I haven't posted in a long time but really feel I need to weigh in briefly about SOPA and PIPA.  These two bills mean well as they are aiming to endonline piracy and protect intellectual propery, two things we should all be behind.  Unfortunately, the bills - if passed into law - would threaten the internet in a variety of ways while doing little to actually stop piracy and copyright/ip infringement.

I'm no lawyer and this topic has been covered by so many websites and organizations that I think the best thing to do is point you to the best article I've found on the issue.  The article was written by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and pretty clearly illustrates the dangers SOPA and PIPA would bring to the internet we know and love today.

Again, let me stress that I am very much against online piracy and absolutely think we need to find ways of preventing people from stealing digital goods, but SOPA and PIPA are not the way to do it. 

So starting today, all Squirrelinabox websites that were previously using Wordpress and being hosted at Dreamhost are now moved to my own dedicated server using a custom built content management system that I built from the ground up.  Why?  Because being hacked sucks.

Those that follow any of my blogs, such as Office Humor Blog and Falling Skies Fansite have probably noticed a lack of posts during the last few months.  While some of that is because I've been incredibly busy working on new projects (namely some Windows Phone 7 apps) a big reason I've stopped posting is because pretty much all my blogs that were using Wordpress were being consistently hacked.  For quite some time, the hackers were dropping hidden web pages and html links that were likely an attempt to leverage my websites' "link juice" to try and improve their rankings.  Even worse, most of those pages and links were for things like porn, viagra, illegal software, etc.  which likely hurt my site's rankings in search engines for the keywords they were designed for.

For awhile I did what I could to keep logging in and removing the pages and the links about once a week.  Since I had almost a dozen different sites, this process took quite awhile.  The breaking point came when the hackers (probably different ones) decided that seceretly hiding pages and links wasn't good enough as they started taking down the sites completely and replacing them with web pages that explained that the sites were hacked and gone.

Using the internet just got a bit scarier as Texas police arrested a teenager for online harassment last week. The arrest was made possible due to a new Texas law that took effect September 1 that criminalizes online harrasment via email, text messaging, and social networking sites.

To me, this seems like a knee-jerk reaction to the MySpace suicide case. While harassment should be discouraged, enacting and enforcing a law that seems to single out online forms of harassment is not only unpractical, but as others have pointed out, is likely unconstitutional. Free speech is something we don't take lightly, and restricting free speech online seems like something that should hopefully be overturned soon.
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The FTC has just revised some guidelines regarding endorsements that will directly affect bloggers that participate in paid reviews. Basically, the FTC has put in place some fines for bloggers that don't clearly disclose payments (or free products) they get from companies they review products for.

I, personally, welcome the new guidelines. While I don't have anything against those that do paid reviews, I do think the process should be as transparent as possible. You may be able to post a fair review of a product you've been paid to review, but your audience should be aware of any potential conflicts of interest.

With that said, many people have already begun pointing out some potential problems with the enforceability of the new rules. So far, it looks like bloggers are the only groups singled out, which would leave loopholes for countless other Web-related mediums. What about paid Twitter Tweets, Amazon reviews, or Facebook messages? I'd like to think they would all be covered by the FTC's new guidelines, but nobody seems to know right now.

In my opinion, Google has the right to deactivate Gmail accounts for whatever reasons they like. It's a free country and with it being their service, Google can choose to alienate users by deactivating accounts if it so chooses. However, when a court orders Google to not only deactivate a user's account but to also disclose that user's information when the user has broken no laws whatsoever, well, then we've got a problem on our hands.

The user in question did nothing except receive an email that was accidentally sent to him. Sure, that email contained some highly sensitive financial documents, but it was the sender's fault not the recipient.

There's really not too much else to say about this. Anybody with any grasp of common sense should be able to see the huge problems with this court ruling. Basically, I could send some important documents to any Web account and get that account deactivated and the personal details revealed to me. That could include not only email accounts, but social networking accounts like Facebook and Myspace (they have their own messaging systems that can send and receive so-called "sensitive information").

Let's hope some sort of appeal will overturn this ugly ruling. Let's also wish for District Court Judge James Ware to find himself quickly out of work due to his lack of sanity in his rulings.