Mission Creek

from cio.com

This is the increasingly blurry line between the private use of computers at the workplace. Though the corporations are squarely in their legal rights, many people view computers and the internet as an increasingly personal extension and many will balk at this strict legal construction.

A large chunk of employers are letting staffers go for violations of computer and Web communications policies, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The news comes from the 2006 Workplace E-Mail, Instant Messaging and Blog survey from the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, according to the Journal.

The survey found that more than a quarter of the employers queried had fired an employee for violating company e-mail policy, up 9 percent from the 17 percent of employers who let employees go for similar violations in 2001, the Journal reports. On top of this finding, the survey also said that 2 percent of respondents had fired workers for instant-message correspondences that weren’t appropriate, and another 2 percent of employers said they’d fired a staffer for posting distasteful content on a Web log—or blog—be it their professional or personal page, according to the Journal.

full story here

from cnet.com

Here are 2 divergent perspectives on Net Neutrality. Of course, if you want a laugh, you can hear how Ted Stevens from Alaska describes the internet here.

WASHINGTON–Two Internet pioneers dueled on Monday over whether proposed Net neutrality regulations supported by companies like Google and Amazon.com are the best way to prevent “abusive” behavior by broadband providers.

A debate here hosted by the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research institute that brags of challenging “conservative thinking,” pitted Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, who co-developed the Internet’s backbone protocols and has emerged as a leading proponent of congressional antidiscrimination mandates for network operators, against Dave Farber, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist widely considered to be a “grandfather” of the Internet.

The pair of technologists appeared to agree on at least one thing: Network operators, in general, shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with Net users’ activities. Where they disagreed was on the role that Congress and federal regulators should play in the ongoing debate over so-called Net neutrality, the idea that network operators must generally give equal treatment to all content that travels over their pipes.

full story here