Internet Computer Network

Iran is blocking access to Web sites containing pornographic material and dissent against the country's Islamic establishment, an official said Tuesday. More than 140 Web sites promoting dissent, dancing and sex have been blocked since the crackdown began last month, said Farhad Sepahram, a Telecommunications Ministry official.

Zhang Shan never paid much attention to Internet censorship in China. The stylish art gallery clerk said it didn't really matter in her daily life. Then last year, she lost access to some of her favorite websites. First YouTube. Then Twitter. Then Facebook. It was her first memorable brush with the so-called Great Firewall of China -- one of many powerful mechanisms the Chinese government uses to block content deemed too sensitive for the eyes of its 384 million Internet users.

A decade ago, in the World Wide Web's formative days, Gary Kremen registered "sex.com" with the company that keeps the rolls of the world's commercial domain names. One year later, a con man filched the rights, and Kremen set off on one of the Internet's longest-running legal battles. Now the lawsuit has been put to bed. VeriSign Inc. has agreed to settle Kremen's federal suit, the two sides said Tuesday. The Mountain View, Calif.

Almost every day, my in box fattens with e-mails from America's freelance writers -- adding their voices to those I quoted a couple of weeks ago about the devastating downturn in the writing market. In bemoaning the need for speed, the flight from quality and the persistent decrease in pay, it turns out writers have a lot in common with photographers. And graphic artists. And architects. And musicians. And, well, with just about anyone who sees his creative endeavors being commodified or who is exposed to low-cost foreign competition via the Internet.

When it comes to choosing broadband Internet providers, you can't always get what you want. But with certain limitations, you can get what you need. If you use the Internet regularly, chances are you already have broadband -- that is, a high-speed hookup, usually through your cable television provider or phone company. But are you getting it at the right speed and right price? There are more choices than ever, even though you typically have to go with a provider that serves your neighborhood.

Steve Mansfield operates his own Internet search engine from a place he calls a secret hide-out -- a small office surrounded by low-rent apartments on the outskirts of Lexington, Ky., a college town known for its horse farms. Mansfield conceived PreFound.com a few years ago on the premise that humans, from pretty much anywhere, can collectively provide better intelligence than a computer program developed out of Silicon Valley. Other start-ups, too, have had similar visions for "social search."

As patient as fishermen, the young men toil day and night, trawling for replies to the e-mails they shoot to strangers half a world away. Most recipients hit delete, delete, delete, delete without ever opening the messages that urge them to claim the untold riches of a long-lost deceased second cousin, and the messages that offer millions of dollars to help smuggle loot stolen by a corrupt Nigerian official into a U.S. account.

In the summer of 2005, when she was 15 but not yet famous, Cory Kennedy went to a Blood Brothers concert at the El Rey Theatre. She remembers what she was wearing--black leg warmers, beat-up black Converse sneakers and a canary-yellow Lacoste mini-dress that she'd had to beg her mother to buy her. It was "back in the day," at the end of ninth grade, when she was still going by her full name, Cory Kennedy-Levin.

The Public Broadcasting Service turns 40 this year, and on Tuesday it gave itself a gift that just might make it feel young again. PBS' new video portal allows online viewers to stream an array of its best-known shows over the Web. The new site gathers more than 130 episodes of nearly 20 programs, including marquee fare such as "Frontline," "Nova" and "Masterpiece Theater." PBS says thousands of hours of programming should be available to users by the summer.

For nearly a year, the families who live along Waterford Crystal Drive in this bedroom community northwest of St. Louis have kept the secret about the boy Megan Meier met last September on the social networking site MySpace. He called himself Josh Evans, and he and 13-year-old Megan struck up an online friendship that lasted several weeks. Then the boy abruptly turned on Megan and ended it. That night, Megan, who had previously battled depression, committed suicide.

