Honestly, this is what Sarah Palin twatted on Saturday Night, July 4th, Independence Day, in America.

Her link goes to (of course) Scientologist nut and sub-literate weirdo Greta Van Susteren’s blog on FoxNews.com, where Greta has helpfully (?) posted seven pages of legal threats from Palin’s lawyers, although you can’t actually read beyond the first vague page of whining bullshit, because Greta/Fox can’t figure out how to operate the Internet.

But, from other websites, we gather Palin’s lawyers plan lawsuits against MSNBC, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, individual bloggers in Alaska, and other such anti-Palin forces such as “rain on your wedding day” and static cling.

The Crown Prosecution Service is telling police officers to use Wikipedia to prepare for court cases.

Famous and respected New York Judge Richard Posner says maybe we should ban links to save newspapers.

In the mid-60s, a golden generation of highly trained whizz kids was pouring out of American universities with PhDs in maths, engineering and chemistry. "It was the generation that went on to drive the development of silicon valley in the 1970s," says Dave Parker, director of the British National Space Centre. "And those people made the moon landing happen."

A stinging attack by John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, labels bloggers and alternative media outlets as “political extremists”. Hartigan implies that bloggers should be jailed as they are in oppressive police states like China and Burma.

Television is a place of maturity and thought. The blogosphere is a place of dickweeds.

That’s according to CNBC host Dennis Kneale, who’s declared the recession over, and went postal on critical financial bloggers Tuesday.

FILESHARING SITE The Pirate Bay is lowering the Jolly Roger and setting sail under the legitimate flag of Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish software company that also runs Internet cafes.

Global Gaming Factory (GGF) is to pay 60 million kronor ($7.8 million) for the download service in a mixture of shares and cash.

Pirate Bay had become one of the largest file-sharing sites on the web. But in April the four Swedes running the site were convicted of copyright infringement, sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.9 million).

GGF intends to take Pirate Bay legit by developing a way to pay copyright holders when their content is downloaded via the BitTorrent catalogue tracking site.

Anyone using Twitter over the past few days knows that the topic of the Iranian election has been the most popular. Thousands of tweets and retweets alleging that the election was a fraud, calling for protests in Iran, and even urging followers hack various Iranian news websites (which they did successfully). The Twitter popularity caught the eye of various blogs such as Mashable and TechCrunch and even made its way to mainstream news media sites.

Were these legitimate Iranian people or the works of a propaganda machine? I became curious and decided to investigate the origins of the information. In doing so, I narrowed it down to a handful of people who have accounted for 30,000 Iran related tweets in the past few days. Each of them had some striking similarities -

Impulsivity and the ability to instantly post things on the internet are a dangerous mix. Throw in egomania and, well, you've pretty much got Chad Johnson's Twitter page. (And, yes, we'll call him Chad Johnson(notes), because that's still his display name, despite the fact that it's easily changeable.)

Anyway, after news of Michael Jackson's death broke yesterday, Johnson had a typically measured response:

The much-vaunted anti-terror eagles at the TSA have subcontractors whose hard-drives turn up in Ghanain junk-markets in heaps of illegally disposed-of e-waste. The drives are stuffed full of unencrypted, sensitive documents:

What has happened is that bloggers have blown the support columns out from underneath traditional media and the people who run the show don’t like that.

The fact that some of us are able to survive by maintaining blogs must have come as an incredible shock to fat bastards in boardrooms across the land. That we are not “regulated” is unthinkable in the Soviet hive mind that governs the political economy of the United States.

Wall Street firms have made off with an unknown sum of taxpayer money and the mom who makes $800 per month from her blogs (see the article below) is going to have comply with FTC regulations?

Cyber attacks against pro-Ahmadinejad (government) websites have largely been driven by hand, in sharp contrast to the botnet-fuelled attacks associated with cyberconflicts between Russia and Estonia, for example. Security watchers are describing the Iranian conflict as a "crowd sourced cyber-war", featuring DIY denial of service attack tools, web page “refresher” tools and PHP scripts, security blogger Dancho Danchev reports.

