Still allowed. (Photo: Hashgram/ObeyTheRussian)

Eric Schmidt left Russia off his world censorship tour for a reason. Until now, the government has kept Internet freedom largely in tact. But it's about to get a lot stricter as Russia has begun to selectively block content online that is potentially harmful to children, reports the New York Times.

The Orwellian-sounding Federal Supervision Agency has been cracking down on “objectionable” material (i.e. child porn, content discussing drug use and suicide) spreading on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The law was passed last November but has only been enforced in the past few weeks. The Russian government insisted the laws are to protect the kids and not to stifle controversial issues, like political dissent, the Times said:

The child protection law, they say, builds a system for government officials to demand that companies selectively block individual postings, so that contentious material can be removed without resorting to a countrywide ban on, for example, Facebook or YouTube, which would reflect poorly on Russia's image abroad and anger Internet users at home.

So far, YouTube is the only website to voice a complaint. The Google-owned site filed a lawsuit in February disputing a claim from Russian officials that a video showing how to make a fake wound using a razor blade was for entertainment purposes. Facebook also found itself in the crosshairs of the law last Friday as it was forced to take down a page about suicide.

Teenagers aren't entirely without online freedom, however. Judging by Instagram, selfies are still permitted.

(Photo: Maximum PC)

When not pissing off the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Time Warner Cable execs apparently take to their evil lair to devise new schemes to wring every last penny out of their hapless customers. The latest pocket gouger? A monthly modem fee.

The New York Times reports that Time Warner is planning to charge a monthly fee of $3.95 to rent a modem from them. If you want to avoid paying the monthly fee, you can purchase a Time Warner-approved modem for $50-$137. Time Warner will then promise to set the modem up during the Harvest Moon but then not show up until the spring thaw.

The Times predicts that many users won't want to opt to change their plan and purchase their own modem, so the move could be a major cash cow for a company that has fewer Yelp stars than cannibal murderer Jeffrey Dahmer.

To be fair, many Internet companies (like Comcast) charge a modem rental fee, but other Internet companies did not have the gall to offend Sir Patrick Stewart. Might we suggest seeing if your building is eligible for Verizon Fios?

(Photo: Shutterstock)

These days, newspapers will seemingly stop at nothing to boost their bottom line. Those Weekender ads are notoriously obnoxious, and we're getting awfully tired of deleting the identification key at the end of a New York Times URL to get around the paywall. But the Wall Street Journal has finally devised a marketing scheme that we can get behind: instituting free wifi throughout our fine city (oh, and in San Francisco).

According to PaidContent, the Journal plans to blanket 70 percent of Manhattan, as well as a chunk of three other boroughs and two neighborhoods in San Francisco, with thousands of free Wifi hotspots. The paper hopes that by providing free Internet to the city's always-on citizens, they'll increase brand recognition and hopefully nab more subscriptions.

PaidContent also notes:

The paper will also garner valuable customer data since non-subscribers must register to access the WiFi. Existing subscribers can simply log-in using their accounts; this too promises to deliver a trove of marketing data about the places that Journal readers frequent.

The Wifi will reportedly be available "through September." Afterwards, you'll probably be stuck fighting for a seat at Starbucks again.

(ITU.int)

The U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) announced Wednesday that it's inviting everyone on the Internet to put down the cat videos, pause the tweeting and discuss the future of the Internet. According to the Associated Press this "follows criticism from civil society groups who say preparations for an upcoming global conference have been shrouded in secrecy."

The grandly-named World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) will take place December 3-14 this year in Dubai. Criticism of the conference has focused on secretive talks between diplomats in preparation for the event, in which they are allegedly hashing out issues that regularly strike fear in the heart of the Internet such as "enhanced" government spying and new methods of billing for Internet service.

The A.P. article reports the criticism and the U.N.'s attempt at transparency in a muted way, but if you want a sense of how intense the focus on this Conference really is you need only check out WCITleaks.org, which was reportedly set up by George Mason University researcher Jerry Brito after the ITU began password-protecting websites in order to control access to information.

Anonymous, naturally, has been concerned about WCIT for a while. A Pastebin drop set to expire on September 1 discusses those concerns in some depth and states that an "international, centralized organization such as the ITU has no business regulating the internet" and that the ITU "must not expand any regulatory authority, even one that would be voluntary and nonbinding for 'member nations,' relating to the internet."

It's almost like we can hear thousands of Guy Fawkes masks snapping into place.

Not all clouds are security threats. (flickr.com/kky)

I exercised a lot on my trip to Mexico so I totally crashed when I got home.

Oops, now the government is spying on Betabeat--at least according to this list of words the Department of Homeland Security uses to monitor social media, which was reportedly obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center under the Freedom of Information Act.

The majority of the words make sense within a security context: if you're tweeting about "dirty bombs," you're probably pretty sketchy. But some of the choices are just plain random and way too generalized to excuse the government's oddly Orwellian defense strategy: "Pork," "response," "incident," "cloud," "wave," "power" and "smart" all make the list, the full version of which you can read here.

