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Wed Jan 18, 2012 at 05:42:52 PM EST
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As Blue Jersey readers who came to our site today have seen, we made the decision to "go dark" as part of a massive online protest against two Bills that would do great damage to internet freedom by allowing the Government to censor and block web sites that corporations don't like. The two bills are as follows:
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) is on the surface a bill that attempts to curb online piracy. Sadly, the proposed way it goes about doing this would devastate the online economy and the overall freedom of the web. It would particularly affect sites with heavy user generated content. Sites like Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, and others may cease to exist in their current form if this bill is passed.
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Wed Aug 17, 2011 at 03:17:26 PM EDT
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FYI - No member of the New Jersey congressional delegation has signed onto this, which is a good thing. Promoted by Rosi
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie may have a pro-corporate attitude and can care less for our First Amendment rights, but it is important that residents of the Garden State fight back. We need to rally our own New Jersey lawmakers to stand up against this bill that takes away our privacy and hides behind an untrue title.
"A direct assault on Internet users" is what the ACLU is calling it. Just before the break a House committee approved HR 1981, a broad new Internet snooping bill. They want to force Internet service providers to keep track of and retain their customers' information -- including your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses. All residents with Internet access living in New Jersey will have their private information exposed for scrutiny from the government.
They've shamelessly titled it the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act," but our staunchest allies in Congress are calling it what it is: an all-encompassing Internet snooping bill. ISPs would collect and retain your data whether or not you're accused of a crime.
According to CNET, the "mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well."
You don't have to be a pedophile or a criminal to be targeted; even your divorce case is valid enough for the ISPs to hand over any searches, emails, and activities you've done on the Internet.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill said, "'It represents a data bank of every digital act by every American' that would 'let us find out where every single American visited Web sites."
Click this link to join the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, and 25 other civil liberties and privacy groups in urging Congress to reject this mess of a bill.
And you can watch our new video about the Internet Snooping Bill here.
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Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 09:00:00 PM EDT
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No - not our Blue Jersey, but rather New Jersey's men and women in blue who work in our police agencies across the state.
Agencies from the State Police to local Police Departments are using the Internet as a tool to facilitate communications with the citizens they serve. But, as with most advances in the exploitation of new technologies, there are both upsides and downsides in how these new tools are used.
According to Captain Frank Locantore of the Evesham Police Department, the Internet is a valuable tool for reaching out to the community whose only other contact with the police has traditionally been motor vehicle stops or investigations of burglaries. Other than that, he pointed out, most people are unaware of the workload or types of incidents handled by their police agency.
Continue reading below.
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Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 03:49:19 PM EDT
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What will New Jersey do after newspapers? I don't know the answer but I ran across this prediction today:
At a recent conference, The New York Times' publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., stated that he eventually expects the "Gray Lady" will no longer be a physical newspaper.
"We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD," he said to attendees of the International Newsroom Summit.
I believe New Jersey is especially dependent on newspapers because TV and radio are dominated by our neighboring cities of New York and Philadelphia. Now, electronic vs. paper doesn't really matter to me as a reader, but it sure matters to the newspaper industry. The Newsosaur blog tells us the situation continues to be disastrous:
Newspaper advertising revenues are on track this year to dive to a 25-year low of approximately $26.5 billion, or 47% of the record $49.4 billon in sales achieved by the industry as recently as 2005...
The only bright spot for publishers in the last five years is that online advertising has climbed 54.3% to $1.5 billion in the first half of 2010 from $955 million in 2005.
Unfortunately, this category represented only 11.8% of total newspaper revenues in the first half of 2010 and its growth has done nothing to offset the prodigious declines in all the other advertising verticals.
I'm not really a reporter and I'm certainly no businessman but obviously $1.5 billion in online revenue is nothing like a replacement for $48 billion in print ads.
Is the future joint TV-newspaper enterprises? The problem is that the experiments so far haven't worked, and it doesn't do us any good in New Jersey anyway since the NY/Philly stations don't care about us. Meanwhile, Newsosaur also points us to how internet groups doom publisher paywalls even for local news.
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Mon Jun 14, 2010 at 12:30:31 PM EDT
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Here's Net Neutrality position John Adler ran on -- and is still running on:
Net Neutrality
Currently, most residents in New Jersey's 3rd Congressional district have access to only one or two Internet Broadband Providers. This relative lack of choice raises the possibility that Broadband Providers can slap a toll on content (what gets sent on the Net) and service (how fast.) This would lead to a multi-tiered Network where some Websites enjoy premium access speeds to their customers. Websites that are unwilling or unable to pay the toll would be relegated to the proverbial "slow lane."
