Meet Lamar Smith, representative from Texas, and Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary.

As Chairman he can kill any bill he doesn’t like by denying it a hearing while giving priority to the bills he wants to pass, Like SOPA.

While addressing the massive outcry over SOPA he stated that:

“It’s a vocal minority. Because they’re strident doesn’t mean they’re either legitimate or large in number. One, they need to read the language. Show me the language. There’s nothing they can point to that does what they say it does do. I think their fears are unfounded.”

Above is a list of people that have pointed at the language, including law professors and computer experts.

You have a civil war among video game companies, and the successful boycott of a company. How do you ignore that?

It’s an election year. This November. Whatever happens, Texas, please kick this guy out of office.

Picture by ChadRocco.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.com, talks about his opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act. Ohanian, speaking on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan,” said he would like to see innovative solutions to piracy as opposed to government intervention. (Source: Bloomberg)

Discussions at reddit and Hacker News.

Lamar Smith still thinks that Reddit SOPA Protestors are not legitimate or large in number.

When asked about online opposition to the bill from places such as Reddit, Smith was quite dismissive.

“It’s a vocal minority, he said. “Because they’re strident doesn’t mean they’re either legitimate or large in number.

Remember folks, reddit, google, facebook, and amazon, are just a vocal minority.

Facebook has introduced its timeline feature in which old posts would be available under their new, and downgraded, privacy settings. Users need to clean up their histories themselves as Facebook has enabled this option for everyone.

If you logged onto Facebook yesterday, perhaps you caught a link at the top of the News Feed that read: “About Ads: Ever wonder how Facebook makes money? Get the details.” The answers provided some context on the news that starting in January, Facebook will start integrating a type of ad, called “sponsored stories,” that display your friends faces next to content they have “liked” in larger-sized ads your News Feed mix. “Facebook makes its money from showing you ads,” the company told consumers yesterday and with the ramp up to its spring 2012 IPO, the social network is getting serious about that endeavor.

In what seemed like an unrelated move, in September, Facebook announced a brand new type of profile called Timeline, where your whole personal history is laid out by month-by-month, all the way back to your birth. At the time, Facebook described it to consumers as a chance to: “Share and highlight your most memorable posts, photos and life events on your timeline. This is where you can tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now.” By the end of this year all 800 million plus Facebook profiles will have been converted to this new interface.

Timeline is centered around making Facebook money.

Disguising ads as your friends’ updates is being offered up as an antidote to the dismal click-through rates for traditional web advertising. Sponsored stories in your feed and sidebar ads based on your friends’ likes will become ubiquitous. Indeed in marketing materials, Facebook says these new premium ads are 90 percent accurate, compared to the industry average of 35 percent. “When people hear about you [the brand] from friends, they listen.”

sponsored stories are different from ads in that a user’s name or profile might appear alongside the ad,  ”If you’ve liked that business’s page, the story about you liking the page (including your name or profile photo) may be paired with the ad your friends see.”

Facebook is currently being sued in California over the issue of ads that people have liked. It depends on the users how much they will tolerate from Facebook’s new sponsored stories in their Timeline.

In Australia, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found that it is perfectly legal for anyone to take photos from facebook and use them in their news stories as the photos are not private.

“The ACMA made it clear that while it considers the use of privacy settings an important consideration when assessing material obtained from social networking sites, the actual settings are not determinative,” the regulator noted.

Instead, the regulator will determine matters taken before it on a case-by-case basis.

The ACMA’s CyberSmart web site advises that “even if your profile is private, you can’t control what your friends do with the information you post”.

“Don’t post photos or information that you wouldn’t want anyone else to see,” it states.

Here, the ACMA is advising people that you shouldn’t really trust anything on Facebook because 1) it’s not going to be private anyway and 2) if you don’t want your information shared, don’t share it. A person may assume that, since they have tagged a photo as private, if they share it with just one other person, their control of that photograph is now out of their hands. Anyone who sees the photograph can copy it and move it to a more public area on their Facebook page or send them to a third party. Although the sharing of the photograph violates copyright, the question of any damage done is still up for debate.

It is understandable that the general public’s idea of privacy and Facebook’s are diametrically opposed. The public only wants certain people to see their information. Facebook desires to monetize everything about a person, thus the less private it is the better for the company. The general consensus on Facebook, or any other social networking site, is that nothing on Facebook is private. It doesn’t matter if you’ve marked something as private. Consider that it isn’t private and the information will be leaked one way or another.

Always remember, if you are not paying for the service, you are not the customer, you are the product. On free social networking sites, such as Facebook, your information is worth money to Facebook and they will use it to make a profit.

