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Another close run thing this month but delighted to say that the winner of this months vote is Dan Catt with his personal but powerful post on creativity and mild depression. Well done Dan, you get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the Hall of Fame. Thanks everyone for taking part.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress can’t agree on a budget, cybersecurity, immigration, tax reform, or even how to sanction their corrupt colleagues. But, the House of Representatives unanimously opposed more United Nations control over the Internet.

“Today’s unanimous vote sends a clear and unmistakable message: the American people want to keep the Internet free from government control and prevent Russia, China and other nations from succeeding in giving the U.N. unprecedented power over Web content and infrastructure,” said, Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack, pre-empting a December meeting of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which will consider transferring control to member countries from its current “multi-stakeholder” structure of nonprofits.

While powerful countries around the globe want management over the Internet to be more egalitarian, many fear that the world isn’t ready for democratic control of the Internet. Should the ITU give all UN members equal control, “each of the 193 members gets a vote, no matter its record on fundamental rights,” explained Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, and one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Vint Cerf. As evidence against government control, he explained,

“Last June, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stated the goal of Russia and its allies as ‘establishing international control over the Internet’ through the I.T.U. And in September 2011, China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan submitted a proposal for an “International Code of Conduct for Information Security’ to the U.N. General Assembly, with the goal of establishing government-led ‘international norms and rules standardizing the behavior of countries concerning information and cyberspace.’”

On the other hand, it’s not unreasonable for countries to believe that a vital global resource shouldn’t be at the whim of a single actor (the US). But, if not the US, or a global governance organization with anti-democratic members, then who is best to protect the Internet?

Lieberman-Collins Cyber Security Act was defeated in the senate today by a vote of 52-46 — four senators shy of its requirement to move forward.

The senate bill was a response to the House’s Cyber Intelligence Security Protection Act (CISPA), which sought to give American companies more legal breathing room when collecting and sharing consumer/user data in the scope of Internet security threats. The Republican-led House passed CISPA back in April, despite lots of backlash from Internet users, special interest groups, and even rumblings of a presidential veto. Critics said CISPA sacrificed a person’s privacy rights, and had the potential to censor free speech without public knowledge — among other things.

The Cyber Security Act, by contrast, wanted to address all of these problems through various amendments, in part by requiring authorities to obtain a warrant for personal online data when charging them with a crime. There were more than 200 amendments filed to change the bill, which invited lots of debate on both sides of the aisle.

The senate bill, which was led by senate democrats, also put much more emphasis on protecting the country’s financial system and electric grid from malicious activity by hackers, and included amendments to other privacy laws that are vague regarding online activity. Republicans said the bill raised too many questions to gain approval.

The failed vote means congress won’t address the issue of cybersecurity until at least 2013, according to The Hill.

Photo via Frank Jr /Shutterstock

Filed under: media, security

It’s easy to find a smartphone running app, but it’s a lot harder to find a good one. With so many options it’s difficult to figure out which one is going to work best for you. We asked you last week which running apps you thought were best. Then, we tallied up your nominations and took a look at the top five smartphone running apps, and put them to a vote. Now, we’re back to highlight the winner. More »

We’ve seen online translation services and we’ve seen language-learning programs over the years, but not until Duolingo had we seen a venture that marries the two. Sure enough, Pennsylvania-based Duolingo is a site that lets consumers learn a new language for free while helping to translate the web.

A native English speaker interested in learning Spanish, for example, can begin by signing up with Duolingo. The site then gives the user single sentences to translate at a level that’s simple enough for a beginner. Users can always request possible translations for words they can’t figure out, and Duolingo helps them learn and memorize those words afterwards through educational examples. They can also see how others translated the same sentence and vote on the quality of other students’ translations. As they gain proficiency over time, the sentences they get become more complicated. Content owners, meanwhile, can upload materials they own for translation on Duolingo; currently that service is free, but there may eventually be a charge for speed and accuracy. Current supported languages include German, Spanish, French and English. The video below explains the premise in more detail:

Duolingo is committed to remaining free and ad-free for users, it says, and a mobile version is coming soon. Web-minded entrepreneurs: one to partner with or emulate in your part of the world?

Website: www.duolingo.com
Contact: biglou@cs.cmu.edu

Spotted by: Murtaza Patel

Putting aside the issue of Apple allowing other browsers to bring their own engines to the table in iOS, there’s more to a great browser than just its engine, and there are plenty of great browsers for the iPhone and iPad. Deciding which one is the best for you is a matter of taste, but we asked you last week which ones you thought were the best. Then we tallied your nominations and took a look at the top five iOS web browsers and put them to a vote. Now we’re back to highlight the winner. More »

Google’s Matt Cutts announced just yesterday that webmasters can now download their newest inbound links by date in their free analysis tool, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). If you’re running a website and not using GWT, I’ll offer these strong words: you’re probably doing it wrong. In addition to providing a list of who’s linking to you, it also tells you when things are broken around your site, so strongly consider implementing it soon.