John Adler believes that this inequitable arrangement would threaten the dynamism on the Internet. John strongly supports Network Neutrality and the innovation and openness that stem from it. In fact, a primary reason the Internet and the World Wide Web have proven so dynamic is the inherent openness and egalitarianism of the Network.
John Adler believes that only by preserving Network Neutrality; ensuring a diversity of media ownership; and bridging the Digital Divide will the Internet thrive as a hub of innovation and free speech in NJ-3 and beyond.
Too bad that's just an election position. John Adler recently signed an industry-backed letter that takes the opposite side, and seeks to block the FCC's attempt to implement (I would say restore) net neutrality. He's one of 74 House Democrats to do so. You can read about the FCC approach here :
...the key part is that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's staff has been briefing FCC commissioners on changes that will be made to the regulation of Internet lines. The companies in charge of such lines, such as phone and cable companies, have been arguing that new regulations would hurt their businesses. They fear that they may have to open these lines to competitors (God forbid!) or be forced to have rate limits (the horror!). According to the WSJ report, the FCC officials are saying that won't be the case, and instead will mainly be concerned with ensuring net neutrality.
Albio Sires was the only other New Jersey Democrat to sign on to the letter, which is a pretty good hint how bad it is. It's not difficult to guess that they are motivated by money.
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Wed Jan 20, 2010 at 11:37:20 AM EST
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New Jersey's future hangs in the balance as a controversial experiment looms, and no I'm not talking about the new Christie Administration or the federal health care bill. I'm talking about New Jersey journalism, which has faces the collapse of newspapers. We're uniquely dependent on our newspapers, because our TV and radio stations are based in other states and frankly don't care about us at all.
As everyone should know, the newspaper business is really an advertising business, and the economic collapse, competition from online ads, and the loss of readers to the internet have crushed the poorly run, debt-ridden publishers. Your subscriptions to the newspapers (if you still have one) really pay for the physical printing of the paper, it's the ads that bring in the money. Blogger Newsosaur recently posted an analysis of how long papers can continue printing and there are scenarios where the death of physical papers is only a decade away. Even an internet triumpalist like me has to worry who will report on New Jersey news when very few people if any can make a living at it.
We've discussed before that newspaper publishers had a big meeting last year where they plotted to charge their internet readers. You've probably noticed, though, that no one followed through in our area. That's changing soon as the New York Times says it will begin charging in 2011:
Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper's print edition will receive full access to the site.
We'll see what happens. If you think this is obviously a good decision, I direct you to this study of how it's worked out elsewhere:
A puny 2.4% of print subscribers is the average number of people paying for online content at the handful of daily newspapers that have been bold enough to erect pay walls, according to a new survey.
If you lose more in web advertising than you gain in subscriptions, it's hard to see what publishers have gained. But the sad reality is that web ads don't bring in enough to run newspapers as we have known them. New Jersey needs someone to solve the problem, so I'll be watching the Times experiment with great interest.
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Mon May 18, 2009 at 03:01:33 PM EDT
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Just last night I was talking to someone who works for the New York Times and he was saying he thinks newspapers have to move to paid Internet content. I'm skeptical, especially since the New York Observer quotes the NYT executive editor:
He said the site presently makes "a lot, a lot of money" from digital advertising-though he wouldn't specify how much-and that executives at the paper believe it is "substantially more" than The Wall Street Journal currently makes on a subscription-based pay model.
Obviously that's why the previous NYT effort failed, they make more without charging readers. Sadly, that is still not anywhere near as much as they used to make from print advertising. Here's the latest from the Wall Street Journal on our Star-Ledger:
Sunday circulation, often seen as the best indicator of a newspaper's health, fell faster than it did during the week. The Houston Chronicle's Sunday circulation declined 15.7%, followed by the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., and the Philadelphia Inquirer, where Sunday circulation declined 14.7% and 13.8%, respectively.
The article also notes weekday declines for the New York Times, New York Daily News, and the New York Post.
On the other hand, Editor and Publisher says nj.com (i.e., the Star-Ledger) has an online increase of 106% from last year. It had a unique audience of 2.6 million in April. That's pretty good news.
I actually think atrios is right that an alliance with local TV may be the future. The problem is that that solution doesn't work for New Jersey because we don't have our own TV stations and the Philly/New York stations are horrible at covering New Jersey.
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Mon Nov 24, 2008 at 02:00:56 AM EST
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Congratulations go out to John Farmer, who has been named as the new editorial page editor at the Star-Ledger. I've read Farmer's columns as long as I've been in Jersey, and I generally like the writing, even when I disagree with the thrust of it. I really don't like the thrust of his Q&A session with Kelly Heyboer.
