SOPA and PIPA Defeated

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Internet wins: SOPA and PIPA both shelved

Only hours after Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that he was delaying a vote on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), followed suit and announced he would be delaying consideration of the companion legislation.

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

“The Committee will continue work with both copyright owners and Internet companies to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property,” Smith continued. “We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem.”

Former Senator Chris Dodd, head of Motion Picture Association of America, seemed to admit defeat as well. ”With today’s announcement, we hope the dynamics of the conversation can change and become a sincere discussion about how best to protect the millions of American jobs affected by the theft of American intellectual property,” he said in a statement. “It is incumbent that they now sincerely work with all of us to achieve a meaningful solution to this critically important goal.”

While the general idea of SOPA and PIPA may return sometime down the line in redesigned form, their present forms, and names, are done for good. A key figure in the fight against SOPA was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). Issa planned to use his perch as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to highlight the flaws of SOPA’s DNS blocking provisions. His intentions were to hold a hearing featuring the testimony of actual technical experts, something that Smith’s hearings on the bill failed to include. Wednesday’s internet protests were scheduled to coincide with the hearings, but Issa scrapped his hearing after receiving assurances that the DNS provisions would be dropped from SOPA. The protests against SOPA and PIPA definitely continued and were very successful.

“Supporters of the Internet deserve credit for pressing advocates of SOPA and PIPA to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation,” Issa said in a Friday statement. “Over the last two months, the intense popular effort to stop SOPA and PIPA has defeated an effort that once looked unstoppable.”

“Postponing the Senate vote on PIPA removes the imminent threat to the Internet, but it’s not over yet,” Issa continued. “Copyright infringement remains a serious problem and any solution must be targeted, effective, and consistent with how the Internet works.”

Source: Ars Technica

SOPA Protests

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SOPA protest by the numbers: 162M pageviews, 7 million signatures

Millions upon millions of people witnessed the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) today as some of the Web’s most popular sites, including Google, reddit, Wikipedia, and Craigslist, staged protests against SOPA and its companion PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The organizations that staged these protests are beginning to release hard numbers on the response, and they are pretty powerful.

The Wikimedia Foundation stated that it reached 162 million people with Wikipedia’s 24-hour English-language protest of the anti-piracy bills. Of those, more than 8 million readers in the United States then went and looked up contact information for their members of Congress, which could be done through the site. That being said, at least tens of thousands, if not more, of calls to congressional offices were more than likely made.

“The Wikipedia blackout is over and the public has spoken,” said Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director. “You shut down the Congressional switchboards, and you melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong.”

Google did not go as far as blacking out its entire site as Wikipedia did, but it did have a black bar over their logo, as their Doodle, and encouraged users to sign the petition opposing SOPA, which went viral on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook very quickly. Google generated at least 13 million page views to its anti-SOPA page and got 7 million people to sign its petition.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal advocacy group, received 200,000 signatures on its petition. The organization stated that more than 30,000 Craigslist users called Congress through the PCCC’s website.

Not all was done on the internet. Opposers of SOPA and PIPA also staged in-person protests. Two of the largest protests were in New York City and San Francisco. All four of their senators are PIPA co-sponsors, despite them being the nation’s largest high-tech communities. Close to a thousand protestors were at the Manhattan offices of the New York senators. In San Francisco, speakers ranged from internet librarian Brewster Kahle to rapper MC Hammer. “When they say that it is to protect rights to content, that may be the surface, but as you drill down, you see all these other clauses that would put a tremendous burden upon service providers and a whole lot of other people,” Hammer said. He described SOPA as a “barbaric” bill that would “give the government the ability to shut down sites without due process.”

“This was one of the biggest outpourings of grassroots sentiment that I’ve ever experienced on Capitol Hill and it’s begun to tip the scales against SOPA and in favor of an open Internet,” Chris Fitzgerald, communications director for Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), told Ars. “The phones rang off the hook once people became more aware of how SOPA will endanger jobs, free speech, and the Internet itself.” Polis is a longtime SOPA opponent.

At least 19 senators have declared their opposition to PIPA, including seven former co-sponsors. Senator Patty Murray of Washington expressed new reservations about the legislation.

Source: Ars Technica

Anonymous Against DoJ

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Anonymous is back, and this time they have launched a pair of operations. The first is in response to the takedown of the Megaupload.com site by the FBI and other authorities. The second operation is to continue to support the protest for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). However, their operation is targeting the members of Congress that support it. So far, the sites of the Justice Department, Universal Music Group, and several congressional sites have been affected.

The attacks began as Anonymous’ Sabu called for people to boycott paid media in all forms and to promote torrent and file sharing sites. “This new, massive operation, will target on SOPA/PIPA in a way that the government was not expecting,” he posted on Twitter. “We are going to starve the beast.” In response to the arrest of Megaupload.com’s founders, he said, “This is the governments way of saying: ‘How nice of you to protest SOPA/PIPA. But we still are in control.’ Fuck this.”

