Mr. Guo said his drive to create a grand repository of music stemmed from his childhood in China, where his parents, both engineers, sent him to study violin at the elementary school of the Shanghai Conservatory. Browsing through a bookstore one day, he said, he was frustrated by how few orchestral scores were available. His father took him to Vancouver, British Columbia, for high school when he was 13. Mr. Guo graduated a year early and entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston to study composition. There a world of scores, at the library and in music shops, lay open to him. But the memory of musical deprivation remained strong, and the idea of a bank of digital scores took flight.

“In many cases these publishers are basically getting the revenue off of composers who are dead for a very long time,” Mr. Guo said. “The Internet has become the dominant form of communication. Copyright law needs to change with it. We want people to have access to this material to foster creativity. Personally I don’t feel pity for these publishers.” Those who “cling to their old business model,” he added, will simply fade away. But publishers point out that users of the site can miss the benefit of some modern editions that may be entitled to copyright protection — and thus not part of the public domain — because of significant changes to the music, such as corrections and editing marks based on years of scholarship about the composer’s intention.

“As business travelers, we’re on the road so much, we psychologically forget that we’re in public,” said Ben Knieff, head of product marketing for fraud at NICE Actimize, a company that focuses on financial crimes in the financial services industry. Mr. Knieff recalled how he was recently boarding a plane and overheard an executive speaking loudly on a cellphone as he booked a hotel, revealing all of his credit card information, including the security code.

Les lignes téléphoniques les plus longues, souvent situées dans les zones rurales et périurbaines, offrent un débit limité. Ceci amène certaines collectivités territoriales à s’interroger sur la possibilité de financer la modernisation du réseau téléphonique de France Télécom. Sollicitée par l’Arcep sur ce point, l’Autorité de la concurrence avait relevé en décembre 2009 plusieurs risques dans son avis 09 A 574: que la concurrence régresse dans ces zones du fait du recul du dégroupage, que les appels d’offres des collectivités pour la mise en œuvre de ces projets soient biaisés par la position particulière de France Télécom, enfin que les zones concernées n’aient finalement jamais accès au très haut débit car les investissements de déploiement de la fibre optique s’en trouveraient découragés.

A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz’s website from January of 2009 to the present.

Verizon, the nation’s leading provider of fiber-to-the-home service, doesn’t offer a gig, or even half that speed. Instead, it markets a “fastest” service that is only 50 megabits a second for downloading and 20 megabits a second for uploading. It costs $144.99 a month. That’s one-twentieth the speed of Hong Kong Broadband’s service for downloading, for more than five times the price.

But are these sites another crack in the eroding wall between public and private life? Perhaps. The better question: Do we actually care if they are? As Mr. Jones noted, Facebook’s News Feed, the feature that lets users easily track friends’ activity in one place, was somewhat controversial when it was introduced in 2006. “Obviously, now, it’s completely accepted and people who are younger, in particular, just accept it that their lives are completely open,” Mr. Jones said. (The jury is still assembling for these sites: Dscover.me has been open to everyone since November; Sitesimon and Voyurl are accepting users on a rolling basis, but will open fully in the coming months.)