Posterick said some of the founding members of Test PAC were involved with previous Internet campaigns to boycott or blackout websites in order to raise awareness of the SOPA bill.

“The website blackout from a few weeks ago, for example, was an idea that our members helped bring to fruition,” Posterick said. “We also pressured Rep. Paul Ryan R-Wisconsin to change his stance on SOPA before most congresspeople had even heard of it.”

I think there is very little chance of unseating Lamar Smith, who hasn't had a primary challenger in 16 years, but there will be more vulnerable SOPA advocates up for reelection in 2014.

Test PAC aims to unseat Lamar Smith | The Daily Texan

"The public prosecutor in Jeddah is filing a lawsuit against Hamza Kashgari on charges of disrespecting God and insulting Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) in his Twitter account," sources told Al Hayat daily.

The sources said that public prosecutor in the Red Sea city of Jeddah was likely to summon people who expressed support or agreed with him on the social network, the daily reported on Monday.

"The public prosecutor, as the attorney for the society, has the right to summon anyone who encouraged the defendant or who is connected to matters that motivated his action," Abdul Aziz Al Zamel, a legal consultant, said, quoted by Al Hayat. null

gulfnews : Saudi tweeter's supporters may face court summon

Another response by me to another essay that attempts to discredit SOPA opponents as being misinformed:

I think this essay does a good job illustrating the "inside the beltway" attitudes that are damaging democracy in America. 

Millions of people stood up to oppose SOPA. These people have a historically unprecedented level of access to the full text of the legislation and reams of detailed analysis. In a democracy, the government is responsible to the people and has a responsibility to understand and respect their views and interests. 

Instead, SOPA proponents have engaged this month in a campaign of editorial writing in numerous publications with the intent of discrediting SOPA opponents as "misinformed" through shallow, transparent "straw man" arguments. The intent is to convince policy makers to ignore what just happened and proceed with the creation of an infrastructure in the Internet for blacklisting foreign websites, a step the protestors understood very well and communicated very clearly that they do not approve of.

Consider this author's attitude about ACTA which he says "was successfully negotiated over several years." The primary objection to ACTA is that it was negotiated for years IN SECRET. The American people were NOT ALLOWED TO READ what our government was negotiating on our behalf. Once, the Whitehouse disingenuously cited "national security" as a reason for preventing the public from reading the text of this copyright treaty. And, now that the treaty has been negotiated, the Whitehouse seeks to implement it without the approval of Congress. 

This is fundamentally anti-democratic. The influence of money and lobbying in Washington has reduced our country to a point where the people in Washington who make the rules no longer believe that they are accountable to the public at large. They don't believe that the people need to be able to read the laws that are being negotiated. When people do read those laws and express disagreement they are just dismissed as "misinformed" and the process moves forward.

If SOPA advocates wanted a reasonable dialog, they could start by demonstrating that they understand the legitimate reasons why millions of people oppose SOPA, rather than simply dismissing them all as being misinformed. Anything less is just a tactic, and one that underlines some fundamental cultural and institutional problems in Washington that go far beyond the scope of this particular debate.

Throwing baby out with the SOPA | Washington Examiner

Me writing in response:

The public is not misinformed about these bills. The people who are protesting these bills have a historically unprecedented level of access to both the full text of the bills as well as reams detailed analysis. It is probably the case that no public protest over a federal bill has ever been this well informed.

I know its comforting to tell yourself that, and SOPA supporters have been doing it a lot recently. If you think that everyone who is opposed to what you are doing is misinformed, you don't really need to think about what they are saying. You can just write them off, and if you say it enough maybe other people will write them off too.

These bills require ISPs to create an infrastructure in the Internet that allows them to prevent Americans from accessing any website on an official government blacklist. Once that blacklist mechanism is in place, there will be a rush to add new categories of sites to it. Every group in this country with a censorship agenda is going to jump on the bandwagon. Legislatures at all levels will get into the game.

The American people do not trust their government to operate an official blacklist of banned websites, and the american people have a pretty good understand of the litany of unintended consequences that such a naive enforcement mechanism would have.

If you've got a personal financial interest in doing something, you can easily allow your desires to delude you into ignoring its greater consequences. Thats why we have a democracy. Its a check upon the institutional blindness of factional interests.

The IP Interests need to stop fooling yourselves, and start listening. You don't know as much as you think you do about the thing you are trying to control.

SOPA Legislation | Timothy McCormack - seattlepi.com

Rattle wrote:
This Dan Geer piece is a great read, with much food for thought.