When you log into GWT, you get Google’s typically minimalist interface. Find your way to the Traffic section, then Links to Your Site, then hit the Download Latest Data button:

Congratulations! You’ve got link data. You can now open the resulting spreadsheet either in Google Docs format or a CSV if you want to examine your links offline. What do you get when you look inside? A really useful list of places that you’re getting links from, by date:

You can then go back to each of those links and have a look around, maybe leave a comment, or at least check out the people linking to you. Useful, right?

But wait, there’s more! /billymays

If you’ve read my post on moving averages, then you know what’s coming next. Take those dates, subtotal their counts, and make 7, 14, and 30 day moving averages. Remember what a link is in Google’s parlance: it’s a vote for your site. It’s a vote for your content being worth sharing. Now you can start to track the trends in this kind of voting:

My “voting” record for this quarter is on the rise – the blue line (7 day) is consistently above the red, which is consistently above the green. Things are moving in the right direction, and my content is doing well in terms of the number of people linking to it. Conversely, if the lines were in reverse order headed downwards, my site would be in trouble and it’d be a good indicator that my content was unappealing, not worth linking to.

Try this set of techniques out and see what it says about who’s linking to your site!

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Facebook users may use the social network for chatting and sharing, but soon they’ll be using it to register to vote as well.

The state of Washington will be the first to offer residents the ability to register t0 vote via Facebook, a move the state hopes will attract more young voters.

Washington tapped local business Microsoft to create the MyVote app, which could appear as early as next week, as ArsTechnica reports.

Facebook has become a popular target for political activity as of late. Earlier this month CNN announced a partnership with the social network to bring more political chatter to users’ news feeds. As with the Washington initiative, the move targeted the younger, more tech-savvy voters who represent an increasing part of the voting population.

Washington is one of only thirteen states that offers online voter registration, which it introduced in 2008. According to data given to the National Journal 475,000 registrations have been processed via the online system, and from 2010 to 2011 62 percent of those newly registered voters were under the age of 34.

Facebook voter registration is likely to improve these numbers. This means more young voters, who, if  trends hold, are likely to vote for a Democratic candidate. That’s good news for the state’s Democrats, but not current Washington Governor Christine Gregorie: The two-term governor is not running for reelection this year.

If Washington’s efforts are successful, you can expect to see many more states offering similar initiatives over the next few years.

Photo:Shutterstock

Filed under: VentureBeat

OMG and amazeballs! HarperCollins is accepting social media and pop culture words for inclusion in the Collins English Dictionary, which has already welcomed LOL and other Internet-inspired gems to the fold. Starting July 17, you’ll have six weeks to cast your vote on the website or on Twitter under the hashtag #WhatsYourWord.

Whereas sites like Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary harness the wisdom of the crowds to keep an up-to-the-minute record of searchable vocabulary words, the Collins Dictionary maintains its integrity through a rigorous editorial process. By allowing Internet users to pitch words to the editors, said HarperCollins head of digital Alex Brown, “We’re opening up that editorial process” while “staying true to what our business is about.”

Brown added that during the selection process, Collins editors pass “no aesthetic judgment” on the word itself — theirs is a “research-based approach.” Sifting through a database of books, newspapers, Internet articles, and spoken word recordings, the researchers look for each word’s frequency of use, length of time in circulation, and whether it is broadly used or part of a niche subject domain. The job “requires linguistic knowledge,” he said, like whether a word is a noun or a verb, and how it should be pronounced.

HarperCollins has already tested the process in the UK, where reality TV shows and regional politics similarly influence vocabulary across the pond. So far, they’ve come up with words like “phubbing,” the act of snubbing your friends by “looking at your phone instead paying attention.” Also in the running is “dolphinicity,” or “the warm feeling of happiness and love for all, that overcomes humans when in the proximity of wild dolphins.”

To help the contest go viral, the publishers will invite celebrities, who are often responsible for coining new slang terms, to claim and promote their own words.

Participants can also get credit for submitting a word first.  You can log in through Facebook, Twitter, or email to submit your word and its definition, and then share the link with your friends. If the word makes it into the dictionary, so does your handle.

Said Brown, the idea is “to make it accessible and to help people get behind words they really love.”

Image by EDHAR via Shutterstock.

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