Maxi Sopo was having so much fun “living in paradise” in Mexico that he posted about it on Facebook so all his friends could follow his adventures. Others were watching, too: A federal prosecutor in Seattle, where Sopo was wanted on bank fraud charges.

Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

Sopo learned the hard way: The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.

The document shows that U.S. agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

Read More on the AP via Yahoo News

NPR discusses the intimate link between sex and technology — how Internet porn kingpins shaped the web as we know it today and introduced some of the technologies we now take for granted:

Coopersmith says America Online’s popularity was driven by its private chat features. “One of the nicknames for AOL in the industry was ‘the house that sex chat built,’ ” he says.

Adult sites also paved the way for the mainstream to adopt several technologies. They were among the first to integrate e-commerce systems to process credit card transactions. “The first part of the Web to make money was pornography,” Coopersmith says.

“You have a lot of some of the tactics, concepts and business strategies pioneered by the cybersex world that then flowed into the regular online world…For instance, creating these Web sites where you join for a fee and you have different levels of membership.”

More obnoxious practices were also readily embraced by some in the adult world, as many people’s junk e-mail folders can easily demonstrate.

You are forewarned, I am not responsible for blindness resulting from viewing of these (many NSFW) pics. LazerTits says:

For centuries the female bosom has been wrongfully held in the prison of maternal duty and manboy motor-boating … It’s time to get ZAPPED!!!!

What will YOU say when your kids ask where you were during the revolution? Don’t burn your bra, BLAST IT!!!

Wikileaks presents a “threat to the U.S. Army” and publishes “potentially actionable information” for targeting military personnel, according to a classified intelligence report posted on the whistleblowing site.

The 32-page report entitled Wikileaks.org — An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups? indicates the government’s concern that “current employees or moles” within the Defense Department or the U.S. government “are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.” To stop this, the 2008 report had suggested a campaign to expose and punish those who leak to the site, which was founded in 2007 by Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians.

“Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the website that they will remain anonymous,” according to the report. “The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public.”

Read More on WIRED’s Threat Level

Google appears to be getting closer to shutting down its strictly monitored search engine in China, according to news reports.

The reports, which cited people close to the situation, indicate that Google advertisers in China are being advised to switch over to rival Baidu Inc., out of fears that Google could abandon the country.

Following a targeted cyber attack on Gmail accounts emanating from China in December, Google announced on Jan. 12 that it intended to give all of its users open access to the Internet.

Google has since been negotiating with the Chinese government, as such a move would clash with China’s censorship laws. Those laws forbid access to Internet sites that criticize the government, display pornography or promote certain religious material.

A spokeswoman for Google declined to comment specifically on the negotiations, but reiterated the company’s intentions to remain an open-access site and said Google will soon make an announcement on the outcome of its dealings with China.

[Read more at CNN]

Andrew Breitbart has been waiting 45 minutes for a filet mignon. He drums his fingers on the table in this plush Italian restaurant off Times Square, a place where the media types he regularly trashes used to flaunt their expense accounts — back when they still had them. Breitbart looks around for a waiter and launches into a stem-winder about collusion between Hollywood and the press — the “subtle and not-so-subtle use of propaganda to make a center-right nation move to the left.

“It’s not just the nightly news,” he says. “You’re also getting television shows that reflect the same worldview, where Republicans are always the bad guys. Al Qaeda’s never the bad guy. The Republican is always the bad guy.”

From anyone else, this would be just talk — or talking points. (No terrorist bad guys on TV? Really?) But Breitbart is one of the people who rams those points into the popular consciousness. Until last September, the beefy 41-year-old with graying blond hair was a largely covert power in the right-wing media, the hidden hand behind the popular Drudge Report who also, weirdly, cofounded the liberal Huffington Post. But then he struck out on his own. Today his collection of Web sites draws more than 10 million readers a month. He has a book deal worth more than half a million dollars, and he’s a regular presence on Fox News — where he’s headed later tonight, in fact. The covert thing is out the window.

