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Reddit bans racist communities, ‘quarantines’ other offensive talk

Reddit is removing several racist communities from its website, as well as other offensive discussion topics, part of an ongoing effort to clean up the most toxic content on its site.Among those now banned are the subreddits /r/CoonTown and /r/bestofcoontown—as well as others with even more racist names—and also content related to “animated” child pornography, said Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, in a post on Wednesday.Reddit is trying to strike a balance between honoring its heritage as a place for free-wheeling free speech while also restricting hateful or harassing content. It’s a tough balance, though, and some of its longtime users have criticized what they see as censorship of the site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Fueling the need for speed, Fastly raises $75 million

Fastly has a plan. And that plan revolves around unseating traditional content distribution network (CDN) vendors. For those unaware, CDNs are a critically important, but largely invisible (at least to end users), part of the infrastructure of the web. Quite simply, CDNs introduce locations close to consumption where content can be cached. What that means is that if you're in Timbuktu and trying to reach a website hosted in Outer Mongolia, rather than having to pull down all those pages all the way between the two points, you can leverage a CDN located near you to reduce page load times.And in a word where empirical data has shown massive revenue gains from even tiny increments in page load speed, every microsecond counts. Enter Fastly, a CDN vendor founded in 2011 that has built a significant presence and already powers such web properties as Twitter, the Guardian, Gov.UK, GitHub and Pinterest. Funded by a bevy of top-tier investors, including Amplify Partners, August Capital, Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, IDG Ventures, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Fastly is today announcing another raise, this time $75 million by way of a Series D round.To read this article in full or to leave Continue reading

Indian government orders ISPs to block 857 porn websites

The Indian government has ordered a large number of porn websites to be blocked, creating an uproar among users and civil rights groups in the country.The Department of Telecommunications has issued orders for the blocking of 857 websites serving pornography, said two persons familiar with the matter, who declined to be named.Section 69 (A) of India’s Information Technology Act allows the government to order blocking of public access to websites and other information through computer resources, though this section appears to be designed to be invoked when a threat is perceived to the sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states or public order.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo picks up fashion commerce site Polyvore

Marissa Mayer knows fashion, and she’s bringing more of it to Yahoo with her latest acquisition announced Friday.Yahoo has reached a deal to acquire Polyvore, an e-commerce site that lets you shop for “what’s trending in the style community,” Yahoo announced Friday. It hopes the deal will give it a place to sell more ads for retailers.The site lets users shop for clothing and accessories, but it also has a social networking component that lets users post collections of desired items, like they might on Pinterest. The majority of Polyvore’s users are women between the ages of 18 and 34, the company says.In its announcement, Yahoo cited advertising as a key driver of the deal. Yahoo will integrate Polyvore’s ads into Gemini, its native ads platform. Polyvore has more than 350 advertisers who are retailers, Yahoo said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mt. Gox CEO Karpeles arrested by Japanese police

The CEO of failed Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox was arrested in Japan early Saturday by police, according to several media reports.Mark Karpeles faces charges related to the loss of 650,000 bitcoins worth hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars when the Tokyo-based trading exchange collapsed in February 2014.Karpeles, a French citizen, is suspected of accessing the company’s computer systems and falsifying financial data, according Japan’s Kyodo News.Japanese broadcaster NHK showed video of a man that appeared to be Karpeles being led to a car by police in a residential district of Tokyo. The TV station said the footage was recorded around 6:40am Saturday, or Friday afternoon U.S. time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ISP argues net neutrality rules violate its right to block content

