ReadWriteWeb

Over the past few days, we've watched a battle unfold between two Internet giants. No, not Google and Facebook. 4chan and Tumblr. Members of the two sites have come to blows, so to speak, over who "owns" Internet memes, and some on the 4chan message board called for "Operation Overlord" - a DDoS attack targeted against the microblogging site. Tumblr users have threatened to respond by filling the 4chan boards with pictures of kittens. And both sites have taken turns over the past 24 hours being offline.

It's easy, perhaps, to dismiss this back-and-forth of bored and disgruntled teenagers. And because one of the call-to-arms on 4chan said "We are Anonymous" and involved a denial-of-service tactic, it may be easy to confuse 4chan v Tumblr with the more recent DDoS attacks undertaken by Anonymous.

Continuing its campaign against the defenders of copyright law, Anonymous orchestrated a denial-of-service attack against the website of the U.S. Copyright Office today, knocking the site offline for half an hour and rendering it slow to unusable for a couple of subsequent hours. (At the time of publishing, the home page is up, but none of the links on the site are operational.)

For the past month, Operation Payback, spearheaded by Anonymous, has targeted organizations like the RIAA, the MPAA, the UK Copyright Office, as well as KISS bassist Gene Simmons with DDoS attacks - either crashing their sites completely, grinding them to an unbearable halt, or in some cases, putting redirects in place so that visitors end up instead at the popular BitTorrent Pirate Bay website.

As reported in the LA Times' technology blog, the launch of Antigua-based media download site Zookz has raised the ire of the US trade commission as well as the RIAA and MPAA. However, according to the company, Zookz is permitted by the World Trade Organization under a loophole copyright sanction. You read that correctly. The US trade commission and the RIAA / MPAA is challenging Zookz the pirate with the WTO in its corner. Imagine the cage match.

Our good friends over at TechDirt discovered an interesting anomaly and enormous security hole in BayTSP's website today.

BayTSP, a Los Gatos, CA-based company, is best known for putting the cease-and-desist smackdown on peer-to-peer copyright violators. The site serves infringement information forms to offending parties on behalf of the copyright holders. Think of them as the online debt collectors of the BitTorrent universe, with all the information security risk that implies.

What are the number one problems facing today's social networks? According to the young developer Vladislav Chernyshov they are: privacy issues, distraction and time-wasting, quantity over quality, ads, and lack of control over your identity. That's why he, Dmitry Gorpinchenko, and Andrew Chernyh, all students at Novosibirsk State Technical University (NSTU) in Russia, have founded Genome, an upcoming next-generation social networking service which addresses the main problem of Web 2.0: the ever-increasing quantity of Web 2.0 resources and the lack of tools to manage them.