The filet finally shows and Breitbart digs in, ignoring the risk to his mustard-colored sports coat. “The idea is that I have to screw with media, and I have to screw with the Left, in order to give legitimate stories the ability to reach their natural watermark,” he says.

Image: Wikipedia via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Read More on WIRED

Great video from the Hungry Beast. If you’re in Oz you can watch here, otherwise see below:

Dan Rather reporting from Vietnam in 1966

Dan Rather writes on the Huffington Post:

I must confess that until recently I had no idea what Twitter was. Even now, I’m not completely sure how it’s best used. When I want to post something, the younger, more tech-savvy people in my office help me out. But I do know this: if you searched Twitter for “Dan Rather” over the past few days, you probably could guess why I feel the need to write this column.

It started this past Sunday when I appeared on Chris Matthews’ syndicated talk show. I’ve known and respected Chris for many years and I enjoy doing his show. I take the train down from my home in New York to Washington D.C. and as I approach Union Station my thoughts often turn to the years I spent covering the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. It was a turbulent time for the country and a formative period for me as a reporter and a young father.

The Washington of that time was a far different place. In some ways it was better: less politically rancorous, more collegial. In many ways it, and the country it represented, was much worse. African Americans were still very much second-class citizens. Women held few positions of power. We smoked more, polluted our environment more, and accepted social mores that anyone who has seen Mad Men knows are embarrassingly outdated.

Read More of Dan Rather’s article in the Huffington Post

Put down the cell phone, stop the status updates on Facebook, shut down Twitter, sign out of e-mail and relax…

People across the nation will tune out to reclaim time to slow life down and reconnect with friends, family, the community and themselves for 24 hours, starting at sundown, Friday, March 19. The Sabbath Manifesto’s principles were created for individual styling, but for one day we are asking you to take on the challenge of Principle Number 1: AVOID TECHNOLOGY.

Secretary Clinton’s recent speech on Internet Freedom has signaled a strong interest from the US State Department in promoting the use of the internet to promote political reforms in closed societies. It makes sense that the State Department would look to support existing projects to circumvent internet censorship. The New York Times reports that a group of senators is urging the Secretary to apply existing funding to support the development and expansion of censorship circumvention programs, including Tor, Psiphon and Freegate.

I’ve spent a good part of the last couple of years studying internet circumvention systems. My colleagues Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I released a study last year that compared the strengths and weaknesses of different circumvention tools. Some of my work at Berkman is funded by a US state department grant that focuses on continuing to study and evaluate these sorts of tools and I spend a lot of time trying to coordinate efforts between tool developers and people who need access to circumvention tools to publish sensitive content.

I strongly believe that we need strong, anonymized and useable censorship circumvention tools. But I also believe that we need lots more than censorship circumvention tools, and I fear that both funders and technologists may overfocus on this one particular aspect of internet freedom at the expense of other avenues. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies.

So here’s a provocation: We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.

[Read more at Worldchanging.com]

Today, March 6, 2010, a student from Plant High School found himself on the unseasonably cold streets of South Tampa begging for money.  It was at the corner of Howard and Swann that young Alec paced back and forth panhandling, along with his unnamed friend, who seemed to be present more for moral support than for panhandle assistance. Within the first hour Alec’s pan, or rather, small cloth basket was filled with nearly $20. Put into terms of a career, at 40 hours a week, that’s $41,600 before taxes. Of course, that’s luck, and those numbers wouldn’t always be that successful, even in the affluent area of South Tampa, and especially not for a homeless person.

So what for has forced the two South Tampa teens onto the streets?  World of Warcraft has them there.

Each time the light turns red, Alec treads down the sidewalk in front of Panera Bread toward Armenia  holding his donation box, “World of Warcraft $$$$” and looks into the faces of the drivers. Every time he gets a dollar (or $5) he lets out an excited yell and runs back to his friend and the two engage in some sort of celebratory activity of chest bump and high five variety.

A seemingly straight laced and somber middle aged man walks by the two. The sort of man who otherwise appears to be involved in no form of video gaming and possibly no form of fun. Without stopping, the man asks the beggar, “horde or alliance?”

Alec answers him, “horde.”