Are you there, government? It's us, Betabeat. We're just trying to report on tech news, okay? No harm intended.

Misty, water-colored memories. (via geekosystem)

Sometime in the mid-nineties, my dad got an AOL account. Roughly two seconds after that, I fell down the rabbit hole of anonymous chat rooms and never quite got out--that is when I wasn't getting the deadly, dreaded dial-up busy signal. AOL charged by the hour back then. Until the service switched to a flat monthly rate in October, 1996, the clock was always ticking, forcing you to make the Sophie's Choice of where to spend your time online.

Now it seems the industry is heading back in that direction. Not by-the-hour, mind you, but a usage-based pricing model that would prompt viewers to consider whether, say, spending the weekend watching Friday Night Lights on Netflix is really worth it. (Answer: Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.)

Last week, Comcast began testing a usage-based pricing model and at the cable industry trade show in Boston yesterday, Julius Genachowski, chairman of Federal Communications Commission expressed support for the notion.

Mr. Genachowski said tiered pricing, will "increase consumer choice and competition" and yield in "lower prices for people who consume less broadband." Although, as  Electronista notes, "he did not clarify what mechanism would drive prices down."

Public interest groups have decried the potential impact broadband data caps will have on the market and innovation, not to mention the biases baked in the plans. Comcast, for example, counts Netflix video into its data plan, but lets its own XFinity service stream away.

As the Washington Post reports, Mr. Genachowski "didn't appear to feel the same outrage," as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings over it.

“Business model innovation is very important,” Genachowski said. “There was a point of view a couple years ago that there was only one permissible pricing model for broadband. I didn’t agree.”

For our feature in this week's paper about Aereo, the startup that lets you live-stream broadcast TV, Betabeat discussed broadband data caps with IAC chairman and Aereo investor Barry Diller. (Mr. Genachowski served in senior executive positions at IAC for eight years under Mr. Diller.)

Mr. Diller, who recently testified before Congress in favor of net neutrality, reiterated his support for usage-based pricing.

"I’m a big proselytizer for net neutrality," Mr. Diller told Betabeat earlier this week. "We have the miracle of the Internet where you can press a button to send and essentially publish to the world, without anybody between you sending that publishing and anyone who receives it. That really is a miracle of communications and it’s worth protecting."

However, he clarified, "That should not be confused with my belief that anyone who sells bandwidth should be able to sell it on a usage basis, just like electricity and I think that is absolutely appropriate and I’ve advocated that for a long time."

Senator O'Mara (nysenate.gov)

This should go over well with our tech-obsessed mayor. A piece of legislation proposed in both New York state houses seeks to ban anonymous commenting from New York-based websites.

As a person who writes on the Internet, this sounds amazing! How about a name to go with that thoughtless feedback, Mr. Not So Nice Guy? Of course, as a proponent of the First Amendment, we would like to tell Senator Thomas O'Mara where he can put this bill. Anonymously, of course.

According to Wired:

Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”

We maintain that one of you anonymous rapscallions must have really hurt Senator O'Mara's feelings. Feel free to offer your condolences to him in the comments.

Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast (uphs.upenn.edu)

Do you spend a lot of time on the Internet? Yeah, us either. Haha, kidding, we are literally never not on the Internet. This reporter sleeps with her phone beside her pillow, and only shuts her Macbook when that screen glare-induced headache starts to set in. We stream and download music and videos and read tons and tons of news stories. The only reason we're not broke is because our Verizon mobile unlimited data plan was grandfathered in. All of this is is why the news that Comcast will begin testing charging for Internet based on how much you use it is kind of the worse.

Writes the New York Times:

Steering its broadband Internet access business away from a one-size-fits-all model, Comcast said Thursday that it would test sales of Internet service based on use, with potentially higher costs for customers who use the most. The tests will start taking place in unspecified Comcast markets in the next several months, the company said. The approach could be rolled out later in Comcast’s other markets.

The good news, however, is that the company has increased its 250GB monthly data cap to 300GB. According to the Consumerist, "those who go over that [300GB] limit won't be throttled — as Comcast currently does to cap-busters — but will instead be hit with fees for additional blocks of GB."

Comcast didn't release details about how much each tier will cost--hopefully it will actually make the cost of Internet slightly cheaper, unless you're running a server farm or something. We'll see, though.

Thankfully, we use Fios--there's a reason Consumerist ranked Comcast as 2010's Worst Company in America.

(freenetworkfoundation.org)

This is a guest post from Cole Stryker, a writer and publicist working in New York. It is an excerpt from his book, "Identity Wars: Online Anonymity, Privacy and Control," which is slated for a September release from Overlook Press.

On March 27, 2012 I had the opportunity to attend a private screening of a mini-documentary called "Free the Network," produced by Vice's tech site, Motherboard.tv. The documentary opens at Occupy Wall Street, first depicted as a wacky, disparate band of activists which developed a curious techno-centric bent with the arrival of Anonymous, along with a more or less disorganized faction of hackers who wished to bring about social revolution through technology. The film centers on one of them, a 21-year old college dropout named Isaac Wilder, the executive director of the Free Network Foundation.

