ReadWriteWeb

It's being called the "Mexican SOPA," especially by press sources wanting to place highly with Google News. Last week, Mexican Senator Federico Döring announced an anti-piracy bill, which that country's justice ministry describes as establishing a notification service for suspected content pirates, one which would enable the authorities to obtain those suspects' identities.

That triggered a series of denial-of-service attacks against Mexican government Web sites, probably because Sen. Döring and President Felipe Calderón belong to the same political party (the center-right-wing National Action Party, or PAN). But taking responsibility for these attacks is "Anonymous," the same group that just a few months earlier announced they were suspending online activities in Mexico after one of its members was kidnapped, allegedly by the Los Zetas drug cartel. That cartel later claimed responsibility for hanging two people from a bridge, identifying them as bloggers reporting on cartel activities from social media Web sites.

In America, 240 million people are wired...to the Internet. And in Russia, 60 million people are online. That's nearly half of Russia's population of 142,946,800. Russia is currently the largest Internet market in Europe, and its Internet population has been steadily growing year over year. The population of Internet users has just hit 42.8% of the entire Russian population. Last year, we wrote about the top 10 startups of 2011. But what are the top Russian startups? And are they all just American knockoffs?

Way back in December of last year, Facebook released its connections map. FlowingData.com recently released an inverse of the Facebook friendship map, showing where in the world people don't use the social network. Facebook has not been able to adequately penetrate the non-Western markets of China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

Media missing in action for Tunisian protests, social media takes over. As protests over brutality, repression and economic neglect intensified in Tunisia over the past week, social media users kicked into gear. Traditional media neglected most of the news, including the killing of about 50 civilians by government forces.

Social media users, both inside Tunisia and outside, reported news of protests, riots, arrests, government actions and deaths via Twitter and YouTube. The hastag #sidibouzid was omnipresent on the social web.

While the United States seemed to move from a possible OpenID login to more of a "secure" intranet approach, Russia has moved from commercial software to open source. The two moves may not seem to have much in common, but they do. Control.

Under the banner of security, the U.S. has announced the creation of a "verified" ID program that looks for all the world like a walled, or at least fenced, section of the Internet. Russia has moved to open source not out of a philosophical belief in free software, but out of fear of American software hegemony.

As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, Facebook has a "crowd-sourced" way of handling complaints. If a certain number of users register complaints against another user, that user is automatically banned and his or her profile is locked down.

We were told by a public relations representative, Simon Axten, that "(t)he assumptions made in the blog post are false." (We weren't really assuming, but OK.) "We don't take any action on a user report until it has been investigated by our professional reviewers, and they have positively identified a violation of our policies." This is contradicted by the facts as we know them.

Once upon a time, ICQ was synonymous with instant messaging. While ICQ doesn't have this kind of clout anymore, it is still very popular in Russia and other countries that use the Cyrillic alphabet. AOL bought ICQ in 1998 for $287 million, but the company has been trying to sell ICQ for quite a while. After a short bidding war between China's Tencent and Russia's Digital Sky Technologies and ProfMedia, AOL just announced that it has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST) for $187.5 million.

In a breathtakingly risky move, a former Russian police officer has taken to the Internet in full uniform to detail the corruption, danger, and brutality of his line of work.

In an open video address to Prime Minister Vladmir Putin, Alexei Dymovsky says, "Maybe you don't know about us, about simple cops, who live and work and love their work. I'm ready to tell you everything. I'm not scared of my own death." How much does Dymovsky have to fear? The answer might surprise those of us who are accustomed to the relative freedoms of self-expression.

Twitter went down last week. So did Facebook, LiveJournal, and Blogger.

They were all victims of a denial of service attack that was, depending on who you believe, either the work of Russian nationalist hackers targeting a Georgian economist, a clever ploy by the United Economists of Georgia to garner sympathy by feigning an attack by Russian nationalist hackers, or an attempt by Paramount Pictures to divert attention from reviews of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Right now, it clearly looks like yesterday's attacks against Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal were meant to target only one user - a pro-Georgian blogger knows as Cyxymu. What isn't clear yet, however, is who was actually behind these attacks. Assuming these attacks were politically motivated and really only meant to silence or intimidate Cyxymu, then they obviously failed spectacularly.