Hastings' Facebook rant draws FCC's attention

The Netflix CEO is lambasting Comcast again for what he says is its continued violation of net-neutrality rules.

FORTUNE -- People are still paying attention to Reed Hastings after all. The Netflix (NFLX) CEO's Sunday rant directed at Comcast (CMCSA), a favorite target of his, is getting all kinds of attention. Including, reportedly, the attention of the Federal Communications Commission, which is looking into the matter. Comcast, he says, is violating MORE

Corporate SOPA opponents approve of CISPA

The new bill is being called "the new SOPA." This time, Internet companies are onboard.

FORTUNE -- Those who believed that the tech industry opposed the now-"dead" anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA purely because they made for bad law might be confused by the industry's backing of a new law, CISPA, that's being called "the new SOPA." It isn't quite that, however. Big Tech is all for it. That's because, unlike MORE

Don't mess with the penny lobby

The chorus arguing America should scrap the 1-cent coin has grown. Here's why it might never go away.

FORTUNE -- Last month, the government of Canada announced that it was doing away with that country's one-cent coin. Shortly thereafter, the group Americans for Common Cents issued a press release declaring that two-thirds of us south of the border want to keep the penny.

Judging by some of the news accounts, Americans are MORE

Twitter's war on spam

A lawsuit aimed at five companies isn't going after spammers themselves, but at companies that enable them.

FORTUNE -- Email spam is at this point almost a non-problem, and Facebook has made great strides in curbing spammers (though they're far from gone), but Twitter is rife with skeevy offers from pornographers and other hucksters. The problem appears to be getting worse, rather than better.

The company is doing what it can, but MORE

Meet the upscale gas station

It's hard to imagine that gas stations will become "the next Whole Foods." But making them less unpleasant would be good business.

FORTUNE -- A new report concludes that gas-station convenience stores should go "upscale" to boost business, a notion that might sound counterintuitive given the industry's slim profit margins as well as the fact that most shoppers at such stores are in a hurry.

Problem is shoppers increasingly swipe their credit MORE

Cut oil subsidies, but don't decry profits

Total oil profits look huge because the companies that generate them are gigantic. Proportional to their size, they're not so outrageous.

FORTUNE -- The fate of Obamacare notwithstanding, the rebounding economy has greatly improved the president's re-election chances. One major economic problem looms, however: rising gas prices. His tactic seems to be to unfairly redirect the blame toward the oil companies to escape having it unfairly directed toward himself.

The main reason MORE

The Facebook password backlash

We live in an age when Facebook has to issue a statement that it's wrong for employers to demand to peek inside applicants' profiles.

FORTUNE -- Two senators have asked the Justice Department to investigate the practice of employers requiring job applicants to hand over their social-media passwords.

Meanwhile, Facebook issued a statement on Friday warning that such employers "undermine privacy." Similarly, so do peeping toms and identity thieves.

If MORE

Telecom marketing: indecipherable jargon

Are terms like "4G" and LTE nothing more than meaningless marketing terms? And furthermore, do they work?

FORTUNE -- You might think that a discussion among a bunch of telecom geeks would be the last place you should look for help in deciphering the technical gobbledygook that wireless providers tend to spew. But an article at Light Reading, and its accompanying conversation, do shed a lot of light. The conclusion: the MORE

Google's incredible behind-the-scenes video

A video of Google's weekly Quality Launch Review meeting depicts detailed discussion of how to improve search results.

FORTUNE -- There are a couple of noteworthy things about this video depicting ubernerds at Google (GOOG) during their weekly "Quality Launch Review" meeting.

One is that we can witness just how granular -- and nerdy -- the process is.  Here, they are discussing how to improve error correction in searches that are more MORE

A bittersweet bye-bye to Britannica

Wikipedia isn't beating Britannica only because of technology and the Internet. It's often simply better. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be sad to witness the end of print encyclopedias.

FORTUNE -- Wikipedia's entries for "Mercantilism" and "The Strait of Malacca" are better than the entries in The Encyclopaedia Britannica's mobile app.

This is bad for Britannica because subjects like those are supposed to be right in the venerable encyclopedia's wheelhouse. While Wikipedia MORE