Following complaints about police officer safety based on concerns that the policeman (policeperson?) rating site ratemycop.com (that’s Rate-My-Cop .com, get it?) posed a danger to law enforcement personnel because it outed the full roster, including names and badge numbers, of police officers at nearly 500 police departments around the country (to the tune of some 140,000 police officers), RateMyCop’s host – GoDaddy – unceremoniously and without warning pulled the plug on the site. So who is in the wrong here? To quote that famous Buffalo Springfield song, we say nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.

A few days ago we reported that a third and fourth undersea telecom Internet cable had been cut, following the initial disruptions caused by damage to two underwater cables that had been blamed on anchors dropping on the cables, plunging millions of people in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East, into Internet darkness. Now the plot thickens as a fifth undersea Internet cable outage is reported, and Iran is taken offline. Total users affected so far by the outages exceeds 80million.

As a third and then fourth submarine Internet cable are cut, further disrupting power to India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Qatar, and other Middle East countries, officials admit that the cuts to the undersea cables have not been caused by poorly dropped anchors, but deny that the cable cuts are the result of malicious activity.

Verizon Wireless is subsituting its own search engine – complete with ads which earn revenue for Verizon – even overriding their users’ own preferences – whenever a user of Verizon’s fiber optic Internet service (FiOS) mistypes a domain name. The “feature”, as Verizon refers to it, is known as Verizon’s “Advanced Web Search” (although their technical name for it, which we just love, is “DNS Assistance”).

The lawsuit against Yahoo over the jailing of two Chinese journalist whom they helped the government of China to identify has been settled, after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang met with the families of the two journalists. In a rush of pollyanic* optimism, their lawyer says “It’s no longer possible for a corporation to say ‘We were just following orders’.”

“Reach out, reach out and muzzle someone.” If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the “reach out and touch someone,” slogan that was famously used to tout bell giant AT&T. Over the years, however, ATT has apparently decided on a more heavy-handed approach. Now, according to the telecomm titan, they will suspend your AT&T high speed Internet and AT&T DSL services if you talk mean about them. So much for meaningful dialogue!

Is your ISP inserting their own ads into your browser, trying to cash in on your browsing experience? Now you can bust them, with this new way of testing it!

Do you want to stay connected via ssh to a remote computer, even when you’re idle? Whether you are on a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, don’t you just hate it when you are connected to a remote system via ssh, and you do something in another window, only to find when you return to your ssh session that you’ve been automatically disconnected by the remote system, and you have to log in all over again? Here’s how make it so that you can stay connected to the remote computer with ssh no matter how long you are idle.

Not to be left out of the Internet Ad boom (such as those ubiquitous “Ads by Google” Adsense ads), it has been discovered that ISPs are cashing in on the ad money craze by inserting ads into your browsing experience using a service called NebuAd – that is, as you are browsing from website to website, your ISP may be adding their own contextually matched ads for you to see, overlayed on top of what you are browsing, based on what you are browsing!

If your Blackberry isn’t working, you’re not alone. Neither is anybody else’s. In fact, Research in Motion (RIM) is experiencing what may be their largest network outage ever, affecting users of their (overly)popular Blackberry device around the world. Reports from the U.S., Canada, and the UK abound.

Can’t get into your Hotmail email? Not getting that expected email from a Hotmail user? That’s because the Hotmail servers are down, again.

RegisterFly has lost their accreditation to act as a domain registrar. What this means is that if you have registered domains through RegistrFly, you need to find a new domain registrar and transfer your domains to them. And ASAP, as RegisterFly has been ordered to cease registrar operations by March 31st!

Network neutrality, laws requiring dating sites to perform background checks and ISPs to rat out their users, laws banning anonymous posting, and cyber bullying legislation. Is it all part of a move towards a nanny Internet?

Microsoft joined the Internet Video sites today with its launch of Microsoft Soapbox. The new free Internet video site, offering free Internet video clips contributed by users, like YouTube and YouTube owner Google’s Google Video, hopes to capture YouTube viewers’ hearts and allegiance. On first glance, Microsoft Soapbox looks like YouTube and Google Video in the ways that you would expect. But is Microsoft Soapbox similar to YouTube enough to really be a contender? And is “similar to YouTube” enough, or does it need to be far better?

You didn’t have to be a customer of AT&T Internet to find that an ATT Internet outage disrupted your Internet communications this morning. AT&T, which also includes Pacbell (Pacific Bell) and SBC Global, accounts for a significant portion of Internet routing and traffic between Internet sites in the San Francisco Bay area, and so when parts of the ATT Internet infrastructure go down, traffic between all sorts of places on the Internet gets disrupted and falls into a black hole.