Mr. Wilder builds communications systems based around Freedom Towers, DIY kits that fit in a suitcase containing everything one would need to set up an ad hoc peer to peer network. The instructions are simple: "Plug it in. Press the big green button." It creates a local network that stays up no matter what happens to the wider global Internet. All of this is mostly funded through private donations from family, friends, and fellow revolutionaries. Mr. Wilder estimates that the equipment required to assemble a Freedom Tower would have cost over $10,000 as recent as five years ago. Today: $2,000. And it's completely grid-independent. That means solar powered batteries, a DC power system, a server, a router and a suite of powerful software, all contained in a suitcase.

The idea is to build a mesh network, where all computers are nodes that act as transmitters to other computers, in order to decentralize the Internet and remove it from the control of governments and corporations. Mr. Wilder argues that if we are ever going to achieve global revolution, we must wrest control of the pipes from multinational telecom companies who would censor or monitor the communication of social revolutionaries.

(freenetworkfoundation.org)

The documentary depicts the aftermath of a police raid at Zucotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, specifically rows of laptops that had been smashed in by cops, presumably. Several contributors to the documentary speculate that the destruction indicates the establishment is trying to keep the message down. Maybe the cops are just sick of putting up with a bunch of grungy hippies and this was a method of discouragement rather than an outright conspiracy to destroy information. Either way, it's a dark, dark image, one that makes me immediately sympathize with the need to create information networks that can't be smashed in, let alone censored.

I caught up with Mr. Wilder a few days after the screening and asked him where his passion for free networks comes from.

I went to Cuba. In the summer after my freshman year of college with three of my best friends. I really didn't like it at all. The police state. That people didn't have access to information. It just really got to me. I wrote a science fiction novel about building a free network. I love writing, but realized this would actually be better as science fact than science fiction.

He went back to school and connected with an  adviser who pointed him in the direction of the FreedomBox Project, which lit a fire in him.

I mean, I'd already deleted my Facebook. I was already a Computer Science/Philosophy double major. But I spent one more year in school and then I left to start the foundation.

The FreedomBox is a small device that fits in the palm of your hands. It is a small, Linux-powered computer that plugs directly into a wall with built-in privacy-protected email and chat, and a publishing platform for activists living under tyranny. It's a work in progress, and the team is currently soliciting software packages that will make an ideal FreedomBox. The project is ambitious, aiming to bring about the collapse of nothing less than China's "Great Firewall. "

Mr. Wilder says that he'd like to see a burgeoning microwave network in Kansas city, his base of operations, and hopefully, some action in New York and California by the end of 2012. He's quick to reiterate that the technology he wants to see in place is already here.

[This technology] exists already, all over the world. Athens, Berlin, Spain, Kabul, Nairobi. There are huge microwave networks that do what we're talking about doing. It's not just for the developing world. It's not just cheaper. That it's cheaper means we can do it together. These are hacker collectives providing internet access to people who can't get it any other way because the infrastructure isn't there.

He rattles off a laundry list of hacker projects, citing "unbelievable pioneering work" happening across the globe at the hands of hacker collectives.

Mr. Wilder hopes that within five years, a dozen metropolitan areas in the U.S. will have cooperative networks and the beginnings of distributed Wide Area Networks. He says that satellites are a possibility, but he thinks that they're not the most attractive option due to visibility and tracking problems, as well as high latency. He's more interested in near-space platforms at 100,000 feet. These consist of dirigibles, fancy balloons that would float somewhere between Kansas City and Chicago, for instance, connecting the two citywide networks. He says the Air Force and oil companies have been using these for years.

This can be a commons. We did it at a small scale at Liberty Park. Next we'll do it for a thousand people. Then for a few hundred thousand people. And ultimately humanity. We'll have a network that we share and operate together for our mutual benefit. I think it'll happen peacefully because the desire for it will be so overwhelming that there will be no way to stop it. This seems like the best way to counter late capitalist hegemony.

The Free Network Foundation isn't interested in pushing for increased government regulation of the Internet. They don't seem to trust the White House any more than they trust AT&T. And so, they rage against the machine by building a new one.

It's all part of the five-year plan hatched with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City of New York which will eventually bring free wireless internet access to 26 locations in 20 parks in the five boroughs. Other locations are expected to come online over the next several months, according to a press release.

Hat tip to Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe for bringing back 90s web slang. “Park visitors will now have more options to surf the net while enjoying the great outdoors of New York City’s open spaces,” he said in a press release.

It's the park-wide net, folks! It's like 70 degrees out! Surf's up!

AT&T says it serves "nearly 27,000 AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots at popular restaurants, hotels, bookstores and retailers, including more than 515 hotspot locations in the New York metro area." The company of course serves the other city-wide free wi-fi, available at a snail's pace for the cost of a latte at Starbucks.