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Over half a million Americans have shared their feelings on network neutrality with the Federal Communications Commission as the agency ponders new rules that could drastically reshape the Internet.

Earlier, Chairman Tom Wheeler reported that the FCC has so far received around 647,000 comments as the July 15 deadline for initial feedback approaches. The commission will then accept responses to those comments into the month of September.

At best, a final decision on the controversial net neutrality proposal isn't expected until near the end of 2014.

There's a new cybersecurity bill making its way through Congress, sponsored and written by Sen Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and critics are already calling it a new backdoor for surveillance by the National Security Agency.

The Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Act of 2014 (CISA) was just approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee, putting it on track for a Senate vote soon. But like its controversial predecessors, the bill is coming under fire as a step backwards in the fight for surveillance reform.

The bill's primary effect would be a new requirement for sharing information on "cyber threat indicators," a vague term that could refer to anything from an ongoing hack to a vulnerability in commercial software. Once a company makes a report to the government with information about a threat indicator, CISA would require broad sharing across federal agencies, including with the NSA, which would be given a more central role in threat management under the new scheme.

Advocacy groups have seized on the reporting requirements as a troubling expansion of NSA access to private networks. The Center for Democracy in Technology says the provision "risks turning the cybersecurity program it creates into a back door wiretap." CDT also notes the bill lacks many crucial privacy protections that were included in previous cybersecurity acts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the bill "fatally flawed," and raised concerns that it would create a new pipeline of data from independent companies to the NSA.

If you're worried about Big Brother and computerized facial recognition, you’ve had plenty of reason to be scared. Law enforcement has been toying with facial recognition for a while, but the FBI is getting set to deploy its own system, called Next Generation Identification (NGI for short), planned to be fully operational soon.

NGI will bring together millions of photos in a central federal database, reaching all 50 states by the end of the year. After years of relative anonymity, it's easy to think 2014 is the year that law enforcement will finally know you by face. B

t here's an inconvenient fact about the FBI's shiny new system: Thanks to extensive work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we actually know quite a bit about NGI, and the numbers suggest it isn't very good at recognizing faces. Given a suspect's face, NGI returns a ranked list of 50 possibilities, and only promises an 85 percent chance of returning the suspect's name in the list. To put it another way, even when you give NGI 50 guesses, it still lets one in seven suspects off the hook.

Compare that to Facebook's DeepFace system, recently presented at the IEEE Computer Vision conference, and it looks even worse. Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they're the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot.

To be fair, Facebook has a whole network's worth of data on its side, so it ends up comparing each face to a smaller number of possibilities. It isn’t an exact comparison, but the overall impression is hard to deny: the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency is getting outgunned by a social network.

Admiral Michael Rogers, the relatively new head of the National Security Agency, has been on the job for about three months, and he’s been exceedingly diplomatic and measured.

n addition to serving as the face of public relations for the Defense Department's "silent service," Admiral Rogers has taken on two formal roles that come bundled with the NSA director position: head of the Central Security Service, another arm of the US’ 17-tentacled intelligence apparatus, and commander of US Cyber Command, the hub of the military’s cyber efforts. That means one man is in charge of the NSA’s domestic and foreign surveillance, along with defending US government networks, coordinating cyberattacks against enemies, and supervising what is essentially the security IT department for the rest of the Defense Department. So, who is he?

The broadcast industry can breathe again: Aereo -- the startup that streamed broadcast TV over the Internet for cheap -- is dead. Or at least, the incarnation of Aereo that wasn’t paying copyright fees is dead, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling. So what happens now?

A decision in favor of Aereo would have changed things quite a bit for the television industry, but the ruling means back to business as usual. While some have raised fears that the opinion will impact cloud computing services, the court intended for the ruling to apply narrowly to Aereo. "It just means you can expect more of the same," says Michael Greeson, president of The Diffusion Group, a research firm focused on the future of TV. "The broadcasters won the case. There were no caveats, except for that this is a limited case. It would be untenable to extend this decision beyond its limited scope."

