Oh, just peruse it:

One thing that was particularly fantastic from the protests over the two bills in Congress that most of the Internet was protesting over yesterday, was the plethora of creative videos that were released.

Here are two that I liked a lot — a comic one from Jest, called “Wikipedia/SOPA Survival Kit”; and a very cogent argument against the legislation, from Clay Shirky on the TED Web site, titled “Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)”:

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.):

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again. The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business. It has done this by eliminating the tollgates, middle men, and other barriers to entry that have so often predetermined winners and losers in the marketplace. It has created a world where ideas, products and creative expression have an opportunity regardless of who offers them or where they originate.

Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don’t. They are a step towards an Internet in which online innovators need lawyers as much or more than they need good ideas. And they are a step towards a world in which Americans have less of a voice to argue for a free and open Internet around the world.

Legal Team, Red Hat Software:

In a single generation, the Internet has transformed our world to such an extent that it is easy to forget its miraculous properties and take it for granted. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that our future economic growth depends on our ability to use the Internet to share new ideas and technology. Measures that block the freedom and openness of the Internet also hinder innovation. That poses a threat to the future success of Red Hat and other innovative companies.

The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA claim that the bills are intended to thwart web piracy. Yet, the bills overreach, and could put a website out of business after a single complaint. Web sites would vanish, and have little recourse, if they were suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks.

The good news is that there is growing opposition from many quarters to these bills. Just this past weekend, the White House expressed serious concerns, opposing legislation — like SOPA and PIPA — that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Lanham Napier, CEO, Rackspace:

In my last blog post on SOPA and PIPA, I explained why Rackspace — along with much of the Internet community — opposes these bills in their current form. They are well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good. Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.

Since then, I and other Rackers have been working with key lawmakers to fix the bills so that they will (a) actually be effective in fighting online piracy, and (b) avoid disrupting the Internet or imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers.

We at Rackspace are on the front lines of the battle against copyright infringers and other online criminals. We employ dedicated teams that take enforcement actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as our own strict Acceptable Use Policy every day. We agree that better tools are needed for this fight but SOPA and PIPA do not fit the bill.

Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association:

“It is increasingly clear that bills causing collateral damage to innovation in the guise of fighting piracy are not politically viable. Now that unreasonable solutions to piracy have been shown not to work, it is time to explore reasonable ones. We urge policymakers to join CEA in support of the OPEN Act — a bicameral, bipartisan and narrowly targeted approach to fighting foreign “rogue websites.”

Paul Hortenstine, Motion Picture Association of America, which supports the bills:

The legislation targets criminals: foreign thieves who profit from pirated content and counterfeit goods. These foreign rogue websites are operating freely today while legitimate American businesses are opposing legislation that would block these criminal websites from the American market.

The Pirate Bay, a site that links visitors to pirated content and would arguably fit someone’s definition of “foreign rogue Web site”:

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

Ben Greenman, Contributor, The New Yorker:

Dear Spanish speakers, I was only joking when I said you think we’re all protesting soup. Geez: People are so touchy on blackout days

January 18, 2012 8:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengreenman

Ben Greenman

Many Internet companies and boldfaced names in tech have in recent weeks been vociferously opposing the passage of the bills, saying the provisions that would thwart piracy would also create an environment of censorship and unfairly target certain sites as being compliant in piracy. Supporters of the bills, meanwhile, say that the laws are necessary to clamp down on sites that circulate copyrighted content outside the U.S.

For those protesting the bills, some Web sites and developers have created options to help other Web users who want to black out all or portions of their sites.

SopaStrike.com is offering “blackout code” for Web users to copy and paste into the theme section of Web sites to protest SOPA/PIPA. The site says the code will only be available today.

The site encourages visitors to join the strike, sign up online and send letters to Congress. It also has a full list of confirmed participants in the strike.

CloudFlare is offering a “Stop Censorship” app that blacks out intermittent words on your site (you have to have a CloudFlare account to access the app). Visitors to your site will see the black bars only the first time they visit; after that, they’ll see a black “censored” label in the upper left corner of the site. CloudFlare also says it won’t block links, and is taking an SEO-friendly approach to blacking out words.

For users who don’t have a CloudFlare account, there’s a plugin available on GitHub, created by CloudFlare coder Mike Sofaer.

