Internet

A federal judge granted a motion restoring access to the Internet, for the first time in seven years, to employees in various offices at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

As part of a class-action suit filed against the Interior Department 12 years ago, American Indian plaintiffs convinced a judge that their Indian Trust accounts, which are managed by the agency, were not safe from hackers. In December 2001, Interior hustled to disconnect, and then hustled to find ways for the thousand-plus affected employees to get their jobs done in the Internet age, without the Internet.

An Oregon man lost a considerable amount of property after a prank Craigslist ad invited all comers to strip his house clean.

Imagine Robert Salisbury's shock and horror as he saw thirty strangers cheerfully carting away his prized possessions -- and, one assumes, some of his not-so-prized possessions as well. It's easy to imagine bargain-hunters helping themselves to, for example, stray soup-cans, or an aging toaster oven. To be sure, Salisbury wasn't stabbed, shot, or, as in the case of another spectacular Craigslist crime, "tased" as a result of this prank. But our stuff is much more than just stuff. MORE

Four undersea telecommunications cables were severed, causing sharp slowdowns in internet access across the Middle East and India.

For many of us the internet is like oxygen: we don't think about it until our high-speed connections fail us, at which point it is all we can think about. Pity the unfortunate Arabs and Indians who were impacted by the cut cables, particularly those working in offshore call centers and other businesses that depend on them to make a living. We've long known that this infrastructure is vulnerable, but it took real economic pain to drive the point home. The Saudis and the UAE have signed a deal on a new telecommunications cable, one that will make sabotage rather more difficult. But it's worth noting that Arab states have done a far more effective job of crippling the internet than any would-be saboteurs. A few years back, Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard Law School prepared a comprehensive review of websites banned by Saudi authorities. Though the blacklist has certainly changed since, rest assured there is still a powerful censor who is deciding what Saudis can and cannot learn about marijuana seeds and Queer Christians. 

An Afghan court sentenced journalism student Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, to death for downloading and distributing an article calling Muhammad a "killer and adulterer."

And US college students think they have it rough when caught downloading illegally.   By now, what rankles most about these calls for death sentences -- for naughty novels, misnamed teddy-bears, scandalous downloads -- is not just that they happen, but that the weird-beards of radical Islam have made them seem routine.  Is every act of violence and religious perversity capable of seeming normal through repetition?  How frightening to think that we might be subject to this inuring effect, if the same courts decided to enforce, say, the rules concerning slavery in the Koran.  To compensate for this creeping change in the terms of the argument, we defenders of heresy need to escalate our denunciations each time an atrocity like this is likely to happen.  Regrettably, the denunciations have instead become quieter and less impassioned instead.