The Internet is fighting back.
Today, hundreds of websites including some of the largest and most influential sites in the world are going black to fight the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. The two acts would give unprecedented power to the government of the United States to order blocking and takedown notices of foreign websites found to be infringing on copyrighted material such as movies and music. The drumbeat is loud and most of the U.S. technology industry has come out against SOPA/PIPA.
Today's blackout is akin to a "sit-in" protest. It is extreme but non-violent and non-threatening and once the point is made the players will move on to other forms of protest. Google has blacked out its logo on its homepage, Wikipedia is denying (top picture) access to entries and Reddit is giving facts about SOPA and what you can do to stop it. What does a blacked out Internet look like? Take a look at the screenshot below.
The U.S. Supreme Court will not hear a case this term that could have clarified the authority schools have over students and their use of social media when they're not in school.
On Tuesday, the court said it would not hear appeals on the suspension of a West Virginia student who ridiculed another student or a lower court's decision to overturn a Pennsylvania school district's suspension of a student who posted comments about her principal online. Officials on both sides of the issue saw the high court's decision as a setback, as it means it will be at least another year before the Supreme Court offers clarity to an issue that has divided lower courts.
A ruling by the Supreme Court on any of the cases it was asked to hear may have also updated a Vietnam-era free speech ruling that has become dated in the Internet age. The 1969 ruling applied to on-campus speech that would "materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school." More recently, however, the ruling in Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District has been interpreted to give schools authority over comments students make on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other social networks, regardless of the student's physical location when the comments are posted.
U.S. Representative Lamar Smith would like to remind you that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) he helped architect is not dead yet. The House will continue marking up the proposed legislation in February, according to a press release. By the beginning of this week, the bill was considered by many to be as good as dead, given recent political developments, including a statement from the Obama Administration that condemned the more restrictive and controversial aspects of SOPA and related legislation.
The news comes a matter of hours before the start of what is expected to be a widespread, Web-based protest against the anti-piracy legislation. Yesterday, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made headlines by announcing that the enormous, user-generated encyclopedia will go dark tomorrow in protest of SOPA, joining Reddit, Mozilla, BoingBoing, all of the Cheezburger sites and others.
The last time you cleaned out your inbox, how many of those emails were auto-generated notifications from social networks and other websites? Unless you're particularly aggressive about turning off default notifications, it was probably more than a few. You've been meaning to get around to going through and changing all those settings, but - oh hey, hang on, there's another email.
Editing the notification settings on a few big Web services doesn't sound like a big deal, and in reality it's not. But in all the digital, real-time chaos of life online, it's easy to put off. You might zap one when you think of it, but what about the rest of them? Are you really going to sit there, hunt them all down and annihilate them?
Facebook is ready to unleash a string of verbs into your Timeline. According to a report from AllThingsD, the Facebook Open Graph will be unleashed on the ecosystem this week bringing more "read, watch, listen" applications to the social platform. Open Graph apps that track what you eat, where and how far you run and what purchases you make could be announced as early as tomorrow.
Open Graph apps are the final installment of what Facebook announced at its f8 Developers' Conference in San Francisco last September. Open Graph apps are the coup de grace to Timeline. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, "We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them."
After several weeks of speculation and debate, the English version of Wikipedia is going to be blacked out this Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its legislative brethren. The massive, open source encyclopedia will join Reddit, Mozilla and others in this week's show of anti-SOPA sentiment, founder Jimmy Wales announced today.
With an estimated 25 million daily visitors, Wikipedia is the largest site to take part in the blackout. Reddit, a wildly popular website with massive traffic, only garners a fraction of the pageviews that Wikipedia gets in a month, and even those page views are typically dominated by a certain subset of the Internet community. Wikipedia is viewed by a much more mainstream audience, a fact certain to propel SOPA further into the consciousness of everyday, non-geek Web users.
When it comes down to it, the value offered by services like Netflix and Hulu is primarily in their content offerings. Sure, they provide an on-demand, convenient way of consuming that content from a multitude of devices, but at the end of the day, it's all about the television shows and movies available on each service. Historically, the premium videos that stream online have consisted almost entirely of material originally produced for another, older medium. In 2012, that's slowly beginning to change.
After what turned out to be a pretty good year in 2011, Hulu announced last week that they are planning to invest $500 million in new content initiatives. That will undoubtedly include more pricey agreements with traditional content providers, but today the company revealed another place it plans on spending that money: on original programming.
Former chief information officer of the United States Vivek Kundra is joining Salesforce as its executive vice president for emerging markets. Kundra, who was the first ever CIO of the U.S., left the position in the summer of 2011 to join Harvard's Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society with a six-month fellowship. He joins Salesforce at a time when cloud computing is ready to be pushed across the world, a job he is specifically suited for.
Mozilla has some big plans up its sleeve in 2012. The non-profit open source foundation is planning some features for its Firefox Web browser and beyond that will require greater access to user data. In a blog post, the organization explains exactly how it intends to use and handle that data. In short, very carefully.
Some of Mozilla's initiatives for this year include an HTML5 Web app store, a mobile operating system and perhaps most intensive of all, a decentralized system for user identification and authentication at the browser level. In other words, a browser-based replacement for usernames and passwords.
Grooveshark may have been booted from both the iTunes App Store and Android Market, but that's not stopping the controversial music streaming startup from forging ahead with its mobile strategy. Rather than going back and forth with Apple and Google, the company has taken matters into its own hands by launching a Web app that forgoes Flash in favor of HTML5.
The Grooveshark HTML5 app can stream music from any modern mobile browser, including Safari on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Until now, the service wouldn't work on (non-jailbroken) iOS devices, since the desktop Web app for Grooveshark utilizes Flash for playback.
