With the launch of President Obama's White House website, three days ago, there has been extensive use of YouTube videos on the site. As we all know Google now owns YouTube and tracks every visitor that lands on the YouTube website or plays a YouTube video.

By Thursday evening the White House website replace the YouTube video player with an image of their own player.

There is really no good reason for Google to track White House website visitors who choose to watch a video that was produced by the White House staff and paid for by the taxpayers.

Corey Smith was a high school teacher, doing weekend music gigs. Then, apparently, his manager had a revelation and started giving all of his music away for free: and last year Corey brought in $4.2 million. And the music industry is complaining that if the government doesn't step in creative content will cease to exist?

However, as an experiment, they took down the free tracks from Corey's website for a period of time last summer... and sales on iTunes went down.

But, still, the real money maker for Corey is concerts, and even here he's doing something innovative: making concert tickets cheap: $5.

The RIAA claims that the re-runs "will be readily subject to editing and manipulation by any reasonably tech-savvy individual."

"Petitioners are concerned that, unlike a trial transcript, the broadcast of a court proceeding through the internet will take on a life of its own in that forum," the RIAA wrote (.pdf) the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. "The broadcast will be readily subject to editing and manipulation by any reasonably tech-savvy individual. Even without improper modification, statements may be taken out of context, spliced together with other statements and broadcast (sic) rebroadcast as if it were an accurate transcript. Such an outcome can only do damage to Petitioner's case."

Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Tracy Langkilde has shown that native fence lizards in the southeastern United States are adapting to potentially fatal invasive fire-ant attacks by developing behaviors that enable them to escape from the ants, as well as by developing longer hind legs, which can increase the effectiveness of this behavior.

In the future, Langkilde plans to study the mechanism behind the behavioral changes following invasion. Non-responsive lizards tend to be killed and removed from the gene pool.

It seems the RIAA is, once again, showing its true colors. When Charlie Nesson asked the court in the Tenebaum case to allow a live internet broadcast of a hearing to dismiss the case, the RIAA protested.

It turns out that the RIAA is so against the idea that it's gone and asked an appeals court to overturn the ruling, which even has entertainment industry lawyers who support the lawsuit strategy questioning the RIAA's move here.

British ISP Demon Internet is no longer blocking access to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, after working in tandem with the IA to correct a "technical issue" with its child-pornography filter.

The IWF soon confirmed that its blacklist contains at least one image hosted by the Wayback Machine.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal.

Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.

One commentator labels it 'another fly in the RIAA's ointment.' In SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, the Boston, Massachusetts, RIAA case in which the defendant is represented by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson and a group of his students, the Judge has ruled that the hearing scheduled for January 22nd will be televised over the Internet.

Germany's Minister for Families has announced a legislative initiative to force ISPs to implement a government-mandated block list (in English), which will be updated daily.

As usual, this is being brought in under the 'fight child porn' guise. The minister is quoted as saying: 'We must not water down the problem' in reply to being challenged that this law and technology could be used to censor other content. She then went on to say: 'I can't know what wishes and plans future governments will develop.'

Spammers have been hard at work at regaining their past momentum. Over the past year, the botnet landscape has changed, especially since the McColo shutdown.

Some of the former kings of the hill, botnets such as Srizbi, were badly hurt by the shutdown.

Depending on whom you ask the amount of spam declined 50 to 70 percent in the wake of the McColo shutdown in November.