The man stops and fishes in his pocket for a moment, then produces a bill and places it into the basket.

[Read more at the Examiner]

Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”

Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Andreessen once famously put the New York Times on deathwatch for its stubborn insistence on trying to save and prolong its legacy print business. With all the recent excitement in media quarters recently over Apple’s upcoming iPad and other tablet computers, and their potential to create a market for paid digital versions and subscriptions of newspapers and magazines, I wondered if Andreessen still felt the same way. Does he think the iPad will change anything?

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

But people pay for apps. Wouldn’t he pay for a beautiful touchscreen version of a magazine? Maybe, if it were something genuinely new that blew him away…

[continues at TechCrunch]

Pull up the wrong undersea cable, and the Internet goes dark in Berlin or Dubai. See our animated infographics of how the web works!

For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie–a congenial, 6′4″, 57-year-old Scotsman–patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light.

The cables regularly fail. On any given day, somewhere in the world there is the nautical equivalent of a hit and run when a cable is torn by fishing nets or sliced by dragging anchors. If the mishap occurs in the Irish Sea, the North Sea or the North Atlantic, Rennie comes in to splice the break together.

On one recent expedition, Rennie and his crew spent 12 days bobbing in about 250 feet of water 15 miles off the coast of Cornwall in southern England looking for a broken cable linking the U.K. and Ireland. Munching fresh doughnuts (a specialty of the ship’s cook), Rennie and his team worked 12-hour shifts exploring the rocky seafloor with a six-ton, $10-million remotely operated vehicle (ROV) affectionately known as “the Beast.”

[Read more at PopSci]

I represent a small group of people who have chosen to permanently deactivate from Facebook on March 7th.

Although we are all aware of the website’s convenience, we are abandoning Facebook for the Promised Land that was once known as life. In order to demonstrate our acknowledgement of the website’s obvious capabilities, we created an event page using Facebook. You can find it here:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=308145337480&ref=ts

On behalf of dwindling humanity in the face of population overload, we cordially invite you to check out the page, and hope that you will consider participating in deactivation on March 7. By gathering many participants in a show of solidarity, we hope to create some awareness and generate mainstream discussion on the true implications of web 2.0.

On the page you’ll find a heated and sometimes hilarious wall-debate outlining many different reasons why one may or may not choose to take up the cause.

Although Facebook is a convenient means to communicate with other people, it does not represent a substitute for human interaction.

Let’s de-clutter our lives and do away with this uselessness together.

Time is running out.

De-complicate, Communicate , Deactivate.

03.07.2010

Hope to see you there.

Every once in a while, you come across a story that makes you shake your head in disbelief.

Today, that story comes out of Milan, Italy, where a judge has convicted two Google employees and a former employee for non-compliance of the Italian privacy code over a video that was uploaded to Google Video in late 2006. A fourth employee also faced charges but was not convicted.

In the video, students filmed and uploaded a clip of them bullying an autistic classmate, a clip that Google called “totally reprehensible” in a blog post this morning. Google said it took down the clip within hours of being notified about it by Italian authorities, In addition, the company worked with local police to identify the person who uploaded the video and that those involved were held accountable for their actions.

No one at Google had anything to do with that video, aside from taking it down. No one at Google appeared in it, filmed it, uploaded it or reviewed it. In fact, the company said, none of the four even knew about the video until after it was removed. Still, the courts held them responsible.

Google is, of course, appealing this “astonishing decision.” But that’s not the bigger issue, With its ruling, the Italian courts are basically holding hosting platforms – like Google Video – criminally responsible for the content that users upload.

[Read more at ZDNet]

A parish priest has been sacked amid claims he offered sex for sale over the internet.

Samuel Martin, 27, posed in his underpants in an advert offering €120-an- hour services for women and couples, reports say. The revelations have caused a scandal in Catholic Spain, after pictures of Martin in his grey briefs were published in newspapers.

The Spaniard also allegedly stole €17,000 from Church donations and spent it on phone sex lines and internet porn. In the advert, which has since been removed, Martin, calling himself Hector, wrote: “Heterosexual man for women and couples. Real photos. Well hung (15cm) for your pleasure and happiness.

