In case you’re not familiar with the concept of Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is a set of rules that protects the openness of the internet. It preserves our right to communicate freely online without any control from big companies like Comcast & Verizon.

Does it really?

Recently, I came across a video published by 171IL, a YouTube channel that tries to discuss sensitive topics by taking into account mostly raw information and facts. 171IL attempts to present a more clear and unbiased, to an extend, view on the bloated topic of Net Neutrality.

“..the public’s perception of the issue is horrifically unhinged..”

During his video he explains how the constant referment to the preservation of Net Neutrality as “common sense” from the majority of online media and influencers has blinded the public. This attitude lead to the creation of a toxic atmosphere where a healthy discussion on the topic is almost impossible to take place.

Didn’t convince me, but..

He makes valid points and presents information that help clear up some misconceptions about the concept of Net Neutrality. Nethertheless he didn’t really convince me to switch sides. I strongly believe that Net Neutrality prevents any kind of malicious attempt to control the Internet. I understand that selectively changing the rate of information transactions is sometimes necessary (like the case of BitTorrent), but I believe that solutions can be implemented through the route of technological or algorithmic advancements, just like they always have in the past. Despite my personal opinion, I strongly advise you to watch his entire video to form a more solid understanding of the subject and then decide for yourself where you stand

His video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYVgIGL1E34

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Yeah, it’s totally true

WiFi4EU is a 120 million euro scheme that promises to provide free Wi-Fi connectivity for citizens and visitors in public spaces including parks, squares, public buildings, libraries, health centres, and museums everywhere in Europe.

The aim is focused to benefit both residents and visitors of thousands of local communities across the EU with at least 6,000 to 8,000 local communities by 2020.

Everyone benefiting from connectivity means that it should not matter where you live or how much you earn. So we propose today to equip every European village and every city with free wireless internet access around the main centres of public life by 2020.
Jean-Claude Juncker – State of the Union speech, September 2016

The beneficiaries have to pay for the connectivity (internet subscription) and maintenance in good order of the equipment for 3 years, while the EU with this scheme will support the installation of Wi-Fi equipment in the centres of community life.

After completing the appropriate online applications procedures, the projects will be selected on a first-come, first-serve basis. The first call for projects is expected to be launched towards the end of 2017 or early 2018.

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The Internet has completely revolutionized the way we live. One can argue that it is the most important development of our history. It has connected the world in ways and places no one could previously have imagined. It has given people the ability to spread information and knowledge in extraordinary rates.

Using the internet has enabled creative and innovative individuals to build successful business from the ground up. Facebook, Google and Amazon are just a few examples of the giant companies that came from young entrepreneurs and small startups.

Without Net Neutrality, the free and open internet could become a thing of the past.

Net neutrality is a set of rules that protects the openness of the internet. It preserves our right to communicate freely online without any control from big companies like Comcast & Verizon. These companies are internet service providers (ISPs) that have spent years trying to end net neutrality. Year after year they desperately attempt to control the internet. The reason you need to care about this issue, is that these giant companies are coming closer every year to ending our free and open internet.

The ISPs want to pass a new set of rules that allows them to control what we see and do online. Without net neutrality, there won’t be anything to stop these companies from blocking or throttling the connection to the Internet in an attempt to make more money and acquire more control.

Their ultimate goal is to create “fast and slow” lanes on the internet. Websites that are able to pay more will be prioritized whereas smaller websites will be much slower. The realization of this prioritization scheme will destroy young entrepreneurs and startups. Without Net Neutrality, it will become almost impossible for fresh startups to flourish and become the new Facebook or Google. In addition, ISPs could acquire extraordinary amounts of power by slowing down their competitor’s content or by blocking political and economical opinions they disagree with.

The end end of Net Neutrality will be the end of the free and open internet.

Hopefully, you can now see why it’s vital everyone understands how important net neutrality is. If you want to help fight big corporations that try to kill net neutrality, you can do so by sharing this information with the world.

If you feel the need to assist even further you can visit www.battleforthenet.com for more information on the subject.

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1. Trello
Whatever the size and nature of your projects are, Trello is the most straightforward tool to help you coordinate them. It can be used for anything, from personal to-do lists to big projects with a lot of people involved. Every project it can be represented from a Board that is basically a list. A list of other lists that each one of them is consisted of cards. With these lists and the cards you are able to organize tasks by adding labels, assign duties, set deadlines, add comments and get feedback, upload file attachments and create checklists with team members. Keeping everything visible and everyone in the team informed and up to date. Trello is even smart enough to notify its users in order to keep them in track and to remember them for the upcoming deadlines and assignments. It can notify from inside the app, via email, desktop notifications via the browser, or via mobile push notifications but most importantly, Trello is always synchronized across all of your devices organizing the coordination of your projects making it one of the best tools for organizing your work.

