The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle landmark rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences.
The agency scrapped so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone services.
The action reversed the agency’s 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to better protect Americans as they have migrated to the internet for most communications.
Ajit Pai, the chairman of the commission, said the rollback of the rules would eventually help consumers because broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast could offer people a wider variety of service options. Mr. Pai was joined in the 3-to-2 vote by his two fellow Republican commissioners.
Republicans are why we can’t have nice things.
FUCK YOU FCC!
We want to give a big shout-out to the indexsy seo services for being so helpful to this site.
It is unconscionable to imagine that Yelp would create, maintain, or expand a significant business presence in any state that encouraged discrimination by businesses against our employees, or consumers at large. I encourage states that are considering passing laws like the one rejected by Arizona or adopted by Indiana to reconsider and abandon these discriminatory actions. (We’re looking at you, Arkansas.) I hope that in the future the legislatures in the nineteen states that have these laws on the books will reconsider their actions. In the mean time, Yelp will make every effort to expand its corporate presence only in states that do not have these laws allowing for discrimination on the books. I also hope that other companies will draw a similar line in the sand for equality on behalf of their employees and the greater public to persuade legislators to do the right thing and stop or rescind these harmful laws. – YELP* CEO Jeremy Stoppelman whose company went public in 2012 and says it will grosses roughly $575M this year.
ANONYMOUShas been doing the world a good deed and hacking and hijacking multiple white supremacist websites around the country and posting the personal information of dozens of Klan members and supporters including having their credit card numbers and PINs published.
On Tuesday, the campaign continued, with Anonymous moving beyond the Klan to target racist websites like Stormfront.org and writing, “The aim of our operation is nothing more than Cyber Warfare. Anything you upload will be taken down, anything you use to promote the KKK will be shut down. DDoS attacks have already been sent and have infiltrated your servers over the past 2 days — d0x’s have also been launched on leaders of the KKK. All information retrieved will be given to the public.” DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks are an illegal tool used by hackers to shut down a website by flooding it with so many dummy requests that the server overloads and goes offline. Anonymous is claiming to have knocked multiple Klan websites offline in several states including North Carolina, Utah and Texas, as well as a website for white supremacist group the Traditional American Knights.
Just ten days after Brendan Eich was named Mozilla’s CEO and his donation to support Prop 8 in California which would have banned gay marriage in that state had been revealed. Eich has resigned.
After calls for his resignation and boycotts by the LGBT Community and its straight allies along with gay Mozilla staffers, and gay developers Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced Eichs removal.
Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves. We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better. Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community. Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.
What’s next for Mozilla’s leadership is still being discussed. We want to be open about where we are in deciding the future of the organization and will have more information next week. However, our mission will always be to make the Web more open so that humanity is stronger, more inclusive and more just: that’s what it means to protect the open Web. We will emerge from this with a renewed understanding and humility — our large, global, and diverse community is what makes Mozilla special, and what will help us fulfill our mission. We are stronger with you involved. Thank you for sticking with us.
Through all this Eich has never apologized or stated that he has changed his position on gay marriage.
Brendan Eich, who it was announced will be the new CEO of Mozilla, which runs and owns the popular Firefox browser has been outed as an anti- same sex marriage supporter who it was discovered donated $1,000 to support Prop 8, California’s a ban on gay marriage.
Hampton Catlin and his husband Michael co-creators of the popular Color Puzzle app from the Mozilla/Firefox marketplace in protest.
“Today we were shocked to read that Brendan Eich has been appointed Mozilla CEO. As a gay couple who were unable to get married in California until recently, we morally cannot support a Foundation that would not only leave someone with hateful views in power, but will give them a promotion and put them in charge of the entire organization”, says Hampton Catlin.”.
Catlin writes the following letter to Mozilla in protest:
Dear Mozilla,
As a married gay couple who are co-founders of this venture, we have chosen to boycott all Mozilla projects. We will not develop apps or test styles on Firefox anymore.
Effective today, we’re removing Color Puzzle from the Firefox Marketplace and stopping work on all of our Firefox-related applications, notably the about-to-launch Firefox version of the popular Dictionary! app for iPhone and Android.
This is in protest of the appointment of Brendan Eich to the position of CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, where he had previously served as CTO.
We will continue our boycott until Brendan Eich is completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla, which we believe is extremely unlikely after all he’s survived and the continued support he has received from Mozilla.
This makes us very sad, as we love the little guy fighting to make things better. But it’s because of our status as a minority that we simply can’t ignore this slap in the face of giving him a promotion to lead your organization.
Sincerely,
Hampton Catlin
Eich on the other hand has played victim since back in 2008 when news of his donation originally became public for he first time.