Particularly, I don't like this answer to whether or not the newspaper industry can remain relevant: Well, I hope they're very wrong. I think a very strong case can be made for newspapers and the public need of them. The problem with information on the internet is that it is unvetted, unedited, it's raw data in half the cases. As it was described by one executive, it can be "a cesspool."
The difference is, what appears in newspapers, in both the news and editorial sections, has been researched, carefully edited, usually through more than one hand. It's dicey proposition and with all of that we still make mistakes. But we're a hell of a lot better than the internet.
Yeah, so much better than half of the newsroom just got cutback. And, as for that "carefully edited" line - care to explain the rash of verified plagiarism at the New York Times?
More than anything, the quote illustrates that Farmer doesn't understand the internet at all. Make the jump, please.
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Wed Jul 09, 2008 at 12:08:36 PM EDT
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Promoted from the diaries - with a week to go til Netroots Nation it's looking like New Jersey won't have any candidates in attendance, which makes me sad - a real missed opportunity. But, it's good to see John Adler reaching out to the netroots and recognizing the importance of net neutrality. That makes me happy. - JG
Senator John Adler is running for Congress in NJ-3 I want to ensure the free exchange of information and ideas via the Open Internet. That's why I will work to preserve Network Neutrality if I'm elected to Congress. Since this link just went live, it seemed appropriate to give New Jersey's Netroots community the first peek.
From my campaign website: Currently, most residents in New Jersey's 3rd Congressional district have access to only one or two Internet Broadband Providers. This relative lack of choice raises the possibility that Broadband Providers can slap a toll on content (what gets sent on the Net) and service (how fast.) This would lead to a multi-tiered Network where some Websites enjoy premium access speeds to their customers. Websites that are unwilling or unable to pay the toll would be relegated to the proverbial "slow lane."
John Adler believes that this inequitable arrangement would threaten the dynamism on the Internet. John strongly supports Network Neutrality and the innovation and openness that stem from it. In fact, a primary reason the Internet and the World Wide Web have proven so dynamic is the inherent openness and egalitarianism of the Network.
John Adler believes that only by preserving Network Neutrality; ensuring a diversity of media ownership; and bridging the Digital Divide will the Internet thrive as a hub of innovation and free speech in NJ-3 and beyond.
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Thu May 31, 2007 at 10:52:17 PM EDT
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Cross-Posted from ShapTalk.com:
In an October 25, 2006 Internet broadcast following the New Jersey Supreme Court?s decision to allow gay couples to enter into civil unions, Hal Turner, former Congressional candidate for the 13th Congressional District, told his audience: "I fully expect now that I gave out the home addresses and phone numbers of the New Jersey Supreme Court that I will have the New Jersey State Police here tomorrow again. Well, I'm not going to shut up. I am not going to stop putting these ideas in people's heads because violence solves everything. And if some very angry people were to go down to some of those judges' houses and tune them up, oh sure, they might get thrown in jail, but that would send a shockwave to the rest of those (expletive) in black robes that they can be gotten to." Mr. Turner did not stop there. He later mused that in the time it would take to have the police respond to a violent attack. ?How many times you think you can bash someone in the head with a sledgehammer in two or three minutes?? he asked.
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Fri May 12, 2006 at 06:56:16 AM EDT
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(I approved the ad because it's important to have this dialog. This fake grassroots-looking site is the work of Ed Whitacre (CEO of AT&T), the person paying Mike McCurry and the rest of the gang trying to wreck the internet. Due to pressure from the big telcos, the FCC changed long-standing net neutrality principles 9 months ago, with a 12 month moratorium on implementation of the rules. If the people running this ad get what they want, in 3 months, the internet as we know it is over. But don't take my word for it - Ask a Ninja explains it much better. And for more information on this ad campaign, read this. - promoted by jmelli)
Take a look at the ad on the bottom right of this page. It was probably conceived by telecom lobbyist/ pretend activist Mike McCurry. (McCurry is a former press secretary for Bill Clinton.)
What if back in the early 20th century, paving and construction companies were given control of the roads instead of the government? The argument was that we had roads because of them and that they won't be able to develop improvements like traffic lights if we don't give them "freedom"? They said, "why should trucking and bus companies get to make a profit from our roads?" The trucking and bus companies fought this and the paving and construction companies would say, "this is unfair, why should the shipping industry make money from our roads."
They would have paid off a formerly respected political operative to form a lobbying firm "Hands Off Our Roads"
PS If you want to help me make an ad for this website defending government preservation of internet freedom email me at jennypenny at crumiller dot com.
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