“I am open to everything except sadism. Hotels and private addresses. 24 hours. You won’t regret it, I will give you pleasure like never before.”

Martin, who has since gone into hiding, offered 15 minutes for €50, 30 minutes for €75 or an hour for €120…

From the AJC:

The campaign for Admiral Ackbar is gaining Internet, if not intergalactic, steam.

Tuesday, Ole Miss students voted to find a new mascot to replace the abandoned Colonel Reb. A student committee to develop and propose a new mascot will be formed soon.

Ackbar, a member of the Mon Calamari species who led the Rebel Alliance ships into the Battle of Endor, appears to be the early favorite. He has more than 14,000 Facebook fans. Websites like notatrap.org — “It’s a trap!” was his famous line — are promoting Ackbar’s candidacy.

“Who wants a Colonel when you could have an Admiral?” the Web site asks, before launching into “The Story of Ole Miss Ackbar.”

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … Admiral Ackbar received a deep space transmission of SEC coverage. He found that he couldn’t stop watching everything from football to volleyball. One team stood out to him, the Ole Miss Rebels. He led the Galactic Rebellion, and he knew he needed to be with the Ole Miss Rebels. And so, he started the long trek to Oxford, Miss.”

[Read more at the AJC]

U.S. government analysts believe a Chinese man with government links wrote the key part of a spyware program used in hacker attacks on Google last year, the Financial Times reported on Monday.The man, a security consultant in his 30s, posted sections of the program to a hacking forum where he described it as something he was “working on,” the paper said, quoting an unidentified researcher working for the U.S. government.

The spyware creator works as a freelancer and did not launch the attack, but Chinese officials had “special access” to his programing, the report said.

“If he wants to do the research he’s good at, he has to toe the line now and again,” the paper quoted the unnamed U.S. government researcher saying.

“He would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing. The state has privileged access to these researchers’ work.”

The report did not say how analysts knew about the man’s government ties.

The allegations over the spyware are the latest episode in a dispute that has pitted Google and the United States against China, with its wall of Internet controls and legions of hackers.

[Read more at Wired]

Someone has uploaded a PDF to a Google Group that is claimed to be the proposal for Internet copyright enforcement that the USA has put forward for ACTA, the secret copyright treaty whose seventh round of negotiations just concluded in Guadalajara, Mexico.

This reads like it probably is genuine treaty language, and if it is the real US proposal, it is the first time that this material has ever been visible to the public. According to my source, the US proposal is the current version of the treaty as of the conclusion of the Mexico round.

I’ve read it through a few times and it reads a lot like DMCA-plus. It contains, for example, a duty to technology firms to shut down infringement where they have “actual knowledge” that such is taking place.

This argument was put forward in the Grokster case, and as Fred von Lohmann argued then, this is a potentially deadly burden to place on technology companies: in the offline world Xerox has “actual knowledge” that its technology is routinely used to infringe copyright at Kinko’s outlets around the world — should that create a duty to stop providing sales and service to Kinko’s?

[Read more BoingBoing]

It’s fashionable to hold up the Internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom. Evgeny Morozov on the myth of the techno-utopia.

A storm of protest hit Google last week over Buzz, its new social networking service, because of user concerns about the inadvertent exposure of their data. Internet users in Iran, however, were spared such trouble. It’s not because Google took extra care in protecting their identities—they didn’t—but because the Iranian authorities decided to ban Gmail, Google’s popular email service, and replace it with a national email system that would be run by the government.

Such paradoxes abound in the Islamic Republic’s complex relationship with the Internet. As the Iranian police were cracking down on anti-government protesters by posting their photos online and soliciting tips from the public about their identities, a technology company linked to the government was launching the first online supermarket in the country. Only a few days later, Iran’s state-controlled telecommunications company confirmed it had struck an important deal with its peers in Azerbaijan and Russia, boosting the country’s communications capacity and lessening its dependence on Internet cables that pass through the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.

