Go Daddy spanks SOPA, yanks support

Found on CNet News on Saturday, 24 December 2011
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Following criticism from customers for its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, domain registrar Go Daddy today said that it's no longer backing the legislation.

In addition, the company has also taken down blog posts where it outlined its support for portions of the bill.

Just yesterday, the creator of icanhascheezburger.com, among other sites, vowed to move 1,000 domains held by parent company Cheezburger, Inc. to another registrar if Go Daddy did not change its stance on the matter.

And today, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales tweeted that the company was moving away from using Go Daddy given the company's support for the bill.

Surprise, surprise. Suddenly Go Daddy does not like SOPA anymore.

Facebook: Ads help keep us free

Found on CNet News on Thursday, 22 December 2011
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Facebook has kicked off a new Web page explaining how and why the social network depends on advertising.

"Selling your information would actually be bad for Facebook. Here's why: Facebook was created to help you share and connect with the people in your life. If you don't feel like you're in control of who sees what you share, you probably won't use Facebook as much, and you'll share less with your friends."

I won't be in control with the continuous privacy changes Facebook makes, so I won't use it at all. I don't even trust it enough to make a fake account just for fun.

Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages

Found on Thread Post on Wednesday, 14 December 2011
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Collected together were records of when Schrems logged in and out of the social network, the times and content of sent and received messages and an accounting of every person and thing he’s ever liked, posted, poked, friended or recorded. The archive captured friend requests, former or alternative names and email addresses, employment and relationship statuses and photos, in some cases with their GPS locations included, to name a few. To Schrems' dismay, much of the data he received from the network was information he thought he had deleted. Facebook, it seems, doesn't think much of the Delete key and continued to hold copies of the data on its servers.

This shouldn't be much of a surprise. After all, your data is what makes Facebook rich.

Jimbo Wales ponders Wikipedia blackout

Found on The Register on Tuesday, 13 December 2011
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Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales is contemplating taking "the encyclopedia anyone can edit" down – temporarily – in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently wending its way through Congress.

In a nutshell, supporters claim that SOPA is needed to protect rights-holders from unauthorized use of their content online, while those opposing it say that the law goes too far by placing undue burdens on content-hosting sites, search engines, and ISPs both nationally and internationally, and is based on a "guillty until proven innocent" model.

That might actually be a good move, because politicians only act when they are affected. Taking Wikipedia away from politicians is such a move. On the other hand, letting SOPA pass might not be that bad either as it most likely kills Silicone Valley and causes a change of future development locations to other more Internet friendly countries.

Senator Lieberman asks Google to add 'terrorist' label to Blogger posts

Found on IT World on Friday, 25 November 2011
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Terrorist suspect Jose Pimentel had a blog on Blogger, owned by Google. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) wants Google to add a "terrorist" flag so readers can label terrorist content.

Unfortunately, Lieberman doesn't define what he considers "terrorist content" or whether deleting posts with such content is within the purview of Blogger or the First Amendment. Google, not surprisingly, has yet to comment.

I remember that at some point in the past, the american freedom fighters were considered terrorists by the British empire. Today, they are heroes.

Tor project asks Amazon to add bandwidth through its cloud

Found on The Inquirer on Tuesday, 22 November 2011
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Amazon's cloud service Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers virtual computer capacity, and developers at Tor are calling on people to sign up to the Amazon service and run a bridge.

The Tor Project allows people to route their online communications anonymously and is used by activists as well as others seeking anonymity. It has been used in countries with oppressive political regimes.

Anonymity is one the most important factors when you want to make use of your right of free speech; especially when the country you are living in is anything but friendly, like Syria. Unfortunately, some out there believe that Tor also is a good tool for filesharing. Not only makes this the network way slower for people who actually have to rely on it, but it also doesn't makes much sense, since Tor bandwidth is usually exceptionally low.

'Occupy Flash' developers want to kill off Adobe browser plug-in

Found on Computerworld UK on Friday, 18 November 2011
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"Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates," said the Occupy Flash site. "It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology."

Occupy Flash urged browser users to uninstall Flash Player, and provided instructions for both Windows and Mac OS X users to do so. It also called on developers on stop using Flash in future projects, and encouraged users to upgrade to a browser that supports HTML5.

"We're pretty realistic about the facts," said the Occupy Flash spokesman. "Flash Player is on like 99% of the desktops. Our little movement won't change that, but we want to start the conversation.

I am one of the 1%. Not running Flash makes surfing the web much nicer. One of the main uses for Flash are ads; and while advertisers may think different, I do not like being bothered by some animated ad which often enough also includes sound and does nothing but annoy me.

OpenDNS Tells Congress Not To Create The Great Firewall Of America

Found on Techdirt on Wednesday, 09 November 2011
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He's someone who clearly understands DNS and DNS/IP blocking better than probably anyone. And he told me that if SOPA were in place when he was first creating OpenDNS, he wouldn't have bothered. The liability would be just too great.

It’s likely that if SOPA and PIPA existed when I started my company, we would have incorporated outside of the United States and all of the jobs and investment that I have put into the economy would have been taken elsewhere.

If we implemented such a solution we would be setting a terrible example for the rest of the world, including countries we criticize for the same behavior like Iran, Syria, and China.

How much longer will Congress continue to ignore the people who actually understand the technology they're trying to regulate?

For as long as those who want to cripple everything have the better lobbyists and deep pockets.

Why Is It So Hard to Give a Record Label My Money?

Found on Music Think Tank on Tuesday, 08 November 2011
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The album was released overseas earlier this year. I don’t want to buy the cd and pay for shipping and wait, I want the music now and I want to pay for it.

Guess what, I can’t buy it. The album is available in iTunes Finland, but not the US. That is the problem.

Two weeks later I ran into this exact same problem again.

Then I hit the band’s website. They have a iTunes link so I click it, it takes me to a iTunes Canada page and since I am in the US I can’t buy the album. Really, again! I am ready to buy some music and because I am in the US I am not allowed to buy.

Leave it to the industry to provide reasons for that "evil" sharing. They still think in countries and try to apply that thinking to a global medium where nobody cares about borders and region codes.

Google dumps + from Boolean search tool

Found on The Register on Monday, 24 October 2011
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Google has quietly dropped the use of the + symbol to link search items, in a move it says will simplify the process of Boolean searching.

“We're constantly making changes to Google Search - adding new features, tweaking the look and feel, running experiments - all to get you the information you need as quickly and as easily as possible,” said Kelly Fee, Google Search community manager in a Google forum. “This recent change is another step toward simplifying the search experience to get you to the info you want.”

What a totally stupid move. Having to type two quotation marks instead of one plus sign surely enhances my experience. Just like the instant suggestions which slow my search down and the instant preview which is so annoying when accidentally having it pop up while navigating the search results. Google is going downhill fast with those changes and gives competitors a good chance.