Reacting to the news, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia said that "our work is not done," and that it will "continue to fight for our consumers." Realistically, though, the company is unlikely to survive. "Aereo will go out of business immediately," Greeson says. The fees Aereo is now required to pay broadcasters, which can range from a few cents to a few dollars for every channel, for every subscriber, every month, will make it impossible to continue charging only $8 to $12 a month.

For consumers, the ruling means no change in the high prices from cable companies and limited options for watching TV online or on mobile devices. Cable companies have started to offer streaming online options and mobile apps like Time Warner’s TWC TV app and Comcast’s Xfinity streaming service, but those offerings are expensive, slow to roll out, and tend to be poorly designed.

A controversial ruling from a European court recently granted people the so-called "right to be forgotten," forcing Google to remove some search links upon request.

If you'd like a medium for sending such a request, Forget.me will now step in, spiriting away everything about you.

The site, a European privacy advocacy project, gives requesters a step-by-step procedure for lodging a request with Google, no knowledge on the finer points of law required. Log in, choose your country, perform a search for yourself, select the offending link, decide on which category your request falls under, and ship it all off to Google. While you wait, Forget.me will track the link's status, informing you when the information has left the physical plane.

Google has quietly launched its own Internet domain registration service. And like many Google projects, Google Domains is starting off in beta; you'll need an invite to get in and purchase your own URL.

But the company's latest effort could present GoDaddy -- the world's leading domain registrar -- with some fresh competition. With Google Domains, you can set up a custom domain of your choosing, but Google won't actually be hosting your website. It's only handling the domain registration aspect; for everything else, the company has partnered with Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and Shopify -- businesses that specialize in helping consumers build complete websites in mere minutes.

First, Google is promising not to charge users anything extra to conceal personal information (e.g. name and address) that must be provided when registering a URL. Lastly, there's the benefit of real customer support. Google says phone and email support will be available Monday through Friday from 9AM to 9PM EST.

If you want to use the Internet and you don’t want the National Security Agency to see what you’re doing, you basically only need one tool: Tor, a network that anonymizes web traffic by bouncing it between servers.

The NSA has been working on ways to get around "the Tor problem" for years without much success. "It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets’ use of technologies to hide their communications," the agency told BusinessWeek back in January. The NSA says Tor is now used by "terrorists, cybercriminals, [and] human traffickers," so you’d think the Pentagon might consider that investment a mistake. Not so.

The military has been working on a new generation of even bigger and better anonymity tools to supplement and replace Tor. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon’s high-tech research lab, started working on anonymity roughly four years ago through the Safer Warfighter Communications program, a collection of tools designed to thwart blacklisting, redirection, and content filtering.

A US Appellate Court has ruled that police must obtain a warrant before collecting cellphone location data, finding that acquiring records of what cell towers a phone connected to and when it was connected to them constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.

This ruling, from the 11th Circuit, is in opposition to a ruling made nearly a year ago by a separate appellate court. While this ruling won't overturn that one because of their separate jurisdictions, it adds critical precedent to a privacy question that's still far from decided across the country.

In its reasoning, the court notes that while the Fourth Amendment has traditionally been applied to property rights, it's gradually expanded to protect much more, including communications. "In the 20th century, a second view gradually developed," the court writes, "that is, that the Fourth Amendment guarantee protects the privacy rights of the people without respect to whether the alleged 'search' constituted a trespass against property rights."

In particular, the court cites a Supreme Court ruling that found that tracking a person using a GPS unit installed in their car requires a warrant. Even though the location data of a cell site can only place the person holding the phone within a certain range, the court feels that that range is still quite detailed. In the case at hand, cell site data was used to place the defendant near the location of several robberies.

Pocket, which lets you save articles and videos to view later, is introducing a paid option. Pocket Premium -- which offers power users new features for archiving, searching, and tagging their saves -- launches for $5 a month or $42 a year.

Seven years after the company began as a bookmarklet, and two years after making its apps free to build its base of customers, the save-for-later service says it's now big enough for a "freemium" business model to make sense. At a time when webpages routinely disappear without warning, Pocket is making a bet that users will pay for peace of mind. Whether the company is right will determine its fate as an independent business.