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Many of us take cheap high-speed Internet access for granted. I think nothing of downloading an MP3 album from Amazon MP3 while streaming a movie from Netflix on the Roku and browsing the Web on a powerful computer. That's not a luxury that's available to everyone, and in some parts of the world data charges prove prohibitive for going online for information.

To help counter that, the Wikimedia Foundation and Orange have come up with a plan for free Wikipedia access. Overall, the deal looks like a win for users, but it does raise a couple of questions as well. How is Wikipedia access going to change Africa and the Middle East?

There were two big expectations from this morning's release of the initial draft of data protection regulations from the European Commission, both of which were built up through quite a bit of fanfare from EC Vice President Viviane Reding's office last November. One was that the Commission would "stick it to" the U.S. Patriot Act, the law that enables American law enforcement agencies access to private data elsewhere in the world, under controlled conditions. Another was that citizens of E.U. member states would be granted a "right to be forgotten," to order online firms collecting personal data about them to purge their records.

The initial draft of these new Data Protection regulations shows moderation on both counts.

There are lots of social media monitoring dashboards out there, but a new service from Cyfe.com attempts to become the mother of all dashboards by combining more than a dozen different metrics into a single easy-to-track screen. You can sign up now for its beta and while you are limited to tracking just five items at once for the free account, it still is a pretty powerful service.

Just a week after Twitter's acqui-hire of Summify, the company has done it again. This time Twitter is grabbing Web security firm Dasient and winding down the Dasient business. Instead of servicing the old customer base, the Dasient team is going to work on Twitter's revenue engineering team. Wait, what?

You might think that Twitter would be looking to snag Dasient in order to curb problems with spam and other attacks on the platform. Instead, it looks like Twitter is hoping to use Dasient's team to prep the platform for self-serve ads that might be launching later this year.

There are two rights issues that stoke the flames in the heart of European Commission Vice President and Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. One is something she's dubbed the "right to be forgotten:" the ability for an individual to tell an online collector of personal data to destroy its data about her. The other involves the rights of the media to express itself freely, an issue that Europe could not ignore during last week's SOPA protests.

But what about when those two rights collide, when personal data is being collected by a source that qualifies as the media, can that person still ask to be forgotten? In a speech at a conference in Munich last Sunday night, a preview of a draft of new E.U. data protection legislation to be formally introduced tomorrow, Comm. Reding said this quite clearly: "The right to be forgotten is, of course, not an absolute right."

In the space of a year Precise, Software, a midsized provider of application management technologies based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, Israel completely transformed its IT infrastructure to virtualization and cloud software, saving more than $2 million of its annual IT costs. This reduction came through cutting half of their IT staff and closely examining a variety of other technologies.

Back in the early 1990s, we didn't have BlackBerries or any kind of wireless data devices. Phones weren't very "smart," and dial up still ruled the land. Then a trio of companies came together to invent the Viking Express which was a combination of an Ericsson Mobidem wireless data modem that was the size of a small brick, an HP 100 pocket-sized computer that looked more like a big calculator, and software from a company called Radiomail that ran on the DOS operating system of the HP. The world of wireless hasn't been the same since.

I remember sending an email from my car on the New Jersey Turnpike, pulling over after I passed through one of the toll barriers. A cop came along and wanted to know what I was doing. It was probably the first time he had seen such an assemblage of devices.

Today Novell released its 2012 version of its email software GroupWise, and the announcement was greeted by most with a big yawn. GroupWise? Seems so last century. (Actually, the last updates to the software were for version 8 back in 2008-2010.) According to one analyst, "GroupWise has 10,000 customers and is used by 47 of the 50 US state governments." It has been a distant third to Exchange and Lotus Notes for a while, and many GroupWise customers have switched over to Google Apps in the past several years.

Failure is a word that, understandably, carries a negative connotation. Nobody wants to fail, really. But failure, if you're doing anything worthwhile, is inevitable. What's important is to plan for failure, learn from it, try to avoid damage and do your best to recover gracefully. That was the topic of Selena Deckelmann's keynote, "Mistakes Were Made," Sunday morning at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE).

Deckelmann is founder and COO of Prime Radiant, the company behind Checkmarkable, "a product that helps organizations document, share and tweak their processes." Deckelmann is also a longtime contributor to the PostgreSQL project.

Security software vendor Sourcefire announced today a new kind of endpoint security solution called FireAMP that couples the power of big data analytics with real-time threat detection and prevention. The idea is to use what is happening around the Internet in real time to lock down Windows endpoints and prevent them from running malware.