There is an interesting article in BusinessWeek today on “

[a] just-released study on technology transfer that looked at the surprising tech transfer results of a number of smaller colleges and universities whose research and development budgets fell far short of the funds expended by tech development superstars such as MIT and Stanford.”

On Yahoo!News, presidential candidate Fred Thompson points out that “[r]ecently, economists Thomas M. Lenard and Brent D. Mast released a report through the libertarian Progress and Freedom Foundation that showed most cell phone users’ paid out about $7 a month in federal, state and local taxes.”  Adds Thompson, “[t]hat’s more than people pay in cigarette or liquor taxes, and I don’t think we need to be taxing broadband like it was a sin or a luxury. Congress should make permanent the tax moratorium on the Internet, or, at a minimum, extend it.”

The Washington Post reports that “[g]overnment repression in some countries has shifted from journalists to bloggers, with the vitality of the Internet triggering a more focused crackdown as blogs increasingly take the place of mainstream news media, according to Lucie Morillon, Washington director of the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.  "Countries that were not sentencing journalists to prison terms anymore have been doing it these last months for bloggers. This is the case in Egypt and Jordan," she said yesterday as the group released its sixth annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Egypt ranked 146th and Jordan 122nd in press freedom among the 169 countries for which data were available.”

According to the Register, “[a]n internet hijacker who allegedly registered 5,500 copycat web addresses in a bid to divert lost surfers onto a porno site has agreed to hand over $164,000 to settle charges brought against him by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  Defendant John Zuccarini also agreed to refrain from dodgy business practices and abide by an enhanced compliance and monitoring regime as part of his settlement with the FTC, which sued him for contempt of a previous court injunction banning similar dodgy business practices, dating from 2002.”

The International Herald Tribune writes that “[t]o satisfy New York State prosecutors who accused Facebook of falsely advertising itself as a safe online environment, the popular social networking Web site agreed to immediately post sterner warnings about the dangers to children using the site and to respond more speedily to complaints from users about inappropriate sexual messages.”