Category Archives: Internet

City of Peoria, Internet, Peoria County

Peoria to try to woo Google

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From a press release:

Mayor Jim Ardis will hold a news conference on February 23, 2010, at 1:30 p.m. The news conference will be held at the PeoriaNEXT Innovation Center (801 W. Main Street, Peoria). The Mayor will be joined by community leaders to discuss our efforts to submit an application to become a test market for Google.

County Board member Merle Widmer has some additional information on his blog, including an e-mail from Mayor Ardis:

As you may have recently seen, Google announced an effort to bring 1GB Internet service to a test market somewhere in the United States. This would be a phenomenal service that would deliver speed up to 100x faster than the best current system available. The impact on economic development will be enormous.

You might also have seen me talk about the importance of this opportunity to Peoria. The City of Peoria has started an application and has now joined the County of Peoria in working collaboratively.

You can read the rest at Merle’s blog, but you get the idea. Here’s some more information on Google’s effort from their official blog.

2008 Campaign, Internet

A couple cool things I found on the Web

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Here are a couple of interesting sites I thought I’d pass along:

  • Complete Broadcast Day, September 21, 1939. All 19 hours of broadcasting, unedited, was preserved by radio station WJSV in Washington, D.C. on 9/21/1939. The whole day is here at this site in mp3 format (fortunately in separate files so you can easily sample it). You may recall that Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, setting World War II into motion. This broadcast includes President Roosevelt giving an address to a joint session of Congress explaining how the U.S. was going to remain neutral. Also included is the last regular season baseball game between the Cleveland Indians and Washington Senators that year. And a little after 12:30 a.m., you can hear the Bob Chester Orchestra play that smash hit, “Shoot The Sherbert To Me, Herbert.” (It makes me laugh every time I see that title.) It’s really a fascinating time capsule.
  • Select a Candidate Quiz. My parents forwarded this to me. It’s a short quiz you take identifying your position on certain hot-button issues, then your answers are compared to the stated positions of the presidential candidates. The candidate with the highest score is the one that shares your positions the closest. I took it; Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson tied for the highest score (43) based on my positions. I’m not quite sure how to feel about that. Bottom of the list: Chris Dodd. He and I disagree on almost every issue, apparently. Who tops your list?
Internet, Libraries

Libraries stand on principle… unless money is involved

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There’s a bill wending its way through the state legislature. It’s called the Internet Screening in Public Libraries Act (HB1727), and it “[p]rovides that each public library must have a technology protection measure to prevent the display on a public computer of any visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors.”

The bill is supported by the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) and SafeLibraries.org. IFI points out that “[f]or public libraries, the Internet is perhaps the best research tool ever available. The Internet, however, is also responsible for the proliferation of adult and child pornography…. Pornography is now readily accessible to anyone using unfiltered Internet computers, even children in many neighborhood libraries.”

But libraries are against this measure. The Illinois Library Association (ILA) says in an “Action Alert” from March that it “supports local control. Local officials — library trustees, librarians, and other professional library staff — are the most qualified to decide how Internet access should be provided to their patrons.” They then go on to list “talking points,” under the headings: “Filters Hurt Libraries,” “Filters Don’t Work,” “Filters Are Expensive,” “Filters Are Biased,” “Filters Hurt the Poor,” etc. The Journal Star reports today that some libraries are staging a protest against filtering requirements.

But ask a member of the ILA (like, for instance, the Peoria Public Library) if they currently have filtering on their computers, and you may be surprised to find out the answer is “yes.”

Why? Money, of course.

The library can get telecommunications discounts of 20-90% through the state’s E-Rate program. One of the stipulations for receiving the money, though, is Internet filtering:

E-rate applicants must follow the Children’s Internet Protection Act [CIPA] if the application covers Internet access and/or internal connections.

CIPA is a federal law that was enacted in 2000. It states (emphasis added): “In order to receive discounts for Internet Access and Internal Connections services under the universal services support mechanism, school and library authorities must certify that they are enforcing a policy of Internet safety that includes measures to block or filter Internet access for both minors and adults to certain visual depictions.”

So, if you ask librarians to filter Internet content to protect children from harmful pornographic images, the answer is a litany of reasons filters are evil and fraught with complications. But if you ask librarians to filter Internet content so they can get a discount on their telecommunication costs, the answer is, “you bet!”

Behold the power of money.