Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
BitTorrent is to movies what “bolt-cutters are to stealing bicycles” — The Authors Guild really doesn’t like piracy. Guild president Scott Turow, a best-selling author of legal thrillers, today summoned his powers to tell Congress: — “BitTorrent is to stealing movies, TV shows …
Grant Gross / Computerworld:
Senators explore new website seizure options — U.S senators will introduce legislation this year targeting websites that traffic in digital piracy or counterfeited goods, said the primary sponsor of a controversial bill proposed in 2010 that would give government agencies more authority to shut down those sites.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’ — As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner that was placed on their domain.
New York Times:
Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet — Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack …
Dan Sabbagh / Guardian:
Hillary Clinton’s speech: Shades of hypocrisy on internet freedom — Last year, the US secretary of state criticised the ‘firewall’ approach. Yet after the WikiLeaks affair it is harder to moralise — Hillary Clinton is back, lecturing the world on internet freedom …
Dan Sabbagh / Guardian:
Hillary Clinton’s speech: Shades of hypocrisy on internet freedom | Analysis: Dan Sabbagh — Last year, the US secretary of state criticised the ‘firewall’ approach. Yet after the WikiLeaks affair it is harder to moralise — Hillary Clinton is back, lecturing the world on internet freedom …
Steve Hamm / A Smarter Planet Blog:
Watson on Jeopardy! Day One: Man vs. Machine for Global Bragging Rights — From a drama point of view, the first episode featuring IBM’s Watson computer competing on Jeopardy! couldn’t have been better. The producers broke the first game into two pieces so they could give viewers a taste of the “Watson” back story on day one.
Kevin Murphy / Domain Incite:
VeriSign scores big win in .com pricing lawsuit — VeriSign has successfully had an antitrust lawsuit, which claims the company has been raising .com domain name prices anti-competitively, dismissed by a California court. — While it’s encouraging news if you’re a VeriSign shareholder …
Nate Silver / FiveThirtyEight:
The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post — When The Huffington Post announced earlier this week that it was being acquired by AOL for 5 million in cash and stock, one group felt slighted: a set of unpaid bloggers for the site, identifying by the Twitter hashtag #huffpuff …
Kim Zetter / Threat Level:
Report: Stuxnet Hit 5 Gateway Targets on Its Way to Iranian Plant — Graphic showing clusters of Stuxnet infections during targeted attacks launched in 2009 and 2010. Courtesy of Symantec. — Attackers behind the Stuxnet computer worm focused on targeting five organizations in Iran …