Some Webmasters might be concerned about the short-term impact of blacking out their sites, even if it is in solidarity with the national protest. WebMonkey points to a Google+ post from Google’s Pierre Far on how to black out sites the “right” way. He also notes, interestingly, that Google’s crawl team has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only, so that the Google search results of Web sites involved in the strike are less likely to be affected today.

Around midnight last night, Google put up a blackout banner in front of its homepage logo; Wikipedia, BoingBoing and other sites also went dark. As AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl writes, sites like Google could find themselves in legal hot water under SOPA and PIPA just for linking to pirated content in search results.

Still confused about what the SOPA protests are all about? AllThingsD has been covering the story, so here’s the latest, along with a growing list of participating Web sites. And the Guardian has a video explainer here.

iStockphoto | oblachko

The plan is simple: Sites participating in the protest will go dark for the day or take some other action. Wikipedia, for example, will black out the English-language portions of its site for 24 hours. The move will likely shut out some 10 million users during the course of the day.

Politico pegs the estimated number of sites that will be affected in some way by the protest at 7,000.

Among the sites participating:

• Google will post a link on its home page to a document explaining its opposition to the bill.
• Mozilla.com, home of the popular Web browser Firefox, will go dark will do two things, see the update below.
• Reddit, the social news site owned by Advance Publications, will go dark.
• WordPress.org will go dark.
• TwitPic, the popular site where Twitter users share photographs, will go dark.
• MoveOn.org, the liberal-leaning political site, will go dark.
• The Cheezburger network, including sites like The Daily What and Fail Blog, will be dark.
• BoingBoing.net will be dark.
• Several gaming companies, including Minecraft.net, Riot Games, Epic Games, 38 Studios and Red 5 Studios, will be dark.

Update: Mozilla just sent a statement outlining what it will do for the protest: It will redirect traffic from the main Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com English websites to an action page for 12 hours on Wednesday, January 18th from 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern Time. It will also make the default Firefox start page black so that the tens of millions of Firefox users will see a black page with a call to action message rather than the traditional white page with the Firefox logo.

Since the list is in flux, Irish bookmakers saw a chance to get into the act by accepting bets concerning which sites will go down for the day and which ones won’t.

Wikileaks was the favorite at 5-to-1 odds that it would join the protest. Myspace, the once mighty social network, was running a close second at 7 to 1, while Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site, was at 8 to 1. Here’s a list of additional bets that Paddy Power was accepting:

14/1 YouTube
40/1 Amazon
50/1 Yahoo!
66/1 Facebook
66/1 TMZ
66/1 IMDb
80/1 LinkedIn
80/1 EMI
100/1 Twitter
100/1 eBay
100/1 AOL
100/1 iTunes
100/1 HBO
100/1 MSN
200/1 Sony
200/1 Universal Studios
200/1 Bing
200/1 Ask
250/1 BBC
250/1 Disney
500/1 Google
500/1 Fox

The U.S. software giant said in a statement that a protest erupted earlier this month over “staffing assignments and transfer policies, not working conditions” at the Wuhan facility, where Foxconn reportedly manufactures the Xbox game console. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft said workers at the plant manufacture hardware products but didn’t specify which ones.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

I am not exactly sure what to make of this funkadelic remix by former Disney tween queen and pop singer Miley Cyrus of her “Liberty Walk,” to honor the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Her singing, interspersed with images of the protests all over the world, is more than a little surreal, but it gets an A for effort!

BART authorities said they shut down parts of a wireless phone network in four of the system’s stations as part of a tactic to slow down the efforts of protesters, and that they did it because protesters had said they would use mobile devices to “coordinate their disruptive activities.” Such a disruption, BART officials argued, could lead to overcrowding on train platforms and cause “unsafe conditions,” fears of which justified the move.

The National Journal reports the FCC is looking into the shutdown of wireless service, but as yet is only “collecting information” about the actions that were taken. “Any time communications services are interrupted, we seek to assess the situation,” FCC spokesman Neil Grace said.

The protests were in response to the fatal shooting by BART police on July 3 of a man who allegedly pulled a knife on the officers. BART officials say they’re on solid legal ground. Meanwhile, another protest is planned for tonight.

That was fast.

Which is probably apt, given the subject matter of a book coming out soon made up of real-time Twitter from Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

“Tweets from Tahrir,” which is being published by Or Books on April 21, says it is chronicling “an entirely new way of telling history.”

