The Bo Alert Newsletter                                                       Net Neutrality and You 

 Net Neutrality; know what it is?

How it affects you?

Well, hang on to your hats, or whatever hair covering you have on right now, this is going to be a bumpy ride. 

A little history from BLCOW.

From day one our site has never pushed any political agenda. We have always tried to be neutral in this area except when we see something that just has to be discussed. We even pulled our information on the Patriot Act (This link goes directly to the Department of Justice Website the D.O.J.) when it came up for review in Congress. It is no coincidence that our favorite founding father is Benjamin Franklin. You no doubt have noticed one of his sayings on our Index or front page. In the event that you have never seen our front page, lets review. Franklin said, 

This is only one of his famous sayings, there are a ton of others. If you want to learn more of my favorite Founding Father, just Google him and find more treasures you were not aware of. As one of those who, quite literally, “Risked his life, liberty and his sacred Horner for the cause of liberty.”, Franklin knew the cost of freedom and treasured it more then life itself. At the age of 60, considering that the average life expectancy was about 35 years Franklin would have been considered ancient, he went to Paris France to secure, for the newly formed government of 13 independent countries (Most of the colonists knew more of what went on in Great Brittan then they did about their neighbors and very few, if any, thought of themselves as one nation. That would come slowly.) money, and an army and navy for its protection. Franklin would be turning over in his grave if he knew what the Federal Government wanted to do. Oddly enough, he would have relished the internet and would have been among the very first to figure out how to make money from it.

Net Neutrality and the Patriot Act in a nutshell 

We use the example of Franklin for a very good reason, among his many accomplishments was the founding of the public library. Hang on, I’ll get to it directly. Franklin knew the value of free speech and free access to data of all types. One of the lesser known features of the Patriot Act is the call for the investigating bodies of the government the ability to demand, from the countries libraries, information on what and who is checking out what information from the nations libraries without getting a warrant to do so or any oversight what so ever. In essence, what you are reading and what you are doing in your own library, no matter how innocent it might be and without proper cause can, and no doubt is being placed into a national justice database. An important freedom has been negated at a stroke in the name of national security. Franklin, as did the other founding fathers, knew the value of a system of checks and balances. No one branch of government could become more powerful then another. 

Basically Net Neutrality is an idea that was the internet from its earliest conception to the present. Principally your service provider is connected via some form of line. The line is owned by certain providers like AT&T, Verison and Time Warner just to name a few. They provide the means for you to get to the internet but have always been prohibited from halting any content. They serve as the highway but the information flowing over their lines cannot be controlled by them. The baby bells want this to stop. For instance just a little while ago AOL/Time Warner lost a court case when it tried to stop some information which was critical to AOL. The court ruled that AOL could not restrict the free flow of information even though it owned the service which transported the criticisms. This is the way it is supposed to work. The baby bells want to stop that and force folks to pay a duty to be connected with any of the broadband connections. They also reserve the right to restrict any information they deem as unsuitable for their ends. This puts far to much power in the hands of a few greedy individuals.

Think of it like a pipeline. The various companies can use the pipeline, but all are prohibited from restricting any of the content. This means that you can get content from our site free of charge and the various companies cannot not say what you can view or from what material. Oh sure, you can say, “Well it should be controlled”! The various sites which deliver smut, SPAM, viruses, Phisher's, and the like should be restricted. Okay, so it is annoying to say the least and we can all agree on that. So who decides what is smut or any of the other stuff? What one considers as trash, someone else might consider treasure. If you are going to be connected to the internet, you have to take responsibility for what information flows from and to your computer. In short, you must take the responsibility into your own hands.

Pulling the information we had on the Patriot Act, in retrospect, might not have been the correct thing to do but we never wanted our site to be controversial or politically motivated. Nor did we ever want to influence our readers on any one political act or idea. We chose to remain neutral on the subject. If our readers wanted to know more, they could easily check out the major search engines. The trouble is, this stuff directly affects our efforts to get the important internet as well as computer news to you, our reader.

Hopefully we have peaked your interest enough for you to continue learning more about the upcoming Neutrality efforts in Congress. We all know the Washington Lobbyists are hard at work making sure the Senators and Legislators are hearing their side of the story. Face it, the legislators have been chomping at the bit to tax, restrict and otherwise get a handle on the internet. You give them a crack and they will punch a huge hole in the internet we have all grown to depend on for information of all types.

Please check out these sites to learn more for yourself. 

Browsing With Microsoft and Others

You’re still using MSIE? You really need to take a look at Firefox. Click here and I’ll explain more and how to grab your copy of Mozilla’s famous little cousin.

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Microsoft Word:

 Microsoft Excel

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