Stories by: Scott Bradner

The Associated Press in late March reported on the issue of employers asking job applicants for their Facebook passwords, citing new and old incidents. The story apparently hit a sore point because it was all over the press within a day or so and in short order politicians were posturing and reaching for the limelight by introducing legislation to ban the practice and sending letters to enforcement agencies demanding action. Based on the comments since the story broke, it is clear that the specific practice of demanding an applicant's password to a social media site is not common but that there is a common worry that it might become so.

What is it about politicians that makes them believe that they, with a few minutes' cursory review, know better than people who have studied in an area for decades? Whatever the case, it far from a rare condition. The most recent example of this attitude is the copyright protection proposals currently in front of Congress.

I ended last year with a death-of-the-Internet column, and I'm starting off the new year with a death-via-the-Internet one.

A year ago I wrote that 2011 would be a year in which the Internet would "be under a multi-pronged attack that threatens to change it irrevocably in ways that may destroy much of the Internet's potential." Well, 2011 has come and mostly gone, and it turned out that my pessimism may have been misplaced but not invalid.

The Supreme Court earlier this month heard arguments on a relatively common drug case, but there is a chance for this case to set the groundwork, for good or ill, on resolving most of the issues I discussed recently regarding the murky state of privacy protections from the government in the United States.

In September representatives from India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) got together to talk about the Internet. Their conclusion: The 'Net needed help from the United Nations in the areas of developing policies, technical standards, operation, dispute resolution and crises management.

Consumer advocates as well as many business groups have attempted to get federal laws adopted in the United States that would mandate disclosure of security breaches in which some types of private information about identifiable people are exposed. In spite of the obvious logic of having a national standard, these efforts so far have failed.

In November 2009 the European Parliament approved a directive on Internet privacy that, among other things, required user opt-in before websites could install cookies on the user's computer.

HP management has not been good to the company over the last few years. One would have to do a lot of searching to find a management team that has so thoroughly messed up in the court of public opinion.

Twenty-five years ago -- when Network World was born -- the Internet was only 3 years old itself. At that time, less than 2,500 hosts were connected to the Internet and maybe 10,000 people used it regularly. Now there are more than 800 million hosts and 1.8 billion regular users.