According to media critic Geert Lovink, the Internet is being closed off by corporations and governments intent on creating a business and information environment free of dissent. Calling himself a radical media pragmatist, Lovink envisions an Internet culture that goes beyond the engineering culture that spawned it ...

In Dark Fiber, Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control hardware, software, content, design, and delivery. He examines the unwarranted faith of the cyber-libertarians in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized, accessible communication system. He studies the inner dynamics of hackers' groups, Internet activists, and artists, seeking to understand the social laws of online life.

Topics include ... sustainable social networks, mailing list culture, and collaborative text filtering.

Howard Rheingold says, "Geert Lovink taught me how to think critically about technology, and I always turn to him for thoughtful and humane analysis."

Mark Dery says, "Geert Lovink is the Linus Torvalds of open-source theory. Where he leads, I follow."

A California congressman is preparing a bill that would let copyright owners, such as record labels or movie studios, launch high-tech attacks against file-swapping networks where their wares are traded.

Adelphia Communications, the cable television operator, and more than 200 of its subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday in Manhattan after a month of struggling to find an alternative.

WorldCom overstated its cash flow by more than $3.8B during the last five quarters in what appears to be one of the largest cases of false corporate bookkeeping yet.

The problem, discovered during an internal audit, throws into doubt the survival of WorldCom and MCI.

Analysts see bankruptcy as a strong possibility; trying to avoid that, WorldCom will cut 17,000 employees. "The company has made a few giant leaps toward bankruptcy. For a company with $30B in debt [and] a sector deteriorating from competition ... it's not looking good."

Operating costs like basic network maintenance had been booked as capital investments. CEO: "Our senior management team is shocked by these discoveries." SEC: "accounting improprieties of unprecedented magnitude." Analyst: "This is horrible for the industry."

Analyst: "I would be stunned if [the restatement doesn't] trigger bankruptcy. I am almost certain it will. The math doesn't even work anymore."

The epic bankruptcy saga of KPNQwest became still more entangled on Monday as banks joined the clamor for an investigation of the service provider's accounts.

The United States needs to move to protect nuclear plants and the power grid against future attacks and may need to reorganize the way government agencies work together.

"The community can make a critical contribution to protecting the nation. Our report gives the government a blueprint."

"We now face a much more sophisticated threat." ... The power grid is vulnerable. "We could also lose a large part of the electrical distribution, electrical transmission system. In a worst-case scenario you would get a cascading failure," causing regional outages lasting weeks or months. ... Another glaring need is for trusted spokespeople to be put into place.

The Office of Homeland Security should establish a new security institute made up of experts who could spot shortcomings in critical systems around the country and find ways to reduce or eliminate those problems. This effort should include "red teaming" exercises ...

The FBI is visiting libraries nationwide and checking the reading records of people it suspects of having ties to terrorists or plotting an attack, library officials say.

It was inevitable. After more than a month of trying to stave off filing for bankruptcy protection, Adelphia is expected to succumb today to its fate.

Albert-Lazlo Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, became fascinated with the structure of the Internet in 1998. He and his student researchers designed software robots that went out on the Net and mapped as many of its nodes, hubs and links as they could. He then began studying other networks and found that they had similar structures. The Internet in particular, he found, had taken on characteristics of a living ecosystem.

That made for a valuable insight in itself. But Professor Barabasi went a step further and analyzed the genetic networks of various living organisms, finding that their genes and proteins interacted in much the same networked way as the Internet.