It's the 2009 presidential election in Iran and opposition leader Mir-Houssein Mousavi declares victory hours before the polls close, insuring that any result to the contrary will be called into question. Western media goes into overdrive, fighting with each other to see who can offer the most hyperbolic denunciation of the vote and President Ahmadenijad's apparent victory (BBC wins by publishing bald-faced lies about the supposed popular uprising which it is later forced to retract). On June 13th, 30000 "tweets" begin to flood Twitter with live updates from Iran, most written in English and provided by a handful of newly-registered users with identical profile photos.

What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews can be tainted: Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.

Were these legitimate Iranian people or the works of a propaganda machine? I became curious and decided to investigate the origins of the information. In doing so, I narrowed it down to a handful of people who have accounted for 30,000 Iran related tweets in the past few days. Each of them had some striking similarities -

1. They each created their twitter accounts on Saturday June 13th.
2. Each had extremely high number of Tweets since creating their profiles.
3. “IranElection” was each of their most popular keyword
4. With some very small exceptions, each were posting in ENGLISH.
5. Half of them had the exact same profile photo
6. Each had thousands of followers, with only a few friends. Most of their friends were EACH OTHER.

A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs.

Officials who run the city of Bozeman, Montana -- perhaps setting a new standard for privacy invasion in the name of public safety -- are insisting that job applicants cough up their usernames and passwords for any social networking sites or online forums in which they participate. Reason: background checks.

The era of brave reporters and determined editors seems to be over. Correspondents who covered the Vietnam War, who actually helped to stop the Vietnam War, are getting older. They write memoirs and publish books, but they hardly witness today's conflicts. There are still some fearless and dedicated journalists - Keith Harmon Snow or John Pilger to mention just two - but they are more exceptions that prove the rule than a common occurrence.

And yet brave alternative voices are needed more now than in any other time in recent history.

The Obama Administration's decision to support Bush-era concealment policies has forced the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge (PK) to drop their lawsuit about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). EFF and PK had been seeking important documents about the secret intellectual property enforcement treaty that has broad implications for global privacy and innovation.

Federal judges have very little discretion to overrule Executive Branch decisions to classify information on "national security" grounds, and the Obama Administration has recently informed the court that it intends to defend the classification claims originally made by the Bush Administration.

It's not exactly Big Brother and the overall intentions seem to have the public's best interest at heart. But many are very uncomfortable about a proposed new law being introduced in the House of Commons on Thursday that could affect anyone using the Internet in Canada.

The bill, with the unwieldy name of "An Act Regulating Telecommunications Facilities to Support Investigations," would allow police to force your ISP to hand over any records of your emails, chat room conversations, website history or surfing habits to authorities without a warrant.

The Internet is by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the United States.

You know nothing. Abso-fucking-lutely nothing about what happened, or is happening across Iran at the very moment. Most of us don't, actually. What we see is a tiny slice of reality, mind you, what is happening on the main squares in the big cities, under camera lenses.

9/11 truth has "become a core part of the belief system of anti-Semites and millions of others around the world," according to ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman.

how do we know that Gabhan is really in Tehran and not, say, spoofing from Johannesburg?

And even if he's in Iran, how do we know his information is credible? It's even possible that some of the tweets are coming from Iranian authorities or foreign intelligence agencies issuing disinformation.

President Obama has ruled out direct intervention in the electoral turmoil in Iran, warning that US attempts to interfere will backfire and that America has little to gain by throwing in its lot with the opposition.

But his public reluctance to interfere has been undermined by the actions of the State Department, which took the unusual step of asking Twitter to delay planned maintenance work so that Iranian protesters can continue to use it to post images and reports of unrest.

As Al Jazeera's 24-hour station takes to the air in English and with other new Arab English-language media initiatives such as the Ramallah-based Palestine Times fresh off the press, Israel has begun effectively using a new weapon in its public diplomacy arsenal to fight the media war on the Web - a locally-developed computer software tool called the "Internet Megaphone."

The Foreign Ministry itself is now pushing the idea, urging supporters of Israel everywhere to become cyberspace soldiers "in the new battleground for Israel's image."

