Ohio university gets high-speed ‘Net hookup

Cleveland If going online with your home computer is like turning on the tap for a glass of water, getting on the Internet this fall at Case Western Reserve University is going to be like opening a fire hydrant.

In all, 16,000 computers, including machines in every dorm room, will be linked over the coming year to a fiber-optic network that delivers data at up to one gigabit per second.

That’s about a thousand times faster than the typical home broadband connection so fast that the research university’s computer mavens still don’t know exactly what they’ll do with so much bandwidth.

And that’s the point of this $27 million investment: Case will look to develop applications that benefit from a supercharged Internet.

With the new system, “You can actually do full-screen, full-motion high-definition video with high-definition sound,” said the school’s technology chief, Lev Gonick. “That’s pretty amazing when you think about research science.”

Internet extends legal reach of governments

New York Police in Italy didn’t care that five Web sites they deemed blasphemous and thus illegal were located in the United States, where First Amendment protections apply.

The police shut them down anyway in early July, simply by sitting down at the alleged offender’s Rome computer.

Under pressure from their citizens, governments around the world are increasingly abandoning the hands-off attitude they initially had toward the Internet. They are now applying their laws far beyond their borders thanks to the borderless medium.

The United States, too, is guilty of trying to extend its reach.

A U.S. copyright law was used to jail a Russian programmer in California for writing software that was legal in his country. He was later freed, but charges remain against his Russian employer.

And because a large part of Internet traffic goes through the United States even if both sender and recipient live elsewhere last fall’s anti-terrorism bill lets the Justice Department prosecute foreign hackers when they attack computers anywhere in the world.

Of course, enforcement is another matter. In the case of the Russian programmer, authorities had to wait for him to attend a conference in Las Vegas before moving to arrest him.