A handful of U.S. websites have decided to go dark today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act as well as its senate cousin the Protect IP Act — two piece of proposed legislation aimed at curbing piracy efforts abroad.
Perhaps the most vocal protester of the bunch is search engine giant Google, which has decided to update its homepage with a large sideways black box over the company’s logo. Since the site prides itself on staying very minimal, the logo is basically the most dominant visual element on its search homepage at any given time — meaning it’ll be difficult for the majority of U.S. web users to avoid observing the protest if nothing else.
The Google homepage also features a link to an anti-SOPA/PIPA infographic and a form that allows you to sign a formal petition against the bill. Google writes:
Fighting online piracy is important. The most effective way to shut down pirate websites is through targeted legislation that cuts off their funding. There’s no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs. Too much is at stake – please vote NO on PIPA and SOPA.
To summarize, both SOPA and PIPA would give the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign-operated websites associated with infringing, pirating or counterfeiting intellectual property. If it becomes law, it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content, the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business online with services like PayPal.
In addition to Google, several other staples of the web have also joined in the SOPA protest, including Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress, BoingBoing.net, The Huffington Post and many more. Some organizations, such as Reddit and the Cheezburger Network of sites, have chosen to begin their protests or blackouts at 8 a.m. EST tomorrow.
We’ve included a gallery of screenshots below displaying protest messages from several sites. Since it’s only 1 a.m. on the east coast, I’d expect we’ll end up updating this page with more screenshots throughout the day.
For more information about the proposed legislation, check out VentureBeat’s ongoing SOPA coverage.
Cloud services leader Salesforce has hired former U.S. chief information officer Vivek Kundra as its executive vice president of emerging markets, the company announced today.
Kundra made headlines as the federal government’s first-ever CIO when he was hired by the Obama administration in March 2009. While in his job, Kundra managed $ 80 billion in technology investments and instituted a 25-point plan to reform and restructure the government’s IT management. Kundra left his job in August to become a joint fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The move to Salesforce as an EVP for emerging markets makes sense for Kundra. Ideally, his time with the federal government will have prepared him to talk up Salesforce’s cloud initiatives throughout the world.
“Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in a statement. “His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”
Before serving as federal CIO, Kundra was the chief technology officer for the District of Columbia and the assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the state of Virginia.
Amazon has released their top-selling digital and physical game titles from 2011. The online retailer has quickly become the quintessential center of great gaming deals, release-day shipping, and exclusive pre-order bonuses (including up to $ 20 back, in some cases).
There are a few surprises to be found, including Deus Ex: Human Revolution as the top digital download. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the top-grossing video game of all-time, dominated physical sales, but barely made the digital downloads list.
Electronic Arts walked away with 50% of the top 10 digital titles, while rival Activision only had one (Call of Duty) on either list. This dominance will likely dissipate throughout 2012 as EA restricts digital downloads of its games to the EA Origin service.
Ubisoft’s casual-friendly Just Dance franchise continued to rake in the cash, with the multiplatform Just Dance 3 selling more physical copies almost every other game this year, while Just Dance 2, released exclusively for the Nintendo Wii in 2010, came in 8th, above Gears of War 3 and FIFA Soccer. Just Dance is an exception to not one, but two rules: It’s a successful entry in the mostly-extinct music rhythm genre, and it’s the only casual title to be included on either list.
Interestingly, and perhaps most telling of all, Nintendo doesn’t have a single product on the lists, despite the number of Wii and DS/3DS units owned outselling any other console worldwide, and the release of several high-profile games last year, including The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Super Mario Land 3D, and Mario Kart 7.
The last thing to note is that most of the physical titles were released during the holiday season (October-December), while digital titles have a more even spread of releases throughout the year.
Slot machine maker International Game Technology said Thursday it will buy Double Down Interactive for $ 500 million in cash. Double Down, based in Seattle, makes Facebook games such as the DoubleDown Casino.
Publicly-traded IGT is branching out from one type of casino gaming to another. DoubleDown Casino had more than 1.4 million active daily players at the end of 2011 and it was No. 4 in terms of the most popular games on Facebook in 2011. DoubleDown Casino, launched in April 2010, has 4.7 million people playing games each month, up from 3.3 million in October.