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules violate the free speech rights of broadband providers because the regulations take away their ability to block Web traffic they disagree with, one ISP has argued.The FCC’s net neutrality rules take away broadband providers’ First Amendment rights to block Web content and services, ISP Alamo Broadband argued to an appeals court this week. While not a new argument for ISPs, it’s a curious one, given that most broadband providers have argued the regulations aren’t needed because they promise never to selectively block or degrade Web traffic.The FCC rules violate the First Amendment because they prohibit broadband providers’ ability to engage in political speech by “refusing to carry content with which they disagree,” wrote lawyers for Alamo Broadband, a small wireless ISP based in Elmendorf, Texas. Broadband providers, by carrying their own and other Web content, have the ability to “exercise editorial discretion,” wrote lawyers with Wiley Rein, a Washington, D.C., law firm.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Italian police shutter Dark Web marketplace

Italian police have shut down a Dark Web marketplace offering illegal goods ranging from child pornography to forged luncheon vouchers, and seized 11,000 bitcoin wallets worth about 1 million euros, authorities said Friday.Officials compared the marketplace discovered by “Operation Babylon” to the Silk Road online black market that was taken down by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2013.More than 14,000 people had signed up to the illegal community, which was allegedly run by an Italian living near Naples. There was evidence of 170,000 transaction messages on the Tor platform, which provided 12 kinds of hidden services, police said. These ranged from pornographic images to arms, drugs, false identity papers, hacker kits and credit card codes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ad group urges FTC to reject right to be forgotten in US

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission should reject a privacy group’s push to extend the E.U.’s controversial right to be forgotten rules to the U.S. because such regulations would have a “sweeping” negative effect on many U.S. companies, a trade group said.The FTC should dismiss a July 7 complaint from Consumer Watchdog against Google, the Association of National Advertisers [ANA] said Friday, because the privacy group’s request that Google and other Internet firms enforce the right to be forgotten could open the door to more European privacy regulations in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FREE COURSE: Learn basic Cisco networking

In partnership with Pluralsight, Network World presents a free course on CCNA routing and VLANs. In this course, the student will learn the fundamental concepts of networking, and then immediately apply this knowledge to the configuration of a router and switch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Friday, July 31

Facebook’s new Internet-access drone set to fly by year endAn unmanned aircraft called Aquila was the star of the show as Facebook on Thursday showed how it plans to provide Internet access to hundreds of millions of people in remote parts of the world. The plane should get a test flight later this year; its entire surface is covered with solar panels to enable it to stay up in the air for three months at a time, at an altitude between 60,000 and 90,000 feet. From there, it will use laser-based technology to receive an Internet connection and share it with users in a 50-kilometer radius.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s pay package for CEO Robbins is a sweet deal

Cisco will pay incoming CEO Chuck Robbins a higher salary than outgoing chief John Chambers made in fiscal 2014.Robbins will make US$1.15 million in salary in fiscal 2016, which began this week, and he could earn another $2.59 million based on performance under Cisco’s Executive Incentive Plan. Add in as much as $13 million in stock grants, and Robbins could bring in more than $16.7 million for his first year at the helm.By contrast, Chambers got $1.1 million in salary and a smaller basic percentage bonus under the Executive Incentive Plan in fiscal 2014, according to the company’s proxy statement issued last September. Chambers was a 20-year veteran at the helm of the company and was also chairman of the board. He’s now stepped back to become executive chairman.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook aims to launch unmanned drone by year-end

At 140 feet, it has the wingspan of a Boeing 737, but carries no passengers—and it’s much lighter too, weighing in at no more than 1,000 pounds. And within the next couple months, Facebook hopes to get its drone off the ground on an inaugural test flight.Named Aquila, the aircraft is the product of more than a year’s work at the social networking giant. Its function is not to drop retail items from the clouds like Amazon’s drones, but to provide Internet access to the hundreds of millions of people who don’t have it in under-served parts of the world. Facebook aims to partner with carriers and other companies to provide connectivity, potentially at a lower cost than typical infrastructure like cell phone towers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google rejects French request to expand right to be forgotten

