Weekly Wrap-up: SOPA 2012 and More

Dan Rowinski publishes an easy to understand explanation of SOPA. Joe Brockmeier wishes Americans were always so tuned in to their elected representatives’ doings. A Google contractor is caught vandalizing Open Street Map. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

What You Need to Know About SOPA in 2012

Many of us needed to know why SOPA, and its sister bill in the Senate, PIPA, was so dangerous to innovation and to your liberties. Dan’s lengthy SOPA explainer is an excellent resource for everyone who needed to learn what SOPA is, and why it is so important to quash it.

What I Wish Wikipedia and Others Were Saying About SOPA/PIPA

Sure it was really great to see the Internet’s response to SOPA/PIPA, but Joe Brockmeier expressed his desire to see Americans pay better attention to their government’s activities. He noted just how close the entertainment industry is to our legislators, and that even though this iteration of SOPA is gone, it will be back.

Troubling Google Contractor Allegedly Caught Vandalizing Open Street Map (Updated)

Someone using Google IP addresses in India was caught editing Open Street Map in a very unhelpful way. The edits included reversing the direction of one-way streets, deleting information and generally wreaking havoc amongst the good data. That this sabotage was made from an official Google IP is even worse. It also appears that the Google contractor was using the same IPs that were caught attempting to scam Kenyan businesses, scraping data from a crowd-sourced phone directory and claiming to represent both a local Kenyan business and Google. To see the entire story and see Google’s response, read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s, Troubling Google Contractor Allegedly Caught Vandalizing Open Street Map.

More Top Posts:

JQ.Mobi Is A Mobile-Optimized HTML5 Rewrite Of the JQuery Framework

HTML5 developers appMobi want to bring the definitive jQuery framework to mobile developers. Dubbed jQ.Mobi, appMobi is releasing the new HTML5 framework to the open source community today, promising that it is faster and more lightweight than existing options and will give mobile Web developers the user interface and programming functions they have been looking for. More

Study: Why Do People Use Facebook?

Facebook is an accepted means of communication. It is a never-ending virtual social gathering filled with adopted puppies, cute LOL kitties, baby announcements, viral articles and videos, events, groups, organizations and fan pages. But why do people really use it? More

Now You Can Jailbreak Your iPhone 4S and iPad 2

Owners of Apple’s newest mobile gadgets can now break their devices free from the confines of the company’s restrictions. The iPhone 4S and iPad 2 can be jailbroken without being tethered to a computer for the first time thanks to a new tool called Absinthe A5. More

Which Facebook Pages Are Growing The Fastest? New Stats Service Tells You

Ever wondered which musician has the fastest growing Facebook Page? Or what TV series? A new beta service called SocialMedia-live is tracking the growth rate of 38 million Facebook Pages, with 2 million of those available to view. It has statistics on total number of likes, fan growth, interesting newcomers and male/female breakdown. These statistics are categorized and users can create comparison graphs. The bad news is that there is no apparent search function. More

How Much XP is Still Around?

With Microsoft gearing up this year for Windows 8, I thought I would survey the stats on desktop OS share, and to no surprise, XP is still the leader. According to Forrester in March 2011, 60% of the corporate desktops were running XP. The mix is somewhat less on the consumer side: According to NetMarketShare.com, XP has a 46% share as of December 2011. More

Stop SOPA: What A Blacked Out Internet Looks Like

The Internet is fighting back.

Today, hundreds of websites including some of the largest and most influential sites in the world are going black to fight the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. The two acts would give unprecedented power to the government of the United States to order blocking and takedown notices of foreign websites found to be infringing on copyrighted material such as movies and music. The drumbeat is loud and most of the U.S. technology industry has come out against SOPA/PIPA. More

The Internet of 2011 vs. The Internet of 2010

Where were you on the Internet in 2010? What about in 2011? The folks over at Royal Pingdom have compiled a nice set of data for the Internet, by the Internet. That is, an entire list of data about email, websites, web servers, domain names by their .dot web addresses, Internet users by country, types of social media, web browser usage, mobile users, videos and images. We decided to take a look at the data points that tell us the most about the read/write web: websites and domain names, Facebook, Twitter and Internet users by continent. More importantly, we’ll look at how the Internet of 2011 compares to the Internet of 2010. More

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