With money from IGT, DoubleDown Casino plans to release more social and mobile games. Double Down Interactive has 70 full-time employees and 10 positions open. IGT said the move will propel it into the leadership of social gaming, and it comes at a time when Zynga is beefing up its own casino game business on Facebook.
NVPR introduced the two parties with the Raine Group and Davis Wright Tremaine finalizing the transaction. The deal includes $ 250 million in cash, $ 85 million in retention payments over the next two years, and $ 165 million in bonuses if Double Down hits financial targets.
Greg Enell is chief executive of Double Down and he will continue to lead the business, which will stay in Seattle. IGT had sales of $ 1.96 billion las year.
Stratfor, an organization that provides international intelligence reports to a large (and often influential) clientele, has finally brought its site back online after last month’s Anonymous-driven takedown.
Anonymous, a hacktivist collective, opened fire on the site for reasons unknown. The group gained access to and then published contact and financial information for hundreds of thousands of Stratfor subscribers.
“In the global commons, anonymity is an option,” said Stratfor CEO George Friedman in a statement this morning.
“This is one of the great virtues of the Internet. It is also a terrible weakness. It is possible to commit crimes on the Internet anonymously. The technology that enables the Internet also undermines accountability. Given the profusion of technical knowledge, the integrity of the commons is in the hands of people whose identities we don’t know, whose motives we don’t understand, and whose ability to cause harm is substantial.”
Friedman also recorded a video about the attack and subsequent downtime:
Stratfor announced last month that it had been hacked on December 24, 2011 and that member data had been illegally stolen and exposed.
The company delayed relaunching its website “until a thorough review and adjustment by outside experts [could] be completed,” a Stratfor rep told VentureBeat in an email at the time.
Then, on December 30, Anonymous dumped a huge amount of sensitive data on text-storage site Pastebin. The data dump inlcuded 200GB of names, email addresses and unencrypted passwords for around 860,000 Stratfor users as well as unencrypted credit card numbers for 75,000 paying Stratfor subscribers.
“We knew our reputation would be damaged by the revelation, all the more so because we had not encrypted the credit card files,” said Friedman today. “As the founder and CEO of Stratfor, I take responsibility for this failure.”
Today, Stratfor has finally brought its site back online and is working to scale back up after several weeks of downtime.
Moving forward, Stratfor will use a third party to process credit card transactions for clients and subscribers. Also, Sec Theory consultants have rebuilt Stratfor’s site, infrastructure and email system for better security against possible future attacks.
Verizon and the FBI continue to investigate the forensics of the attack.
“It was deliberate destruction,” Friedman said to Reuters. “Their only motivation in doing that was to silence us. We don’t know why they wanted to silence us.”
All along, we’ve wondered exactly why Anonymous went after Stratfor, which claims to provide neutral intelligence, analysis and forecasts on matters of international security, politics and more.
In a statement issued December 29, representatives of the Anonymous movement wrote, “All our lives we have been robbed blindly and brutalized by corrupted politicians, establishmentarians and government agencies sex shops, and now it’s time to take it back.”
“The consequence of this will not be a glorious anarchy in the spirit of Guy Fawkes, but rather a massive repression,” Friedman countered. “I think this is a pity. That’s why I wonder who the hackers actually are and what cause they serve. I am curious as to whether they realize the whirlwind they are sowing, and whether they, in fact, are trying to generate the repression they say they oppose.”
The U.S. House has invited a small group of security experts and tech industry leaders to testify about potential risks associated with passing legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced today.
The list of people asked to address congress includes Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, Union Square Ventures Partner Brad Burnham, security researcher Daniel Kaminsky and others. The committee has scheduled a full hearing for January 18.
For anyone who’s still in the dark about the proposed legislation, SOPA gives both the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against websites associated with infringing, pirating and/or counterfeiting intellectual property. The implication of having the act pass is that it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content (such as a song, picture or video clip), the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business with companies like PayPal. [For more information about the proposed SOPA legislation, check out this infographic about the bill's negative effect on business and innovation as well as VentureBeat’s ongoing SOPA coverage.]
