Wikipedia and Reddit are not the only sites to black-out their website in protest of the PROTECT IP and Stop Online Piracy Acts that are running through the US Congress. Many other sites, including Destructoid, and Imgur will also participate.
Have you heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or the PROTECT IP Act? The tech industry is talking about it. And that could be because it hasn’t gotten any mainstream media attention until the White House publicly said it would not let it through if Congress passed it in its current form. But what is it? Why are Google and Facebook against it?
Wikipedia could have a total “blackout” – by blanking out every single page in the online encyclopedia, even the 1 million pages in the English version – as a protest to the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, which is heading to the US Senate.
The United States Government has been given the go-ahead to access Twitter records relating to associates of website Wikileaks after Birgitta Jonsdottir’s motion to have the request thrown out failed, with the judge saying that the associates have no standing to challenge the order.
Jónsdóttir helped Wikileaks to release the Collateral Murder video – she is now no longer a volunteer for the site.
The Icelandic government has summoned the US ambassador to Iceland to explain why the United States has subpoenaed the personal details of an Icelandic MP’s Twitter account who had links to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, the site’s founder.
The Department of Justice has issued subpoena to Twitter asking for the records of Twitter messages between known Wikileaks supporters since November 1, 2009, according to a message posted on Twitter by Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament.
President Barack Obama is considering taking legal action against Wikileaks, which is currently based in Iceland, after more than 250,000 diplomatic cables were released in the wild.
In addition, the Justice Department has announced that it has an active criminal investigation on how the cables were leaked.
Wikileaks newest leak, promised to be seven times larger than the Iraq War Logs, have been revealed to be the diplomatic communications between the United States and its allies. The site, similar its previous leak, has given first access to the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, who all released the news at the same time.
Known to have made enemies with the Pentagon, Wikileaks is set to release another set of classified documents that will apparently top the Iraq war logs, which it released earlier in the year.
The Federal Trade Commission is said to be opening an investigation on whether Apple has been using its position as the mobile application market to harm its competitors – including those in the mobile-advertising market, where Apple is set to open its own mobile ad provider iAd in July – according to several publications.
Analysts from the United States government have said that they have found the programmer who wrote the code that was used to hack into Google’s servers last year, according to the Financial Times. According to the newspaper, the man is a security consultant in his 30s and posted sections of the code to a hacking forum.
NEWS IN BRIEF: President Barack Obama has chosen Howard Schmidt to take up the role as the national cybersecurity coordinator, according to an “administration official” talking to the Washington Post. The role will coordinate cybersecurity policy across the federal government – including the military agencies.
Barack Obama has announced that Vivek Kundra, a former Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, as the new Federal Chief Information Officer, which will oversee the architecture and spending of technology across the entire federal Government.
The United States Senate has voted unanimously to delay the digital television transition, which was supposed to happen on February 17, for four months to June 12. The vote, which came after the NTIA’s coupon program announced that it ran out of money, is seen as a huge victory to the Obama administration.
This is the image from the inauguration from the GeoEye-1 satellite, which Google has exclusive access to it, and it shows the mass number of people seeing the inauguration from Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument. It looks magnificent.