Universal Broadband Plan Calls for $44 billion in Spending

The new Obama administration has pledged to deploy next-generation broadband to every community in America, but has offered few specifics. The Free Press has published a specific plan to accomplish broadband for all. China has passed the US in total broadband subscribers.

US Drops to 19th in Broadband Penetration Worldwide

US broadband penetration dropped from 17th to 19th place overall among all countries surveyed over the past two quarters. Monaco leads all nations surveyed with 40.6% of the population on broadband and 100% of households.

The State of Maryland has filed a $8.5M claim against Premier Election Systems (previously known as Diebold), joining Ohio in seeking damages from the company. The claim alleges that election officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address multiple security flaws in the machines. Previously, Diebold paid millions to settle a California lawsuit over security issues in their machines. The dispute comes as Maryland and Virginia prepare to scrap the touch screen electronic voting systems they bought after the 2000 presidential election. California, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa have already switched to optical scanners, and voters in Pennsylvania are suing to prevent the use of paperless electronic voting systems in their state. Meanwhile, Artifex Software is suing Diebold for violations of the GPL covering the Ghostscript software technology used in the proprietary voting machines.

Stalin third most popular Russian, according to poll

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin remains one of Russia's most popular historical figures despite the purges that marked his rule, according to latest results in a nationwide poll.