“The public deserves a full discussion about the consequences of changing the way Americans access information and communicate on the Internet today,” said committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) in a statement.
The hearing will also explore federal government strategies to protect American intellectual property without adversely affecting economic growth.
As for who will deliver the testimony, it’s a pretty competent group of people who (arguably) aren’t just a bunch of SOPA protesters. For instance, Kaminsky is regarded highly by many computer security experts for his work exploring DNS Cache Poisoning, while Ohanian is the spokesperson for one of the largest and most active online communities in the world.
We’re reaching out to a few of the people on the list below for additional comment and will update the post with any new information.
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) today announced that the Full Committee will hold a hearing on January 18 to examine the potential impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on American cyber-security, jobs and the Internet community. In light of policy proposals affecting the way taxpayers access the Internet, the hearing will also explore federal government strategies to protect American intellectual property without adversely affecting economic growth. The Committee will hear testimony from top cyber-security experts and technology job creators.
“An open Internet is crucial to American job creation, government operations, and the daily routines of Americans from all walks of life,” said Issa. “The public deserves a full discussion about the consequences of changing the way Americans access information and communicate on the Internet today.”
Witnesses
Mr. Stewart Baker: Partner, Steptoe & Johnson LLP
Mr. Brad Burnham: Partner, Union Square Ventures
Mr. Daniel Kaminsky: Security Researcher and Fortune 500 Advisor
Mr. Michael Macleod-Ball: Chief of Staff/First Amendment Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union
Mr. Lanham Napier: Chief Executive Officer, Rackspace Hosting
Dr. Leonard Napolitano: Director, Center for Computer Sciences & Information Technology Sandia National Laboratories
Mr. Alexis Ohanian: Co-Founder, Reddit.com, and Web Entrepreneur
Node.js has been getting great press for being used to build real-time web applications and fast networking tools that help big web sites run and scale.
But is Node just as good a fit for web agencies and developers that build dozens, scores, or even hundreds of sites a year?
Making the switch away from tried-and-tested platforms such as Ruby, PHP, Python or .NET for a fresh technology barely out of its infancy, especially when it’s not your product and when you’re working for global brands that simply can’t fail, is a risky proposition.
So why would you want to use Node.js? As a high-volume web agency, here are the reasons we chose to go with Node and the tips and tricks we learned along the way.
Why we chose Node.js
» It’s JavaScript!
Every developer also knows at least some JavaScript. Introducing Node.js, then, is relatively easy.
Everyone in a given web shop knows the basics and just has to learn about the event loop, callbacks and to how to use async flow control.
At our own agency, as people got to know Node, we actually saw that our browser-side JavaScript code improved in quality and structure.
» Code re-use at every level: browser, back end & database
JavaScript is the language of the browser, but JavaScript also powers many of the new NoSQL databases. We tried a couple of them for building content management system and quick fell in love with MongoDB.
MongoDB uses JavaScript for querying data, which means at the very worst that we can copy and paste code and use it in different layers of the system. What might be written as a parser for the browser might be used to format a report executed on the database.
Taking this one step further, we are standardising the include mechanism to actually reuse code and modules across the layers. This means all layers can include the same file, massively reducing the maintenance needed of code and cutting down the time required to write tests.
» Strong, responsive and enthusiastic community
IRC, meetups, bloggers, Twitter and Github are all alive with the chatter and support of Node.js. But not only are they alive; there is an excitement which you don’t normally see on this scale.
So for our developers and many others, this is an invaluable resource when bugs, issues and obstacles do occur.
» Large productivity gains in HTML & CSS using Jade & Stylus
HTML and CSS guys love working on Node because using Node means we’ll be using Jade and Stylus by TJ Holowaychuck. We loved HAML and SASS before Node.js, and now we can’t imagine using anything other than Jade and Stylus.
» Performance and scalability
We have found that Node.js scales really well. The non-blocking event loop allows for a phenomenal amount of traffic compared to our old, highly-optimized PHP stack running through Apache.