It will indeed be interesting to see all the myriad of tweets compiled in one place.

And the impact of social tools on the various protests in the Mideast will definitely be great fodder for some historian in the future.

That said, some think the focus on Silicon Valley social tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, rather than on the people’s will, is overhyped.

Still, social networking is simply a reflection of humanity, so examining its impact is well worth a read.

Plus, tweets are only 140 characters, so it is an easy one too.

Here is the press release on the book:

TWEETS FROM TAHRIR

Egypt’s Revolution as It Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It

Edited by NADIA IDLE and ALEX NUNNS

With a foreword by AHDAF SOUEIF

Gsquare86M Gigi Ibrahim
Everyone in Cairo who wants Mubarak out and stands for justice come to Tahrir NOW!
Feb 2

“Without the new media the Egyptian Revolution could not have happened in the way that it did. The causes of the revolution were many; deep-rooted and long seated. The turning moment had come–but it was the instant and wide-spread nature of the new media that made it possible to recognise the moment and to push it into such an effective manifestation.”

–Ahdaf Soueif

The Twitter accounts of the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in January and February this year paint an exhilarating picture of an uprising in real-time. Thousands of young people documented on cell phones every stage of the action, as it happened. This book brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Tahrir Square.

Some of the activists were ‘citizen journalists’, using Twitter to report on what was happening. Others used the social network to organize, communicating the next steps necessary for the revolution to move forward. Nearly everyone online gave instant reactions to the extraordinary events occurring before their eyes.

History has never before been recorded in this fashion. The tweet limit of 140 characters evidently concentrated the feelings of those using Twitter. Raw emotions burst from their messages, whether frantic alarm at attacks from pro-government thugs or delirious happiness at the fall of the dictator. To read these tweets is to embark a rollercoaster ride, from the surprise and excitement of the first demonstration, to the horror of the violence that claimed hundreds of lives, to the final ecstasy of victory.

Many of those tweeting also took photographs with their phones and these are used to illustrate the book, providing remarkable snapshots from the heart of the action.

Edited by young activists Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, an Egyptian who was in Tahrir Square when Mubarak fell, Tweets from Tahrir is a highly original take on one of the most important and dramatic events in recent world politics. The result is as gripping as any thriller–but it’s all real.

I can’t remember a year during which computer security stories jumped so readily from the tech and business pages to the front page.

The year 2010 was bookended by two such cases. It opened with Google’s disclosure that it had come under attack in China, an apparent attempt to penetrate the Gmail accounts of certain activists and journalists.

It ended with the WikiLeaks affair, which stemmed from the alleged theft by an Army private of classified documents stored on a government network.

And let’s not forget in mid-year came the story, as fascinating as it was sobering, of Stuxnet, a computer worm developed by parties unknown–although the smart money is on Israel–that penetrated and ultimately damaged equipment used in the Iranian nuclear program.

Computer hacking–which has for too long evoked images in the public mind-set of teenagers in basements taking digital joyrides–has finally revealed itself to everyone for what it has long been for those in the know: The domain of espionage, sabotage and possibly warfare.

In Google’s case, the attacks upon its systems raised questions about where it draws the line with authorities in Beijing about such matters as freedom of speech. When the attack was first disclosed, Google publicly mulled shutting down its operations in China.

Then in protest, it stopped censoring its search results, giving mainland Chinese access to the same search results available to residents of Hong Kong. Beijing responded by blocking access to Google’s site.

Finally, Google and China came to a new agreement, and Google appeared the loser in the battle of wills.

Computer security is one of those things that companies and governments say they take seriously, but never really seem to get a grip on, judging by the results.

In any case, there is no firewall or software in existence that could have prevented Bradley Manning from stealing the documents that he is alleged to have given to WikiLeaks. As a low-level Army intelligence analyst, he was a trusted insider who had access to this material in the course of his day-to-day job.

So, it was not technology that failed. The failure was one of internal policies that allowed him access to data not relevant to his position.

Any employee of a midsize company can see how wrong that is. Human-resources documents are limited only to those who work in that department. The same is true of people who work in the legal office, business development department and so on.

But it apparently didn’t occur to anyone in government to limit the access to what became the WikiLeaks cache to people who worked only for or closely with the State Department.

If it turns out that thousands of companies are better at protecting their business secrets than the U.S. government is, then it’s not for nothing that the Central Intelligence Agency task force investigating the WikiLeaks affair bears the initials “WTF.”