A donation that I made in support of California Proposition 8 four years ago became public knowledge and sparked a firestorm of comments in the last few days, mostly on Twitter. People in other countries or other U.S. states do not know why “Mozilla” was listed in the donation data. Donors above a certain amount are required by the State of California to disclose their employer. Mozilla had nothing to do with the donation. I’m not going to discuss Prop 8 here or on Twitter. There is no point in talking with the people who are baiting, ranting, and hurling four-letter abuse. Personal hatred conveyed through curse words is neither rational nor charitable, and strong feelings on any side of an issue do not justify it. In contrast, people expressing non-abusive anger, sadness, or disagreement, I understand, grieve, and humbly accept.
I am sure Eich will be reprising his role as victim once again soon.
Google Reader, which was released to the public as a Google Labs project on Oct. 7, 2005, and was suppossed to be a solution for the Web’s rapidly growing problem of content overload will shut down on July 13th.
“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites,” the company said. “While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.”
Google Reader lets users subscribe to and read feeds from all manner of publishers, in a format that resembles an e-mail in-box..”
Google has acknowledged that some of the Reader’s core social functionality was being replicated and even replaced within Google+, and that it was pushing Reader users in that direction, including the decision to cut out sharing options from Reader completely.
“Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall,” wrote Alan Green, a Google software engineer, in Google’s last official Reader blog post in late 2011. “We hope you’ll like the new Reader (and Google+) as much as we do, but we understand that some of you may not.
An adorable pitbull puppy was abandoned at a Jackson, Tennessee animal shelter because his heartless bigoted owner believed him to be gay because the dog was seen “hunched over,” another male dog, therefore, in this owner’s mind, the dog must be gay and took him to the shelter to be “put down”.
More than 4,000 people shared the post overnight. Men and women from across the United States volunteered to adopt the dog or pay for him to be moved to a no-kill shelter.
Today the rescue group “Saving the Animals Together” posted on Facebook that the dog was safe, and is being adopted.
Writes Stephanie Fryns: “I am adopting this big boy first thing in the morning. He has Kristin Joy Duewerth who is going to help with cost as well as many others in the area. He will be neutered/ htwm tested/ and vetted. He will be temperament tested and then places in a rescue verified and approved home. Woof connections is pulling many pups tomorrow, wonderful!! They need help with vetting the ones they pull also. We are all working together ( Diane Butler , Susan Bell) to save all the babies on the euth list for tomorrow.”
Save the gay puppy. Save the world!
On the other hand his previous owner should be tarred and feathered and put in a cage.
The 2.5 million dollar gift, doubles the money available to the proponents of Referendum 74, which will legalize same-sex marriage in the state by affirming a law that passed the Legislature this year.
Same-sex marriage was legalized by Washington’s States Legislature last February after a push by Gov. Christine Gregoire,. But opponents collected enough signatures to put the legislation to the voters.
Jennifer Cast, one of Amazon’s earliest employees, who was able to buy Amazon shares UK and a lesbian mother of four children who is now a fund-raising chairwoman of the pro-referendum effort sent Mr. Bezos and his wife an e-mail asking for help.
In her e-mail, sent Sunday evening, Ms. Cast, 50, implored Mr. Bezos to understand the importance of the issue to her and her longtime partner.
“I want to have the right to marry the love of my life and to let my children and grandchildren know their family is honored like a ‘real’ family,” Ms. Cast wrote. “We need help from straight people. To be very frank, we need help from wealthy straight people who care about us and who want to help us win.”
Jeff, I suspect you support marriage equality,” she wrote. “I beg you not to sit on the sidelines and hope the vote goes our way. Help us make it so.”
The group which is called Truth4Time has a large lists of documents which contains anti-gay propaganda that members are invited to use against the “gay agenda” The founder says that the group is supposed to be a sort of a “behind the scenes support system for the religious right” and prominent members of the anti-gay industry, including:
a Fox News pundit,
former employees of Concerned Women for America and The Family Research Council,
a prominent member of the American Family Association,
long term anti-gay activists, including those who testified in front of Congress,
prominent members of the so-called “ex-gay” movement,
a member of a state legislature,
college professors from right-wing universities,
activists who have called for laws declaring homosexuality illegal,
members of a prominent anti-gay marriage equality group, and
various religious right talking heads who us bloggers have had to refute many times in the past.
McEwan received information from an anonymous source who became increasingly more upset with the groups plans
PLEASE head on over to Holly Bullies and Headless Monsters and read Alvins full article which contains many of the hateful strategies and Facebook posts and shows what we are up against and the disgusting practices of the religious right.
Great work Alvin!(Personally though, I’d have named names.)
UPDATE – From Holly Bullies and Headless Monsters:
According to my source, the secret anti-gay Facebook group Truth4Time have dismantled itself. As far as my source knows, the group is disabled/gone from Facebook. I’m not gloating by saying this but you all can run, but you can’t hide. Seems to me that if you are doing God’s work, you shouldn’t be ashamed of said work.