If you want to block facebook, you’ll have to edit your hosts files with this information. You can also use Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Collusion, BetterPrivacy, disconnect, and/or NoScript.

These addons are mostly for Firefox. If you want the Chrome version, go to the Chrome Web Store and do a search for their names and install whichever ones you want. If you already use Adblock Plus, you can add this link to your blocklist.

Infographic by Veracode Application Security

Read the rest of my article at The Daily Censored.

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

As major websites, such as google and facebook, use algorithms to filter your searches, your time online is being refined and tailored so much that you might not even realize it. One redditor points out exactly how this happens.

This came up in another thread recently, and it brought up an interesting/alarming situation:
A friend of mine was watching some science/space movies on youtube, and after clicking through the related videos he eventually ended up watching a few videos on the “pole shift” theory (a Y2K-like end-of-the-world scenario). He’s also the type to listen to conspiracy theories just for fun.

After some casual searching, he never really stumbled across any evidence refuting this “pole shift” disaster story, and started thinking it was true. As soon as he brought it up to me, I talked a bit about, from my non-scientist’s opinion of science, why this idea didn’t really make any sense.

Finally I just googled it to convince him, and my first result was the wikipedia page which cited sources disproving the “pole shift” hypothesis.

It was a little scary that his results were tailored this way. After just a cursory search, he was mislead. And unless you are really making an effort to look into something, how often do you click past the first page of Google search results, or even finish the list of results on the first page?

As Eli Pariser noted in the video above, it’s very difficult to stay out of the filter bubble and the unique bubble that you end up living in online. You cannot decide what you get to see and you don’t have the ability to change it on those sites. You do, however, have a few resources on your side. You can add “&pws=0 “ to your searches to turn it off. You can turn off web history in your preferences. You can clear everything in your browser every time you close it.

If you use Chrome, you can browse in incognito mode or use Disconnect or Personal Blocklist. If you use Firefox, you can use Adblock Plus, NoScript, CookieCuller, Better Privacy, HTTPS Everywhere, and Disconnect. You can block Google Analytics and other Google scripts. Instead of searching google, use scroogle. If you want to see how much information google has on you, then check out your dashboard. These are just a few things you can do.

The problem remains, however, in your hands as you must learn about these tools to protect your privacy and your surfing habits online. If you want an unfiltered online experience, you must be the ones to take steps to do so because these companies will not. It takes some time at first, but you’ll be happier and expanding your mind and experiences will be better because of it.

“When the possibility exists for information to be obtained that wasn’t possible before, it’s entirely understandable that law enforcement is interested,” Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf told Reuters in an interview.

“Then the issue would be, what’s the right policy? And that, or course, engenders a lot of debate,” said Cerf, who is recognized as one of the “fathers of the Internet” for his early work in areas including communications protocols and email.

Demands from governments for Internet companies to hand over user information have become routine, according to online privacy researcher and activist Christopher Soghoian, who makes extensive use of freedom-of-information requests in his work.

“Every decent-sized U.S. telecoms and Internet company has a team that does nothing but respond to requests for information,” Soghoian told Reuters in an interview.

With many governments increasing the time that companies have to keep this private information, it won’t be long before everything about you is stored with them, making investigations by law enforcement that much easier.

The ease and cost of surveillance are at an all-time low, Soghoian said, with Google charging an administrative fee of $25 to hand over data, Yahoo charging $20, and Microsoft and Facebook providing data for free.

“Now, one police officer from the comfort of their desk can track 20, 30, 50 people all through Web interfaces provided by mobile companies and cloud computing companies,” he said.

“The marginal cost of surveilling one more person is now essentially approaching zero.”

With these fees becoming negligible, expect the requests to start happening more often. If you’d like to understand this a little better, the video below from DEFCON 18 will help you.

His personal biography preaches the gospel.

First and foremost, I am a man of God. I try to teach and lead my students as if Lake Co. Schools had hired Jesus Christ himself. That doesn’t mean I give a sermon and serve communion each day…what it means is I try my very best to teach and serve and minister to my students as a teacher led by and connected to the Creator of the Universe.

His syllabus, too, preaches the word of god.

His syllabus also offered this warning to students: “I teach God’s truth, I make very few compromises. If you believe you may have a problem with that, get your schedule changed, ’cause I ain’t changing!” On a separate document, he also said the classroom was his “mission field.”

Hop on over to Friendly Atheist and see for yourself.

While I still believe that your personal web page, facebook page, etc. is your personal space and you should be free to put what you want there, you cannot do the same on a public school site, your syllabus or in your classroom. Mr. Buell has overstepped the line and is breaking the law. For that, I cannot support him.