Truth be told, I have no idea why I’m about to write this post, other than the fact that it’s in my little writing queue. You can’t fight City Hall. Here’s the deal: the Federal Government of the United States spent a bunch of money investigating various online marketing scams. How they work, what makes people fall for them, etc. Consumers lost some $1.4 billion to such scams.

Yesterday’s trip down memory lane with the Gopher protocol got me thinking about all the other protocols I used to use, and those that I continue to use on a regular basis. There’s little doubt that hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is one of the most widely used protocols on the Internet today. But there are a host of other protocols used every day! Let’s look at a few of my current favorites, and some that have gone the way of the Dodo bird.

A Pew Internet & American Life study has refuted the idea that use of the Internet necessarily leads to decreased social isolation. Quite the opposite!, yelled a character in a Charles Dickens novel. It turns out that as people continually use things like Twitter, Facebook, and the like, they’re both expanding their social circle and increasing contact with said circle.

More FCC news for you, this Wednesday morning (and before Droid news consumes us all). The agency is considering taking some of the bandwidth that is currently allocated to digital television, and auctioning it off so that broadband companies can bid on it. The point, of course, is to increase the availability of wireless broadband.

Nicholas here, fresh off freaking out over Shogun Rua’s loss last night. (I hate to use the word “robbed,” but Mr. Rua was 100 percent robbed last night. Later today: watching Dream 12!) I just wanted to draw your attention to a New York Times essay I just stumbled upon. It’s about the Internet, and our increased dependence upon it. It’s pretty short, so it won’t kill you to read the whole thing.

The beauty of the Drudge Report right now is that Mr. Drudge is working against his very interests. He’s got some ridiculous headline right now, JULIUS AT FCC WANTS TO ‘REGULATE’ INTERNET, that’s meant to wile up his easily excitable readership. What’s going on is that the FCC has moved one step closer to bringin Net Neutrality to fruition, and has invited the public to weigh in until January 14.

Good news, everyone. All this Internet use may be slowing the onset of dementia. So says, sorta, a recent UCLA study that I’m sure every media outlet, including this one, has oversimplified. The study looked at a group of 55-78 year-old, half of whom never use the Internet, then told ‘em to go home and do a few Web searches. The findings, again, wildly oversimplified, suggest that the brain is able to adapt to this flood of new information (the stimuli, at least) and can then “alter the way the brain encodes new information.”

If you’re like me and love Car Talk, but don’t actually have a radio, you probably listen to NPR over the internet. If you love it so much you want to listen to it even when you’re away from your computer, you’re in luck. Livio, makers of the Pandora radio, have introduced a stand-alone, internet radio module, with NPR-exclusive capability.

Yup, another airline is poised to offer in-flight Wi-Fi. United Airlines has said that it will start use of Aircell’s Gogo service beginning with flights between New York and California. It’s $12.95 for laptop access for the duration of the flight.

Once again, the Internet has saved the day. As some of you may know, Setanta, a sports broadcaster, recently went out of business in the UK. The unfortunate thing is that Setanta held the rights to England (football/soccer) away games. England play the Ukraine, in Kiev, next week, in a World Cup qualifier, so that leaves English fans without a way to watch the game. (England have already qualified, so it’s not really a huge deal.) What do do?!

We have Internet access in planes now (Virgin America offers it in the US, for example), so why not on boats? That’s what one of Japan’s biggest telecommunications companies, KDDI, thought and now gives us a device that will allow ship passengers to enjoy wireless broadband Internet while being out on the water.

As expected, the chairman of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, announced today his agency’s support for Net Neutrality. Odds are if you’re reading us then you have a basic idea of what Net Neutrality is, but if not it can be summed up like this: ISPs will be expected to treat all data equally, and not favor 0s and 1s from Company A or Company B, no matter what sweetheart a deal may be in place. The idea is that, since all data is treated equally, consumers will have better, unfettered access to the sites and services they choose to support.

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 in June of 2008, but there’s still a few of you out there who haven’t upgraded, despite, if nothing else, the security improvements. So what gives? Mozilla asked the abstainers, essentially, “Why haven’t you upgraded?” The answer, of course, has to do with Internet pornography. Doesn’t it always?

Potentially bad news for you UK readers. An amendment to the big Digital Britain report would kick off “hardcore copyright pirates” from the Internet. The amendment would require ISPs to tell repeat offenders to knock it off, or else. The cost for doing this—it’s not exactly inexpensive to keep track of copyright infringement, mail out letters, etc.—will be burdened by both the ISPs and rights holders.

Raise your hand if you consider yourself an Internet addict. Go ahead, no one here will judge you. (How could we: all of us are online at least 12 hours per day.) The thing is, if you feel like your addiction actually represents a legitimate problem, fear not, for a new “detox” center, reStart Internet Addiction Recovery Program, has opened near Seattle. It’s the first of its kind in the U.S., and it will “help internet and video game addicts overcome their dependence on gaming, gambling, chatting, texting and other aspects of Internet Addiction.”

There’s two ways to look at the story that many of the country’s biggest ISPs have refused government stimulus money for broadband infrastructure investment. One, the ISPs patently don’t need the money, and are more than capable of delivering broadband to as many Americans as possible with their own capital. Two, the ISPs could use the money, but they’d prefer not to accept it lest they be beholden to all sorts of government-imposed restrictions, one of which relates to net neutrality.

So here’s an interesting look at Internet piracy you may well enjoy. The English Premier League complained the other day that illegal Web streams of live games (from Justin.tv and the like) were eating into its profits. No profits, no Premiership, was the implied threat. Then explain this to me: WWE ran a pay-per-view event in June called The Bash, and it marked the first time the company aggressively pursued illegal Web streams (again, from Justin.tv, Ustream, etc.). According to the company’s recently released financials, by way of the latest Wrestling Observer newsletter, The Bash was the third least purchased pay-per-view event “in years.”

A new poll, conducted by Common Sense Media, suggests that teens are complete idiots when it comes to comporting themselves online. A whopping 13 percent of teens have posted online nude or semi-nude photos of themselves or someone they know. And then some 25 percent of teens have posted something online that they later regretted. You know, drunk photos and the like.

To quote Grandpa Simpson, “Oh, bitch, bitch, bitch.” Today I woke up to reports that AT&T was being Evil, blocking access to certain sections of 4chan, which you’ll see described as anything from a “Wild West” to a “hornet’s nest.” (That blocking has since stopped, by the way.) I like to describe it as the last honest place on the Internet. People are creative like that. Anyhow, before you e-riot or whatever, consider this posting by an admin at unWired, another ISP that was blocking access to 4chan.

Green Dam, a filtering software that’s supposed to protect China’s population from harmful content (and can be called a piece of garbage on more than one level), seems to trigger anticipatory obedience (you could also call it business sense, I guess) within some PC companies. Even though the Chinese government postponed its plans to make the software mandatory with all PC shipments in the country from July 1, Acer, Asustek and Lenovo already bundle their hardware with Green Dam.

UPDATE – Information from Lenovo after the jump.