Siva Vaidhyanathan

The French government is on the verge of passing a law that would punish Web users for downloading illegal content: after your third violation you will be banned from the Internet for a year. Some argue that this violates our fundamental human rights.

Seven billion dollars of the stimulus plan making its way through Congress right now is devoted to bringing broadband internet to under-served parts of the country. But technology experts worry that the plan will suffer if the technology is not examined.

Yet another search engine, Cuil (Gaelic for ‘knowledge’), is taking aim at Google. In true Freudian fashion, the upstart is the brainchild of former Google engineers who claim that Cuil will offer broader, faster searches, without recording information about what you search and when.