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GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.

This is just as useless as a porn blocker to “protect your children”. It’s much better to tell your kids all about sex, and what can go bad about it – unwanted pregnancy, HIV, etc… it’s the same here – talk to your kids instead, or they’ll end up unprepared and caught in a cult before you know it.

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Professors at Harvard Law School’s influential Berkman Center for Internet & Society consistently take positions on hotly debated business issues in support of companies like Google, which favor a free-wheeling Internet culture and less control over intellectual property, and against companies like Apple and AT&T, which—at least when it comes to hardware like the iPhone—favor closed digital systems and stricter intellectual property rights.

For example, a week after the iPad announcement last January, The Financial Times published an op-ed by Berkman Center founder and star professor Jonathan Zittrain critical of Apple, declaring: “iPhone thus remains tightly tethered to its vendor—the way that the Kindle is controlled by Amazon … Mr. Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out.”

What most readers don’t know is that the Berkman Center and many of its leading professors have financial and personal ties to Google and other tech companies—ties that are not disclosed when these academics speak or publish, and that I discovered after auditing a class with Zittrain.

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As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.

A New York Times examination of public records in the United States and Israel identified at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade. The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.

In some ways, American tax law is more lenient than Israel’s. The outposts receiving tax-deductible donations — distinct from established settlements financed by Israel’s government — are illegal under Israeli law. And a decade ago, Israel ended tax breaks for contributions to groups devoted exclusively to settlement-building in the West Bank.

Now controversy over the settlements is sharpening, and the issue is sure to be high on the agenda when President Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, meet in Washington on Tuesday.

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Web site advertisements viewed by the Dutch consume as much energy as two thousand households in the Netherlands, concludes Randy Simons of the University of Twente.

He connected a power meter on his computer and used a special program to disable the many web adverts on the internet. This way he could compare how much power is consumed when he let the ads load and how much power is consumed when he blocks them.

He concluded that on average two and a half watts per hour are consumed by web adverts. Previous research showed that all Dutch people surf 2.7 billion hours a year. By dividing those numbers he calculatedthat Web site advertisements consume as much electricity as two thousand households.

Just read that a Dutch hospital in Heerlen has invited all their cardiac out-patients to come watch the match in a room in the Hospital, close to medical care…

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As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the elders related how the previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. The troops promised the villagers full compensation, and were allowed to burn the crops; but the money never turned up. Before the planting season, the villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked the government if they could be provided with assistance to grow other crops. Promises were made; again nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the local authorities that if they again tried to burn the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up, about the same time as we were arriving at nearby Jegdalek, the villagers were waiting for them, and had called in the local Taliban to assist. In the fighting that followed, nine policemen were killed, six vehicles destroyed and ten police hostages taken.

After the jirga was over, one of the tribal elders came over and we chatted for a while over a glass of green tea. “Last month,” he said, “some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, ‘Why do you hate us?’ I replied, ‘Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.’”

What did he say to that? “He turned to his friend and said, ‘If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?’ In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this.”

The US House of Representatives voted 420 to 1 to give the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico full subpoena power.

The Senate blocked it.

No subpoena powers. No real investigation.

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The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is blocking certain websites from the federal agency’s computers, including halting access by staffers to any Internet pages that contain a "controversial opinion," according to an internal email obtained by CBS News.

The email was sent to all TSA employees from the Office of Information Technology on Friday afternoon.

It states that as of July 1, TSA employees will no longer be allowed to access five categories of websites that have been deemed "inappropriate for government access."

“In our society, you can state your views, but they have to be correct.”
– Ernie Hai, coordinator of the Singapore Government Internet Project

“Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.”
– General William Westmoreland, 1960s