On our first project for a national newspaper, we used a front-end nginx proxy for load balancing to the various node instances and were ready to add extra instances during the peaks caused by TV and national newspaper advertising. The peaks came but the load on the first instance stayed low.
The single Node.js instance hardly broke a sweat, despite seeing one of the highest requests per seconds we’d ever seen.
With PHP and PostgreSQL we could scale up, but it felt really hard and gave us many sleepless nights. Using Node.js with a MongoDB backend scaling up is quick and easy; but because Node can handle more traffic, you don’t need to as quickly.
» Wealth of hosting options: No.de, Joyent’s SmartMachine, Heroku, Nodejitsu
We host our production sites on our own private cloud, but for smaller companies there are many cost effective and easy to setup hosting providers. We’ve got a couple of new Node.js projects in development and will be deploying them on Joyent’s SmartMachines.
» Make your developers famous
I always try to ensure our developers work on open-source projects in contracted hours as much as possible. Encouraging them to start projects that benefit the community as well as the business.
When building projects for our clients, we look for modules that have common functionality which could be packaged up and made into open source projects:
For example, Gzippo is connect middle-ware developed by one of our staff to perform gzip compression of static assets.
We like to manage compression and expiry times of static assets in our Node.js layer because it gives us the freedom to either serve directly from Node or to stick a caching proxy in front.
This way it is served from the caching proxy for all other requests and keeps all the configuration in the Node app, meaning you only need node.js on your development machine to work on projects and do QA using Pagespeed or ySlow.
» Developer happiness
There is something intoxicating about coding JavaScript on the server side; throw in the event-loop and it’s heaven for developers. They just can’t get enough of it!
Maybe it’s because we’ve been coding PHP for such a long time, but Node.js has really inspired our developers. If you were to ask any one of them, “How do you find coding in Node.js?”, you can bet your bottom dollar you’d hear “I love it!” right back.
A sample Node development stack
This is a snapshot of our ever-evolving development stack. There are a couple of staples, but for the most part if we find something better we can just switch it out.
Anyone wandering into the world of Node.js quickly make a choice how they are going to handle flow control. There are a number of methods out there. We’ve stuck with one of the most popular Async.js and depend on it in nearly all modules.
The de facto standard Node.js web application framework is the Sinatra inspired Express.js which builds on top of the Connect middle-ware framework by Sencha Labs.
We use Jade as our template engine in the view layer to generate the HTML, and we use Stylus for creating CSS. If you’ve not checked them out then you should, they are a compelling reason for using Node.js. Here is an example of the sort of thing that our designer are doing with Stylus.
We’ve built a number of Node modules which we reuse from project to project. Validation, data mapping, et cetera — Basic utility stuff that epitomizes our style of development.
We use Winston writing to files and also pushing log data to the excellent Loggly cloud logging service, which consolidates the logs from each of our node.js instances.
There are a lot of testing frameworks for Node.js. Knowing which to chose it hard. We looked at a few and made the decision to go with something very simple, in this case Expresso and Should.js. New projects are now using Mocha, the successor to Expresso.
Conclusion
We are on our fifth large project with Node.js (for us, “large” is around 150 worker-days) and are continuing to support the previous projects whilst developing a handful of small and medium-size projects in between.
Less than a year has passed since we adopted Node.js, but the project stats are already looking really good. Initially, the projects we undertook did take longer as our developers learned the intricacies of Node and as we found our feet with the hosting, editors and tools needed to develop and deploy a large scale applications. However, our last project in node was actually under budget, something that rarely occurs at Clock.
Once you get used to event-based async programming, settle on a set of standard development patterns and an architectural style. You quickly start to reap the benefits of working solely in JavaScript. This makes Node.js not only fun but extremely effective to program in.
Paul Serby is CTO of Clock, a UK web agency, where he directs technology choices, architects software, manages large development projects, writes code, makes tea and preaches the virtues of good software design. Clock developed Sun Perks, one of Britian’s largest consumer facing Node.js implementations for News International. Followed shortly by another ground breaking service, the Eat Out Dining Card for The Times. Both leveraging Node.js and a whole host of young and exciting supplementary technology.<
A long, hard look at the iOS 5.1 beta 2 shows that Apple is getting ready for quad-core processing in its mobile devices.