That being said, I'm only excerpting this quote because it gives me a smug self-flagellating feeling of awesomeness...

cybersecurity is the most intellectually difficult profession on the planet

OK, this is actually brilliant - a must read or at least a must scan - we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to build computer systems that can solve security problems when we could consider hiring actual people in the third world to make access control choices for us. At the very least its a thought provoking.

RE: People in the Loop: Are They a Failsafe or a Liability?

With infections that date to September, 2011, the Android botnet sported 11,000 active devices generating revenue for the botmaster as recently as last week. Data from January shows 29,000 active devices, according to Symantec, which analyzed data from a command and control server used by the botnet.

Researchers Discover Android Mobile Botnet 100k Strong | threatpost

As for the ideas tentatively proposed in that dystopian fantasy thirty years ago, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that whatever usefulness they afford modern radicalism is very satisfying.

BBC News - Viewpoint: V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous

Last night I came home from work with an old Jungle song stuck in my head, and it made me wonder about the origins of Jungle. Jungle is an intersection of Jamaican Dancehall with Breakbeat Hardcore. This video - General Levy's Incredible - is a particularly famous example with incredible rapping. It is the origin of Ali G's "Booyakasha" catch phrase and apparently it caused a schism in the scene between people into this sort of gangster jungle and intelligent drum and bass. Wondering where things had gone recently I found this video, which is a mind-blowing drum and bass jazz fusion. I bought the whole album.

Update: It occurs to me that maybe the reason I like this music so much is a subconscious connection with the constant rhythm of keyboard clacking that is my waking life.

The origins of Drum and Bass

The supporters of SOPA/PIPA have repeatedly failed to demonstrate that they have any respect whatsoever for the millions of people who have stood up to oppose these bills.

Cary H. Sherman of the RIAA provides another example with this essay.

At no point does Mr. Sherman discuss the actual long term consequences of an Internet Blacklist.

Instead, he variously accuses the opponents of this legislation of being liars, or people misinformed by liars, or copyright scofflaws, or anarchist computer criminals who perpetrate distributed denial of service attacks:

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works...

The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power...

... how many knew what they were supporting or opposing? ...

No doubt, some genuinely wanted to protect Americans against theft but were sincerely concerned about how the language in the bill might be interpreted. But others may simply believe that online music, books and movie should be free. And how many of those e-mails were from the same people who attacked the Web sites of the Department of Justice, the Motion Picture Association of America, my organization and others as retribution for the seizure of Megaupload, an international digital piracy operation? Indeed, it’s hackers like the group Anonymous that engage in real censorship when they stifle the speech of those with whom they disagree.

I think that these people actually believe that most of us really are idiots or criminals. It is much easier to believe that than to come to terms with the fact that you really ARE doing something tremendously evil that millions of people, with historically unprecedented levels of access to the full text of legislation and reams of detailed analysis, strongly oppose.

If you really understood that - if you really saw yourself objectively - I don't know how the hell you could sleep at night.

The fact is that most people understand that once an Internet Blacklist is in place its use will expand, and we do not trust our legislature with that kind of power.

Fifteen years ago the US literally passed the Communications Decency Act, which would have put people in prison and fined them tens of thousands of dollars if they ever said words like "fuck" on their blogs! The Senate passed this, the House passed this, and the President signed it into law! Why would any informed person trust THIS government with the power to easily prevent Americans from accessing any site on the Internet, when this government has demonstrated through its actions such total incompetence when it comes to this exact sort of responsibility?

SOPA/PIPA are unacceptable because they will have tremendous negative long term consequences for our society. This has been explained, repeatedly, in great detail, but groups like the RIAA and the MPAA refuse to THINK about it because they are too blinded by the profits they think they'll make if these laws are put in place.

Perhaps this is naïve, but I’d like to believe that the companies that opposed SOPA and PIPA will now feel some responsibility to help come up with constructive alternatives.

I don't feel any responsibility of the sort.

Constructive dialog is not going to happen here until the supporters of these bills demonstrate that they understand WHY they were wrong about this. I haven't bothered looking at OPEN carefully. I don't feel any obligation to help solve these people's problems for them when they have demonstrated an unwillingness to look beyond their petty personal financial interests and consider the greater context of their actions.

What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You - NYTimes.com

My guess is that nominal house prices, using the national repeat sales indexes and not seasonally adjusted, will bottom in March 2012...

And this doesn't mean prices will increase significantly any time soon. Usually towards the end of a housing bust, nominal prices mostly move sideways for a few years, and real prices (adjusted for inflation) could even decline for another 2 or 3 years.

But most homeowners and home buyers focus on nominal prices and there is reasonable chance that the bottom is here.

Calculated Risk: The Housing Bottom is Here