Google won’t comply with an order from France’s privacy watchdog group to apply the right to be forgotten to all its search results around the world.In June, CNIL, France’s data protection authority, ordered Google to remove search results meeting “right to be forgotten” criteria from any regional version of Google’s search engine. However, granting CNIL’s request could have a “serious chilling effect on the web,” Google said Thursday in a blog post.The request stems from May 2014 decision issued by the European Court of Justice that allows Europeans to ask search engines in the region to scrub results that contain information about them that’s found to be inadequate, irrelevant or not in the public interest. This has been dubbed the right to be forgotten.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, July 29

Intel and Micron unveil a new class of memory with 3D XPointIntel and Micron say they’ve developed the first new kind of memory since NAND flash was introduced in 1989. The new technology, 3D XPoint, is a form of non-volatile memory that’s as much as 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, the companies say. 3D XPoint should arrive in products next year, and it could change computing as much as SSDs have by powering better speech recognition, biometrics, and gesture-based interfaces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Italian parliament drafts a declaration of Internet rights

The Italian parliament wants to have its say in the creation of an international legal framework promoting freedom, equality and access to cyberspace for all, and on Tuesday it presented a Declaration of Internet Rights that it will bring to the Internet Governance Forum in Brazil in November.“This is the first time that a parliament produces a declaration on Internet rights of constitutional inspiration and international scope,” Laura Boldrini, the speaker of the lower house of parliament and a major backer of the project, told a press conference in Rome. Boldrini said she hoped parliament would pass a motion calling on the Italian government to promote the document in national and international forums. The document was drawn up by a commission headed by Stefano Rodotà, a former politician and jurist.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon Launchpad store will sell goods from startups

Amazon is opening a specialized storefront on its website that will sell products from startups in an effort to help the fledging companies build their businesses.Called Launchpad, the site lists approximately 200 items with an emphasis on tech gadgets, like a US$649 drone or a $150 floating Bluetooth speaker. There are also startups selling food, like gluten-free pancake mix, and wellness products, including vitamins. Each startup will get a product page for its merchandise and will get Amazon’s help with marketing and distributing. The products will ship to buyers from Amazon’s warehouses and will be eligible for Prime, the company’s expedited shipping program. Joining Launchpad is free, Amazon said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, July 28

Samsung tipped to upstage Apple with August phone launchSamsung has sent out invitations to an event in New York next month that looks like it’s planned to be the coming out party for a new, larger version of its flagship Galaxy S6 edge smartphone. The S6 line has been a hot item but the company hasn’t been able to keep up with demand, and shortages of the smartphone may be a factor holding down Samsung’s quarterly earnings, to be reported on Thursday.Most Android phones can be hacked just by sending them a multimedia messageTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA will lose access to ‘historical’ phone surveillence data Nov. 29

The U.S. National Security Agency will lose access to the bulk telephone records data it has collected at the end of November, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Monday.Congress voted in June to rein in the NSAs mass collection of U.S. phone metadata, which includes information such as the timing and location of calls. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court then gave the NSA 180 days to wind the program down.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook opens Internet.org to more mobile operators

Facebook is inviting additional mobile operators to take part in Internet.org, its project to bring Internet access to poorly connected parts of the world.Internet.org turns one year old this week, and Facebook says it’s ready to scale the project to reach more people.The company is making it easier for more mobile operators to join the project by launching an online portal where they’ll find technical tools and best practices to help them get started.So far, Facebook has been working with about a dozen operators in 17 countries to provide an app that gives people free access to a set of basic Internet services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google to decouple Google+ from some of its sites

Google is severing the ties between its social network and other of its services, so that users will not need to log in to other sites like YouTube using a Google+ account.In the coming months, people will only need a standard Google account—not a Google+ account—to do things like share content, communicate with contacts, and create a YouTube channel, the company announced Monday. YouTube will be one of the first products to adopt the change.Since launching Google+ in 2011, the company has tried to integrate it into its various other properties, partly in an aim to unify people’s identities across them. But the integrations have not always gone smoothly. Google sparked outrage from users when in 2013 the company began requiring people to hold a Google+ account to post YouTube comments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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