An update on SOPA/PIPA

See my last post about these two bills: SOPA (and PIPA): What they mean for your Internet.

Since my last post, I’ve gotten numerous emails from Demand Progress and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thanking me for my opposition against the bills, and ironically, asking me to sign more petitions. It turns out that the activism on the Internet has pushed these bills to the “ropes,” as Demand Progress claims. Now, they’re asking me to push Obama to veto the bills. “President Obama has expressed concerns about the bills, but hasn’t pledged to veto them,” the organization claims.

Well well well, look what finally happened

This gallery contains 6 photos.

UPDATE: Got more pictures from around the area!

SOPA (and PIPA): What they mean for your Internet

I hadn’t heard of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) or the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (Protect-IP Act or PIPA) until an email from Demand Progress showed up in my inbox. Since I hadn’t received any politicking emails in a long time, I became interested when I read that the PIPA and SOPA would ruin the Internet as we know it.

As with all emails concerning political issues, I took the opinions with a grain of salt. Are those two aforementioned acts as bad as Demand Progress portrays them? To find out, I started doing some personal research. Here’s what I found out:

Assange’s arrest not Wikileaks-related? Yeah right!

On December 7 at 9:30am, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by the British police on accusations of sex crimes. This apparently had “nothing to do” with Wikileaks.

Hold on for a minute.

Consider the popularity, or should I say infamy, of Mr. Assange during the past 3 months or so. It began with the giant leak of Afghan war documents. Then the Iraq War logs were revealed. Those ended up being nothing compared to the 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables that were recently released.

The point is, Julian Assange has had a lot of dirt thrown in his face for these “internet crimes” since the beginning. A few days after the Afghan War logs were leaked, a news story spread about Julian Assange’s allegations of rape. He got his own page on INTERPOL’s website. Recently, the cables were released. Shortly after that, Mr. Assange was arrested.

The order of these events happening makes me suspicious. Are they just a coincidence? I think not.

Sure, the media has been telling everybody that Julian Assange’s arrest had nothing to do with Wikileaks.

But I’m convinced that it had everything to do with Wikileaks.

First off, the proximity of events between Wikileaks leaks and sex-crime-related affairs is too close to be ignored. INTERPOL is just using allegations of sex crime to cover up the real reason for arrest. An article on INTERPOL’s website gives suspicious evidence for this (article here):

“INTERPOL has made public the Red Notice, or international wanted persons alert, for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the request of Swedish authorities who want to question him in connection with a number of sexual offences.”

Note carefully that INTERPOL identifies Mr. Assange as “WikiLeaks founder.” That kind of labeling doesn’t show up with other prisoners on INTERPOL’s website, so why must it show up with Assange? Very suspicious.

The point is, Julian Assange is being arrested on behalf of Wikileaks, not sex crimes. The “sex crimes” thing was just thrown in there so that INTERPOL wouldn’t face so much controversy. Ironically, this is another example of how government is so flawed. Wikileaks is trying to present government flaws through dissemination of media.

Interesting combination here.

Minecraft Developer is Now a Multi-Millionaire (via Trouble Thinking)

This just shocked me.

This was pretty obvious from the statistics of his sales after the free weekend, but it's official: Notch, the developer of Minecraft, is a multi-millionaire. This is from money coming from no other source than $14 per-person purchases of the Minecraft alpha. That is to say, he's made more by selling the pre-pre-release version of his game than so … Read More

via Trouble Thinking

HELLO NEW TWITTER!

Well, I’ve been waiting for what seems forever, but my preview of the new Twitter has finally come.

I absolutely love the aesthetics of the new Twitter! Here’s some of my favorite new features:

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Sexy Stats (via WordPress.com News)

Yes! This is what I’ve been waiting for!

You may have noticed a change to your stat charts a couple of weeks ago. We ditched Flash in place of a more robust charting library called Flot. If you didn't notice, go check it out because you can view all of the new charts with modern browsers including mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad. Sooo sexy! Today we updated the charts to use bars instead of points and lines. We've also made the stats page super sexy. Each module can be opened and … Read More

via WordPress.com News

September 11.

Today, we remember the countless innocent victims of a terrorist attack on our nation, and the vigilance and strength of our nation in the days following. To honor this occasion, we have placed ribbons on our website, which you see on the left. We also invite you to share your stories by leaving a comment on this post.

Afghan war logs revealed, now Facebook profiles exposed?

As if our world weren’t devoid enough of security and privacy, here comes another one. Some freak named Ron Bowes decided to noodle around one night on the Internet, scraping up the names and profile URLs of 171 million Facebook users. He then uploaded this data to BitTorrent where everyone can download it.