Citing ‘Censorship’ Concerns, North Idaho ISP Blocks Facebook and Twitter

jasonbuechler writes: A North Idaho internet provider, Your T1 WIFI, emailed customers to say customers would need to opt-in to access Facebook and Twitter from its service. They wisely seem to have changed their mind on that after it started garnering attention on social media. The ISP says it decided to restrict service this way after receiving numerous calls from customers…

Sci-Hub: Scientists, Academics, Teachers & Students Protest Blocking Lawsuit

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Torrent Freak: On December 21, 2020, Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society, filed a lawsuit hoping to have the court compel Indian ISPs to block both Sci-Hub and Libgen. Accusing the platforms of blatantly infringing their rights on a massive scale, the publishers said that due to the defiant nature of the platforms, ISP…

Cable Companies Can No Longer ‘Rent’ You the Router You Already Own

Is your internet service provider charging you every month for the cable modem or router that you purchased with your own money? Or, perhaps, have you never bothered to buy those items because you couldn’t escape the fee? That fee is illegal as of yesterday. From a report: Last year, Congress passed a law that should have fixed this ridiculous loophole…

Senator Tries To Block Frontier’s FCC Funding, Citing ISP’s Various Failures

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Republican US senator from West Virginia has asked the government to block broadband funding earmarked for Frontier Communications, saying that the ISP is not capable of delivering gigabit-speed Internet service to all required locations. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) outlined her concerns in a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit…

Your Computer Isn’t Yours

Security researcher Jeffrey Paul, writes in a blog post: On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored. It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique…

Facebook Just Forced Its Most Powerful Critics Offline

Facebook is using its vast legal muscle to silence one of its most prominent critics. The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the…

Amazon Brings Eero Mesh Wi-Fi To ISPs

Amazon’s Eero mesh networking company is introducing Eero for Service Providers. “This is an all-new hardware and software offering designed to help internet service providers (ISPs) meet customers’ increasing demands for exceptional home Wi-Fi,” writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols via ZDNet. “This is not just a bundling of a selection of Eero Wi-Fi mesh routers with your existing internet service. It also…

Boardwatch/EVTV Founder Jack Rickard Dies at Age 65

I’ve only paid for a magazine subscription once in my life — to Jack Rickard’s Boardwatch magazine, which through the late 1990s was the geekiest read in town. You can still read 70 issues of the magazine from more than 25 years ago at Archive.org. But this week the small Southeast Missourian newspaper reported that the magazine’s original editor/publisher Jack Rickard…

Belarus Has Shut Down the Internet Amid a Controversial Election

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Internet connectivity and cellular service in Belarus have been down since Sunday evening, after sporadic outages early that morning and throughout the day. The connectivity blackout, which also includes landline phones, appears to be a government-imposed outage that comes amid widespread protests and increasing social unrest over Belarus’ presidential election Sunday. The ongoing…

Multiple Service Providers Are Blocking DuckDuckGo In India

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: Just a few days after India banned 59 Chinese apps, many users in the country are reporting that privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo is inaccessible to them. Users on Reddit have noticed they’re unable to access the site on their Airtel and Reliance Jio mobile network connections. While Some users on Twitter…