Here's a brief article about a nonprofit that moved almost all its computers and software to open source.

We've long felt nonprofit organizations willing to use open source software were making more dollars available to their core mission. The article appeared in a recent issue of Information Week. Here's the link: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/open_source/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220400020

The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 3458) has been introduced in Congress.

According to FreePress.net, "More than 850 organizations have signed on to the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, including every major consumer group, progressive and conservative leaders, small businesses and unions, bloggers and librarians."

According to WashingtonWatch.com, the bill would amend the Communications Act of 1934 to establish a national broadband policy, safeguard consumer rights, and more.

Once the full content of the bill is submitted to the Library of Congress, it can be viewed in its entirety  here .

This is a heads-up on meeting venue availability in the Oak Ridge area:

I was contacted today by Sharon Hmielewski about Centennial Bluff --left side of Edgemoor Road just one mile from the Edgemoor Rd./TN 170 exit off Pellissippi Parkway/TN 62.

They are opening their community center to non-profit groups--no strings attached-- for a limited time (until the residential part of the development opens).

For more information about the development, go to http://www.centennialbluff.com

If you have a need for a meeting space, you may want to consider this venue. It will accomodate 100. Call her for an appointment to view, and further information.
Her contact info is:

Sharon Hmielewski
sharonh@centennialbluff.com
865 257-4390 cell

We always enjoy hearing from our members and friends, and are especially happy to help out whenever we can. So keep the emails coming...

We also get lots of spam. Spam is down about 100,000 email messages to our servers from what it was a year or so ago, at its peak. Our Spam FAQ has lots of great info on how to reduce spam, and our multi-level email filtering system stops a lot of it, for which we are thankful.

We also receive forwarded emails, some of them with jokes, political "facts", or silly pictures. A lot of these circulate through email for years, whether factual or not and become "urban legends". A good way to verify the content of such an email is through the www.scopes.com

website: http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.

The new Bing.com (here) online search from Microsoft went live this morning; a quick check found results for DiscoverET.org showing up approximately the same as on Google. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for websites may be roughly comparable, but its likely too soon to tell. However (for what its worth), we discovered that Google had "crawled" DiscoverET.org a day more recently than Bing.

Bing.com is replacing the search formerly known as Live.com's search engine. Its a pretty interface--but we found it loads in the browser slower than Google . What impact will this have on Google? We'll wait and see.

DiscoverET.org is happy to arrange for a speaker to come to your group's meeting. During 2009 we've provided a speaker for a few area non-profit organizations seeking to be more aware of our East Tennessee Community Network.

Want to learn new ways the internet is impacting our community, or learn about challenges facing net neutrality? Do you wonder why spam and computer viruses have become so prolific, and what steps you can take to keep them at bay? We'll take a stab at answering your toughest tech-related questions.

Email contact-at-DiscoverET.org to set up a time convenient for your group.

This website has lots of useful information and discussion of efforts to maintain net neutrality:

• http://www.savetheinternet.com
• http://www.savetheinternet.com/yourstory/state/TN

We frequently hear from non-profits hosting with us they'd like to have their own domain name. Acquiring a domain name for your site can be handled separately from hosting the site, and there are numerous domain name resellers anxious for business. (We chose not to resell domain names years ago simply because it didn't fit our mission).) We have several FAQs on the topic. See http://www.DiscoverET.org/domainfaq for more information. Remember, you don't have to host your site through the same organization that provides your domain name registration. If you have questions, or need advice, give us a call, or send us an email. We're here to help you.

We have received numerous emails today from "Webmail Help Desk" asking for current username and password. Never give this information out unless you are certain you know to whom you are sending it. DiscoverET.org is NOT affiliated in any way with this organization.