Something similar was true of Stuxnet. One of the reasons the attackers, whoever they are, succeeded was that they used several so-called “zero day” vulnerabilities in Windows.

These are undocumented weaknesses that hackers save up for special occasions as a way to open a back door into a computer and then insert a troublemaking payload, like a worm. Zero day exploits are a fact of life, and once spotted in the world, they’re usually patched.

The Stuxnet attackers used as many as four zero day exploits as a way to get their worm into targeted computers. Microsoft, to its credit, made short work of fixing them once they came to light.

Even so, the Stuxnet worm burrowed its way from Windows machines into industrial control computers known as SCADA systems, which are widely used to run factories, power plants, pipelines and all sorts of other infrastructure essential to modern life.

The worm was designed to find a specific target: The systems controlling a set of as many as 1,000 centrifuges at the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, and make them spin faster than they were supposed to.

The ability to attack industrial computers and cause them to do things they’re not supposed to do has been a lingering fear among security experts for years. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy in 2007 looked at the potential for attacks on SCADA systems and proved that it was possible to seize control of an electrical generator and then make it destroy itself.

They also found that many of these systems are connected to the Internet for what seem like good reasons: Convenience and cost savings. But these connections have also opened them up to the same kind of attacks that rattled the Iranian facility in Natanz.

Another Stuxnet-like worm, the thinking goes, could be used to bring down a power grid, or poison drinking water, or shut down an oil or gas pipeline. The good news is that such an attack is expensive–Stuxnet, by one estimate, cost $10 million to create–and requires a lot of specialized insider knowledge.

The bad news is that the Stuxnet source code is circulating in the wild for anyone to study. And as the WikiLeaks case shows, there are often insiders willing to take part in criminal schemes.

The other bad news? Securing these systems won’t come cheap.

If history is any judge, there will likely be a barrage of computer security companies that try to spin these incidents into opportunities to make a sales pitch. That’s what security companies do, after all.

But they usually miss the point. How can you plan for a vulnerability you’ve never seen? How can you stop an otherwise trusted insider from abusing their access to sensitive information? Both are fundamentally difficult problems for which there are no easy answers.

Spending money on last year’s security vulnerabilities is like preparing to fight the last war: Circumstances inevitably change, and they certainly will in 2011. New kinds of attacks will arise, and they will catch their targets by surprise.

And the public, like the CIA, will reasonably ask, “WTF?”

The unvarnished fact is that the networked society to which we’ve become accustomed in the last several years has a soft, vulnerable underbelly.

And the more we rely upon it, the more people with a combination of advanced technical skills and repugnant motivations are going to look for ways to turn it against us.

Some will do so as a means of making a personal profit. Others may see it as a way of advancing a political or ideological agenda.

But others will want to use theirs skills to do serious harm to innocent people on a large scale.

And the events of 2010 point the way to a world where that’s a more realistic scenario than it ever was before.

“Like any service-orientated business, we are not too big to listen to the needs of our customers,” HSBC said in a statement. “Following the feedback from our graduate account holders, we have taken the decision to freeze interest-charging on 2007 graduates’ overdrafts up to £1,500 and refund any interest charged in August.”

An impressive achievement for armchair organizing, eh? And a hell of a lot easier than attending a student march.

“There can be no doubt that using Facebook made the world of difference to our campaign,” said National Union of Students Vice President Wes Streeting. “By setting up a group on a site that is incredibly popular with students, it enabled us to contact our members during the summer vacation far more easily than would otherwise have been possible. It also meant that we could involve our former members–the graduates who were going to be most affected by this policy.”

“Like any service-orientated business, we are not too big to listen to the needs of our customers,” HSBC said in a statement. “Following the feedback from our graduate account holders, we have taken the decision to freeze interest-charging on 2007 graduates’ overdrafts up to £1,500 and refund any interest charged in August.”

An impressive achievement for armchair organizing, eh? And a hell of a lot easier than attending a student march.

“There can be no doubt that using Facebook made the world of difference to our campaign,” said National Union of Students Vice President Wes Streeting. “By setting up a group on a site that is incredibly popular with students, it enabled us to contact our members during the summer vacation far more easily than would otherwise have been possible. It also meant that we could involve our former members–the graduates who were going to be most affected by this policy.”