The Department of Justice and Universal Music sites were both made unavailable by denial of service attacks. Anonymous’ Barrett Brown told RT.com that “It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org.” Both sites remained down for quite some time and attacks were being mounted for a few days. Anonymous members have also targeted the sites of the Motion Picture Association of America and the White House, as well as other government sites.

In a wave of attacks labelled “OpDonkeyPunch” by Barrett Brown, the frequent spokesperson for Anonymous, the group is targeting Democrats in Congress who support SOPA. OpDonkeyPunch is directly targeting those people’s websites. Brown also published the fax machine phone number for Republic Rep. Lamar Smith, sponsor of SOPA.

In an e-mail, Brown stated that the intention of OpDonkeyPunch “is to show Democrats that they can’t just slide through on this and escape notice, that we can do more damage to their fundraising ability than they realize.” The efforts of Anonymous have extended and expanded to Facebook and Twitter accounts of SOPA supporters. However, they are not hacking these accounts, as they don’t want these sites shut down at all. No, Anonymous is spamming messages to the supporters messages, walls, and feeds.

Source: Ars Technica

Google Plus Doubles Membership

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Google doubles Plus membership with brute-force signup process

Google CEO Larry Page gave a statistic that surprised many people during last week’s quarterly earnings call. He stated that Google+ now has 90 million users, which is double what it had three months ago. But going even further, he claimed that 60 percent of those users are engaged daily, and 80 percent weekly.
 
After being analyzed, it was noted that these users aren’t necessarily engaging with Google+, but any Google service when signed in to their Google+ account. They could just have went to Google.com to use Google Search and have gotten included in the engaging users. Facebook currently has 800 million active users, and 50 percent of them log in each day. Google+ isn’t revealing that kind of information and has stated many times that that type of information doesn’t matter.
 
“If you try to create a Google account from Google’s homepage, you’ll notice that Google redesigned the page, but that’s not all. You’ll now have to create a Gmail account, a Google Profile and you’ll automatically join Google+,” the Google Operating System blog states. “Until now, creating a Google account was quite simple. You could either use an existing e-mail address or create a Gmail account. The redesigned form includes new fields: name, gender (required for Google+) and mobile phone number (not required).”
 
The only exception to this statement is that a Google+ account is not automatically created for users who are under 18 years of age. Otherwise, that is definitely the truth.
 
We understand that Google+ is a lot newer than Facebook so it isn’t quite ready to be a competitor for the popularity of social networking. However, Google’s method for expanding membership captures a large number of “users” who barely ever visit the site. Facebook accounts are only created when the person tries to do so. Google has also had a past reputation of presenting statistics about Google+ usage in a misleading way during its quarterly earnings calls.
 
All in all, Google+ is a great platform which seems to attract more tech-savvy professionals than not. It would be interesting to see the real statistics instead of Google’s misguided ones, but I’m afraid that will likely not happen for quite some time.
 

Source: Ars Technica

Xbox Ambassador Tyler

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Ambassador Conversation via MSN Messenger

I’m very excited to say that I have been accepted to the Xbox Ambassador team. While I cannot call myself a direct employee of Microsoft and am not to advertise as such, I am officially volunteering my time for Xbox and Xbox Live. Above isn’t the best image in the world, so feel free to click on the image and it will expand.

As of now, what I do is take questions via MSN Messenger, though the user doesn’t know that I’m on the messenger. I can hit “y” to accept a question or “n” to deny it and let someone else take it who might be able to help more. I’ve taken quite a few and found myself getting along with the users great, so perhaps I have a future in this, I’m not sure.

To be accepted, the Xbox Live Enforcement team basically ran a background check on me and liked how I play and what I do. As of now I am an Xbox Ambassador, but hopefully I can work my way up to the XBLPET (Xbox Live Protection and Enforcement Team). I love helping people and being able to do so on the Xbox 360 is just perfect for me. I love the interactions I’ve had and haven’t had to let anyone go yet without solving their issue. I just have a knack for knowing what I’m doing, I guess.

If you have any questions about this position, me, or whatever else, feel free to comment here or message me on Xbox Live at TylerW507.

Reddit Protesting SOPA

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reddit going dark for a day to protest SOPA online censorship bill

On January 18th, the online community known as reddit will go offline for 12 hours in opposition of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently being considered in the House and its companion PROTECT IP Act in the Senate. These two bills would give copyright holders power to have websites blocked, to get their advertising cut off, and to shut down their credit card or PayPal payments.

 

reddit’s community has been organizing all manner of oppositions to the two bills. Their most successful attempt included targeting GoDaddy, who supported the legislation until reddit’s Move Your Domain Day. This time, site admins decided to get involved in order to get the word out to all of reddit’s users.

 

“Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action,” they announced yesterday.

 
“We’re not taking this action lightly. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it.”
 
reddit community members have been using /r/sopa to organize, posting custom signs, various pieces of Internet anti-SOPA artwork, such as the image at the top targeting SOPA backer Representative Lamar Smith, and suggestions for making their collective voice be heard around the world. One of the bigger ideas that I’ve seen included trying to convince Google to join the blackout, which more than likely won’t happen, but it sure would be powerful.
 
Source: Ars Technica