As legislators consider making California the first state in the country to legalize and regulate Internet poker, a coalition of Indian gaming tribes warned them Friday that the proposal would not create the budget windfall backers claim and could actually cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. The tribes, which have hired Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's former budget chief to help make their case, argue that the legalization of Internet poker would violate existing gaming compacts and allow the tribes to stop paying the state its $365-million annual cut of slot machine revenue.

One in a series of occasional articles The Troubadour, awash on a recent night in indigo light and chiming guitars, doesn't look all that different than it did in the 1970s, when music history plugged in to the club's stage amps and earned the tiny West Hollywood venue the audacity to relentlessly advertise itself as "the world-famous Troubadour." The description still fits but, well, the world isn't as big as it used to be, not for the recording industry or the young musicians who come to Los Angeles with dreams of gold and platinum.

Almost every day, my in box fattens with e-mails from America's freelance writers -- adding their voices to those I quoted a couple of weeks ago about the devastating downturn in the writing market. In bemoaning the need for speed, the flight from quality and the persistent decrease in pay, it turns out writers have a lot in common with photographers. And graphic artists. And architects. And musicians. And, well, with just about anyone who sees his creative endeavors being commodified or who is exposed to low-cost foreign competition via the Internet.

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Thursday urged China to investigate cyber intrusions that led Google to threaten to pull out of that country -- and challenged Beijing to openly publish its findings. "Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century," she said. Clinton said the U.S. and China "have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently" as part of a cooperative relationship.

The decision by Google Inc. to stand up to censorship in China is a marked turnaround from just a few years ago, when the Internet giant agreed to gag parts of its search engine to enter the lucrative China market. Google's threat to bolt from the Asian nation has brought praise from politicians and Silicon Valley business leaders, along with many of the human-rights activists who had condemned the company for going along with China's restrictions on Internet access. Whether Google's reversal sprang from political idealism or corporate realism, the Mountain View, Calif.

Zhang Shan never paid much attention to Internet censorship in China. The stylish art gallery clerk said it didn't really matter in her daily life. Then last year, she lost access to some of her favorite websites. First YouTube. Then Twitter. Then Facebook. It was her first memorable brush with the so-called Great Firewall of China -- one of many powerful mechanisms the Chinese government uses to block content deemed too sensitive for the eyes of its 384 million Internet users.

The scale and sophistication of the cyber attacks on Google Inc. and other large U.S. corporations by hackers in China is raising national security concerns that the Asian superpower is escalating its industrial espionage efforts on the Internet. While the U.S. focus has been primarily on protecting military and state secrets from cyber spying, a new battle is being waged in which corporate computers and the valuable intellectual property they hold have become as much a target of foreign governments as those run by the Pentagon and the CIA. "This is a watershed moment in the cyber war," James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., a national-security firm, said Thursday.

Bouquets were laid in front of Google Inc.'s headquarters in China on Wednesday, a show of support for a company whose threat to exit the country rather than be party to more censorship is a dramatic shot across the bow of the Chinese Communist Party. But while Chinese cyberspace was awash with chatter about Google's gambit, state-controlled media downplayed the story, reporting that Google had been a victim of cyber attacks in China but making no mention of the company's allegations that human rights activists' e-mail accounts had been hacked.

As the number of sources for news proliferates on digital platforms, most original reporting still comes from newspapers, television and radio. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that surveyed news gathering in Baltimore as an example of nationwide trends found that 95% of stories with fresh information came from "old media," and the vast majority of that from newspapers. "The expanding universe of new media, including blogs, Twitter and local websites -- at least in Baltimore -- played only a limited role: mainly an alert system and a way to disseminate stories from other places," the study's authors write.

The French government is mulling a so-called Google tax that it said would help level the playing field between Internet portals that offer free content and the music, film and publishing industries that lost revenue partly because of it. "The world of culture is not only turned upside-down but profoundly threatened by the development of the Internet, and we hope that our action doesn't intervene too late," music producer Patrick Zelnik told the...