The current A5 chip for the latest iPhone and iPad models supports dual-core processing only.
Quad-core A6 chips are currently rumored to be in the works and may land in consumers’ hands as soon as this year.
By looking at the most recent iOS beta’s code, as 9to5mac already has, we see the operating system supports up to four cores, numbered core.0 to core.3 (developers always start counting with the number 0; don’t ask us why, that’s just how it is).
Quad-core mobile devices aren’t unheard of in these parts. Back in May, Nvidia started singing the praises of its new Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor. Code-named Project Kal-El (Superboy’s given name, for all you non-nerds), the chip was designed to give mobile phones and tablets performance capabilities on par with those of laptops and other personal computers.
In order to keep the iPad competitive, Apple has to start thinking about quad-core processing power. And quad-core processing would be an awfully nice advantage for gaming and other heavy-duty software.
We’ll see if Apple launches new iPad (and perhaps iPhone) versions featuring quad-core processing in the next few months, but we’d be shocked if the company lets Android manufacturers sneak ahead of it in innovation for very long.
Sports analytics startup NumberFire has raised $ 650,000 in a seed round that will help it expand its fast-moving (and popular) venture, the company revealed today.
As we wrote previously, New York-based NumberFire focuses on sports analytics and can even help you win your fantasy football league. Other sports for fantasy tracking are coming in the future. The company is a recent graduate of the ER Accelaerator program.
Despite only being around since Sept. 2010 and only having four employees, the company already has partnerships in place with ESPN, Sports Illustrated and SB Nation for content and statistics.
NumberFire CEO Nik Bonaddio told us the seed round amounted to $ 650,000, but it will eventually total $ 750,000. Bonaddio said he and his team decided to close the round early because they wanted to get the ball rolling now. The team will get the paperwork sorted out for the additional cash in the near future.
RRE Ventures led the seed round, with participation by TechStars’ David Tisch and Pennyblack’s Eliot Durbin.
“We’re thrilled to be working alongside such great investors and mentors,” Bonaddio told VentureBeat. “This round will give us the runway to build on our great momentum by developing products across multiple sports and partners. But enough about the company — let’s go Steelers!”
Apple apparently has a big event in store for New York City this month — though it’s not the announcement of the iPad 3, or the rumored Apple television set.
Most likely, the event will center on a media-related announcement since Apple SVP of Internet Software and Interactive Services Eddy Cue is said to be involved, reports All Things D’s Kara Swisher. Cue, who was Apple CEO Tim Cook’s first major appointment as SVP, spearheads Apple’s media properties, including iTunes, iCloud, the App Store, and iAd.
Prior to the TechCrunch report, I assumed the event would have something to do with iAd, Apple’s struggling mobile advertising solution. The company purchased the mobile ad firm Quattro Wireless for $ 275 million in 2010, which was then refashioned into iAd, but never quite caught on with publishers.
Given that most of the buzz around iAd has been negative over the past year, Apple certainly needs to shine a good light on the mobile advertising service. It could be announcing new major publisher deals, or changes to iAd that will be more tempting to ad buyers. The departure of former Quattro head Andy Miller from Apple in August was yet another blow for iAd, which still lacks direct a replacement for Miller.
The U.S. House has invited a small group of security experts and tech industry leaders to testify about potential risks associated with passing legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced today.
Node.js has been getting great press for being used to build real-time web applications and fast networking tools that help big web sites run and scale.
Paul Serby is CTO of Clock, a UK web agency, where he directs technology choices, architects software, manages large development projects, writes code, makes tea and preaches the virtues of good software design. Clock developed Sun Perks, one of Britian’s largest consumer facing Node.js implementations for News International. Followed shortly by another ground breaking service, the Eat Out Dining Card for The Times. Both leveraging Node.js and a whole host of young and exciting supplementary technology.<
Apple apparently has a big event in store for New York City this month — though it’s not the announcement of the iPad 3, or the rumored Apple television set.