2. Slack
Maybe the most famous way of communication in-between teams and communities. Basically, Slack is a platform for team communication. The main idea of it is to make working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive by keeping everything in one place. Teams can organize into channels every conversation, or every specific topic for discussion, or every project along with the needed material. These channels can be closed only for specific team members or they can be open to the public creating an open community for anything. For more private use, there is available a feature of direct messaging between colleagues and you can always set who can see what. Private or public use, you can always send and share files, images, PDFs, documents, and spreadsheets with others for team editing and viewing, and you can easily search through all these media together. Specially for teams that work from distance, Slack is the ideal tool to improve the communication between the team and organize everything, conversations and material. Everything will be indexed and archived so that you can have it at your fingertips whenever you want with just a simple search. And you can do it from everywhere you want with everything synchronized in all of your devices(iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux and web apps available). You can even use the Slackbot to get automated notifications and you are always able to customize your notifications in order to get just what you need.

3. CoSchedule
Maybe the most integrated and powerful tool for teams that are creating, organizing and coordinating content in blog posts, social media and videos. CoSchedule offers the ability of handling all these in one place with a marketing calendar that helps you to prioritize your projects and customize your work-flows to create content more efficiently. Organizing and coordinating the team can be easily done with the work-flow management feature in which you can set publishing dates and attach simple task-based work-flows in order to stay in track with deadlines. CoSchedule also offers a channel of communication for the members of the team where they can discuss anything related, they can exchange feedback and they can share useful content. If you are looking for a tool to help you on managing social media, scheduled blog posts, authors with their drafts or even for creating a cooperative content development system then you will find CoSchedule very handful because is definitely one of the best tools for organizing your work.

4. Pocket
Nowadays, new information is coming from everywhere. Whatever we do, is related with some information that we need to dominate. Even if it is for pleasure, for work or for personal development. In just a simple scroll to the news feeds of our social media and we find so many links of interesting videos and articles.But time is limited most of the times to check them all. Pocket is a tool that will help you to save all these interesting information to have them organized for when the time is more convenient to deal with them. How many times people just want to save a link and send it to their selves? This is no longer necessary. You can easily have links, articles and videos in Pocket well organized.

5. Evernote
How many times do we want to read about something in the web and get easily lost in our browsers with so many tabs open that at the end of the day we are confused from the enormous amount of information we are facing? Evernote is a tool that helps you organize the content you are collecting from the web and save everything you like. You can organize the content you collect by saving parts of websites as notes or you can save whole articles keeping notes with them. You can even keep lists among with the notes for even better organization. It is even suitable for teams because you can share your Notes and groups of notes that you have captured and keep references of all the useful content that every member found. You can always discuss projects with others with Evernote’s live chat feature that is allowing personal conversation with someone or conversation between a group while viewing the same document, so there’s no switching back-and-forth between windows. Collaborative work in a single document has never been easier than that.

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The Internet is the most powerful tool we have ever invented as a human species. It has revolutionised the way we communicate, learn and work with each other. The advantages of using the internet are countless but today we are only going to focus on a specific aspect of the web. If you need to do something on your computer, there is definitely a tool to suit your needs lying free in the World Wide Web.

In this article I have found and listed the best, in my opinion, free tools for 8 different purposes that you could use in the future.

1. Image Editing

PicMonkey is a website that offers a variety of free image editing tools. It’s simplistic and beautiful at the same time. It’s very easy to use and it offers a friendly environment to work on. It gives you all the basic functions you need to edit your photos and much more. What is great about picmonkey.com is that it’s constantly changing, adding more functionality to its overall experience.

2. Video Editing

WeVideo is a great tool for basic video editing. What is special about WeVideo is that it allows multiple people to work on the same project online. Another great thing about this platform is that it can be connected with Google Drive, meaning that you can store your project files online rather than on your local computer.

3. Website / Blogging

WordPress has made possible for many non-technical users to own a website or a blog. It’s extremely user friendly and it offers a variety of functionalities with focus on blogging. It’s fairly easy to get used to. There are two ways you can use WordPress. If you have your own domain name and hosting plan you can go with wordpress.org but if you don’t then you need to use wordpress.com to host your blog in their servers.

4. Brand Name

thenameapp.com is a great tool for someone who is just starting something new. It helps you find out if the name you’ve thought for your idea is taken or not.

5. Trending Content

If you’re a blogger or a website author then Google Trends should be your friend. It offers information about what is trending up at the moment in Google Searches. You can get information based on geographic location or just for a specific region of interest (like technology). Google Trends could be a great tool to attract more readers to your website. You should definitely give it a try.

6. Organize & Collaborate

Team assignments? Collaborative Projects? Startups? trello.com can handle them all. Trello offers functionality to suit the need for collaborative work and project planning. If you haven’t heard of Trello so far you should definitely check it out.

7. Learning

The most beautiful tool that the internet has to offer to the world is learning. Information flows freely on the net but some websites are here to offer you structured online learning for any topic you can imagine. I couldn’t make my mind for which of the learning platforms is the best so I decided to list the top 3 platforms in the field of education according to popular belief. Those platforms are :

• Khanacademy
• Coursera
• Codecademy
  

8. Free Stock Photography

I chose to end this article with something magical. You might say that this is not a tool but you are wrong. pexels.com lets you search its database for beautiful stock photography. What’s great about pexels is that it lets you use any photo you can find freely

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