Most of these paradoxes are lost on Western observers of the Internet and its role in the politics of Iran and other authoritarian states. Since the publication of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, they have been led to believe that cyberspace is conducive to democracy and liberty, and no government would be able to crush that libertarian spirit (why, then, Mr. Barlow felt the need to write such a declaration remains unknown to this day). The belief that free and unfettered access to information, combined with new tools of mobilization afforded by blogs and social networks, leads to the opening up of authoritarian societies and their eventual democratization now forms one of the pillars of “techno-utopianism.”

[Read more at WSJ]

Love it or loathe it, Google Buzz has dominated tech headlines since its launch last week.

The latest product unveiled by the Mountain View tech giant, Google Buzz, is a social networking service that plugs right into a Gmail user’s e-mail account.

Like Facebook or Twitter, the new tool lets users post status updates, YouTube videos and photos, connecting users in an ongoing online conversation.

While some people have hailed Google Buzz as a potential “Facebook killer,” others have lambasted the service for publicizing users’ private information.

One law school student decided this week to take the Google Buzz backlash to a whole new level.

Complaint Cites Electronic Communications Privacy Act

Law firms in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., Wednesday filed a class-action complaint in San Jose, Calif., federal court against Google Buzz on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a 24-year-old Harvard Law School student.

The complaint alleges that Google Buzz, which automatically opted-in all Gmail users upon its launch, unlawfully shared personal data without users’ permission. The document cites the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Federal Stored Communications Act and California common and statutory law.

“I feel like they did something wrong,” said Hibnick, an active Gmail user and second-year law student. “They opted me into this social network and I didn’t want it.”

[Read more at ABC News]

From Blather:

This is the video of the talk I did at the Dublin Paracon 2009 on the subject of 9/11 and conspiracy theories. This talk resulted from a course called Digital Cultures, part of the MsC. in e-learning at the University of Edinburgh, where we were encouraged to carry out a ‘virtual ethnography’ on a community of our choice. I chose, for reasons passing understanding, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, choosing some of the recent 9/11 films as a field site.

[Read more at Blather]

…The lingering mystery, though, was who was behind the site. The question was answered on Saturday when Andrey Ternovskiy responded to the questions we sent to an e-mail address on Chatroulette. Mr. Ternovskiy said he was a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow.

“I was not sure whether I should tell the world who I am mainly because of the fact that I am under age. Now I think that it would be better to reveal myself,” Mr. Ternovskiy wrote.

I asked Mr. Ternovskiy about the origin of the idea for ChatRoulette, how he manages the technical challenges of running the site, whether he viewed it as a business, and about the way some people were using Chatroulette in, as he put it, “some not very nice ways.” Here are his e-mailed responses, slightly edited and condensed:

I created this project for fun. Initially, I had no business goals with it. I created this project recently. I was and still am a teenager myself, that is why I had a certain feeling of what other teenagers would want to see on the Internet. I myself enjoyed talking to friends with Skype using a microphone and webcam. But we got tired of talking to each other eventually. So I decided to create a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people.

It wasn’t so easy to create it for me, but I have been coding since 11 (thanks to my father who introduced me to the Internet early – most of my knowledge comes from it).

I didn’t advertise my site or post it anywhere, but somehow, people started to talk to each other about the site. And the word started to spread. That’s how the simultaneous user count grew from 10 to 50, then from 50 to 100 and so on. Each time the user count grew, I had to rewrite my code completely, because my software and hardware couldn’t handle it all. I never thought that handling the heavy user load would be the most difficult part of my project…

…What is currently stopping me from adding other features which have been suggested by many and have been in my mind is that I am not even sure what Chatroulette is now.

Everyone finds his own way of using the site. Some think it is a game, others think it is a whole unknown world, others think it is a dating service.

I think it’s cool that such a simple concept can be useful for so many people. Although some people are using the site in not very nice ways – I am really against it. Others do really unbelievable things I could never think of. They make up songs about strangers and sing to them, draw them, listen to music, broadcast them their own music. Two groups of teenagers can party together. That’s just great in my opinion. I am glad that I made this project and it is a pleasure for me to work on it…

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