Cody Taylor

Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

For many people, social networking has become as much of a daily routine as brewing coffee and brushing teeth. IT administrators dislike it and cyber crooks depend on it.

A little more than a month after announcing it had 150 million active users, Facebook has reached 175 million active users–the statistic the social-networking site prefers to use, rather than registered accounts overall.

Richard.Tao and a number of other readers sent in a NYTimes piece by John Markoff asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced. “…[T]here is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over. What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.” A less alarmist reaction to the question was blogged by David Akin: “If you build a new Internet and you want me to get a license to drive on it, sorry. I’m hanging out here in v.1.”

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