Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » U.S. House of Representatives

House Decides To Cancel Legislation That Would Stop Employers From Asking For Facebook Passwords

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 04:53:44 +0000

Yesterday a Facebook user protection amendment was proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives, but it was already voted down. The legislation was offered by Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter, which would have added new restrictions to FCC rules that would prohibit employers from demanding the passwords and usernames from workers and potential candidates. It turns out that the proposal ended up being rejected by the House.

The final vote ended up being 236 to 184 with only one House Republican voting in support of the changes. If the proposal was passed, the amendment would have been added to a section of H.R. 3309, the FCC Process Reform Act Of 2012, allowing the FCC to step in and stop any employers asking applicants for confidential information.

How Tumblr Is Combating The Stop Online Piracy Act

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:30:23 +0000

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 by Representative Lamar Smith [R-TX] and 12 initial co-sponsors. This bill is intended to help U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders fight online piracy of intellectual property.

Today the House Judiciary Committee had a hearing where a representative from Google represented opposition of the Act. Google opposes the Act because the bills would introduced website blocking at the DNS level causing censorship.

AOL, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga sent a joint letter to Congress about the issue. Tumblr decided to go the extra mile to bring public attention towards the SOPA issue. When logging in to Tumblr, the stream of content has been replaced with censored blocks. At the top of the Dashboard, there is a banner that says “Congress is holding hearings today and will soon pass a bill empowering corporations to censor the Internet unless you tell them no.”

When clicking the banner, users will be prompted to enter their phone number and street address. Tumblr will then call you and give you talking points along with information about how to call your House Representative.

Users were averaging 3.6 calls per second earlier today. If you click on “next page,” the censor blocks go away.

[TechCrunch]

Opening Day Of New Congress To Be Live-Streamed On Facebook

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:59:08 +0000

The new Congress will be live broadcasting their first meeting on Facebook. The announcement was made by incoming House Speaker John Boehner (pictured above). The live-stream will be at noon on tomorrow. To view the meeting, go to the “Pledge to America” Facebook page (www.facebook.com/pledgetoamerica) to see the GOP-controlled House. [CNN]

LimeWire Chair Mark Gorton Tells Congress Not To Worry About Doc Sharing

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:01:38 +0000

LimeWire has sent a response (PDF from Wired.com) to Congress where he explains the steps that the P2P company is taking to prevent document sharing. This will prevent users from sharing government documents or inadvertently sharing tax return letters.

LimeWire had to add extra safeguards due to Congress re-opening an investigation against the company. Information regarding President Barack Obama’s helicopter “Marine One,” along with medical records and tax return information had leaked over the a P2P network recently.

“LimeWire 5 by default does not share documents even if a user purposely attempts to do so,” stated Gorton. “LimeWire will not allow it. In fact, LimeWire 5 [released in December] goes so far as to automatically un-share documents that a user may have shared using a 4.x version of LimeWire.”

A response was demanded from Gorton by The House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This is because Marine One data was downloaded by an IP address in Iran. Older versions of LimeWire by default asked if you would like to share folders containing audio, video, documents, and software.

[via Wired]