ACTA is basically an attempt by legacy media companies to leverage their hyperbolic rhetoric and wildly inaccurate math into an extralegal framework that would allow them to dictate which web sites are permitted to exist.

Apple’s trademark is the intuitive elegance of its designs. Yet when it comes corporate and labor practices, Apple’s track record looks like a morass of obfuscation and murky public-relations smokscreens. So activists seeking a more user-friendly Apple on the human rights front should welcome the company’s new “Supplier Responsibility” report.

The reaction to SOPA and PIPA, the latter which is scheduled to get a vote in the Senate when they come back to Washington, is not a Statement of Administration Policy, nor does it truly grapple with the legislation itself. Instead, the three Administration officials – IP Enforcement Coordinator for OMB Victoria Espinel, US Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, and Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt – lay out broad principles for what legislation to combat online piracy should look like. They do say that this statement of principles will guide “what the Administration will support—and what we will not support.” So it’s worth reading closely.

In 25 years, John le Carré or his son or some new spy thriller author will write a hell of a novel based on our undeclared war with Iran. If they’re taking notes now, the next plot point will come when the US government acknowledges that the unmanned drone now in Iran’s possession belonged to the CIA.

One might note that the high point of American power (absolute as opposed to relative, after the collapse of the USSR) coincides with peak of oil production in the US, and that the sudden rise in American pathologies coincides fairly closely with the oil crises of the 70s and early 80s, for example. Hustling, eternal growth, works when cheap energy is readily available, when more, more, more is possible, and when growth is choked, the hustlers, rather than growing the pie, turn on each other in a vicious “war of all against all”.

Unnamed sources and materials discovered in Tripoli, where the regime’s spies monitored telecommunications, show Amesys, a unit of the French company Bull SA, assisted in the spying. Sources and materials also indicate Chinese company ZTE Corp provided equipment to Gaddafi.

Micah Sifry’s been out in front of the new developments in transparency and media for quite a while. His work with the Personal Democracy Forum and his writing at techPresident continue to chronicle the ways technology leads to major changes in American democracy.

Now Micah has written a fascinating book, Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency. Particularly timely as we watch both Bradley Manning’s prosecution and the immense changes in North Africa and the Middle East, Sifry not only talks about Manning, Assange and the release of both the Collateral Murder video and the state department cables – but tells the bigger story of old closed hierarchical systems being overtaken by open, lateral relationships.

William Ockham, who knows a whole lot more about coding than many of us, shares some interesting thoughts with us about the Stuxnet virus in this post.

Facebook is censoring marijuana.

Just last week, the social networking giant abruptly changed its policies and decided to ban images of marijuana leaves from ads, claiming pictures of the plant promote “tobacco products.”

We’re fighting back against Facebook’s censorhip with a massive campaign to call out the social networking site.

The Department of Homeland Security wants to make a “one-stop shop” for the disaster response under a .gov URL. That means shutting down the current site, and taking another look at who has access to post on the site, with government deciding control of the content and message. So why did DHS allow BP to walk off with the mailing list of everyone who signed up for information about the disaster?