the unconstitutional law last year, the court has issued a new decision to permanently enjoin Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry's law, which singled out video game companies for games with "inappropriate violence" while not putting such restrictions on other media.
Financial trading company, TD Ameritrade announced that some of its databases may have been compromised. The company discovered the security breach after their customers complained that they started to receive spam.
A 17-year-old from New Jersey has managed to unlock the iPhone and allow it to be used on different cellular providers. Remember that whole spiel about the Telco Act in the 1990s offering more competition and cheaper prices for consumers? No, it never happened, but the closest we come is when enterprising young kids thwart corporate mafia who lock down the latest technology.
Will Wright, developer of The Sims series gives another demo of the upcoming evolution-type sim game, "Spore" that has been promoted as coming now for no less than three years. Maxis' response? It's in ALPHA stage. What? Originally the game was going to be released in 2007. Now they're talking about 2009. Here's a collection of recent videos on the game's progress.
State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California's voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems' electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.
A 27-year-old man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.
Oh, you've seen live webcams. Some of them weren't even porn...there were baby pandas to watch, Swiss Alps to check weather conditions on, even live executions in dangerous parts of the world that you really wish you hadn't seen. But you've never seen this kind of live webcam before. It's so suspenseful...so shocking...that you might just not be able to handle this much excitement.
Google's popular map portal has replaced post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery with pictures taken before the storm, leaving locals feeling like they're in a time loop and even fueling suspicions of a conspiracy.