Noam Cohen

In a manifesto-like e-mail message sent last month to all Google employees, Jonathan Rosenberg, a senior vice president for product management, told them to commit to greater transparency and open industry standards. With the Chrome browser, however, Google's inclusive principles are being put to the test.

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.

The Iranian protests, as globally significant as they are, lack foreign reporters — if standards are to be bent, better to do it there, one could argue, where there is a need for news, any news.

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn't caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped.

To censor the Internet painlessly, undetectably, is the dream that keeps repressive governments up late at their mainframe computers. After all, no users are so censored online as those who never see it.

As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

This spring, the students of an elective course on Internet privacy at Fordham Law School experienced a number of fascinating "teaching moments" during an assignment meant to demonstrate how much personal information is floating around online.

In its short history, Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal.

Copyright lawyers have been arguing over Shepard Fairey's appropriation of a news photograph of Barack Obama for his "Hope" campaign poster and whether it constitutes "fair use." But no one has disputed that it is a work of art.

Google, the online giant, had been sued in federal court by a large group of authors and publishers who claimed that its plan to scan all the books in the world violated their copyrights.