Were these legitimate Iranian people or the works of a propaganda machine? I became curious and decided to investigate the origins of the information. In doing so, I narrowed it down to a handful of people who have accounted for 30,000 Iran related tweets in the past few days. Each of them had some striking similarities -

1. They each created their twitter accounts on Saturday June 13th.
2. Each had extremely high number of Tweets since creating their profiles.
3. “IranElection” was each of their most popular keyword
4. With some very small exceptions, each were posting in ENGLISH.
5. Half of them had the exact same profile photo
6. Each had thousands of followers, with only a few friends. Most of their friends were EACH OTHER.

One day after Arizona's unemployment website crashed, Assistant Director Patrick Harrington says he still doesn't know why it happened.

"What this software was doing in error is it was asking people to create a new password," Harrington told ABC15 Tuesday afternoon.

What possible justification is there to grant anonymity to someone to spout these clichéd and factually false insults? First, as I've documented numerous times and as Mayer herself well knows, the case against Brennan was not that he was "at the agency for the past ten years" or even that he had anything to do with the torture program, but rather that (as she herself documents later in the piece) he explicitly advocated and defended many of the worst torture techniques and other Bush abuses.

Look at this screencap from Twitter. Someone is using multiple twitter accounts to feed the same identical message into twitter over and over and over.

These are not individual Iranians; THIS IS A PROPAGANDA OPERATION! Twitter is being hijacked!

Supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the presidential challenger whom President Ahmedinejad claims to have defeated with 63.4 per cent of the vote, have emulated the internet campaign techniques used by Barack Obama to appeal to the young generation of Iranians who make up the majority of his support base.

But reports from Tehran say that social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, the micro-blogging website, were taken down after Mr Ahmadinejad claimed victory. SMS text messaging, a preferred medium of communication for young Iranians, has also been disabled. This is widely suspected to be the result of government interference, but could equally be caused by the poor quality of the network and the heavy demand it is experiencing.

"They [bloggers] are doing some great things," said Mike Hoyt, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. "In many ways, they're helping the conversation get bigger. But the optimist in me hopes that at some point some of the time-tested old-media standards will rub off on them.

The online social network is preparing to lay off as many as 500 of its 1,600 workers, the TechCrunch blog reported on Wednesday, as it cuts costs while trying to stay ahead of growing competition from rival Facebook.

MySpace is part of Fox Interactive Media, which houses some of News Corp's online properties. News Corp last month ousted co-founder and Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe and has shaken up management elsewhere in its digital operations.

The Constitutional Council declared access to the internet to be a basic human right, directly opposing the key points of Mr Sarkozy's law, passed in April, which created the first internet police agency in the democratic world.

The strongly-worded decision means that Mr Sarkozy's scheme has backfired and inadvertently boosted those who defend the free-for-all culture of the web.

Network World is reporting a new Twitter virus has been making the rounds today. At best the virus will auto-tweet this message: "Hey everyone, join StalkDaily.com. It's a site like Twitter but with pictures, videos and so much more." At worst, it may lock you out of your Twitter account as noted by Sheamus Bennett at Twittercism.

One year later, all three military services (and, it seems, half the other agencies in Washington) are fully uploaded and stalking each other in a funding cyberwar. As a result, the virtual sun is shining for military-industrial corporations, as Frida Berrigan tells us in her latest post: actual money is starting to flow, and a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed new cybermilitary-industrial complex is in formation. Not surprisingly, it has all the trappings of the older version of the same, right down to the corporate names on the logos and the military-industrial fun in the sun that goes with it.

Krichmar emphasizes that these artificial nervous systems are based upon neurobiological principles rather than computer models of how intelligence works. The fi rst of those principles, as he describes it, is: “The brain is embodied in the body and the body is embedded in the environment — so we build brains and then we put these brains in bodies and then we let these bodies loose in an environment to see what happens,”

China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet.

There is also speculation among observers online that the incident, which became public Saturday, could be a hoax.

A "guardian of the truth" on Wikipedia, the global internet encyclopedia, has been caught up in an embarrassing scandal after it was revealed that he created bogus online identities to change entries on the system.

I noticed this omission on YouTube Friday morning at appx 10:00 a.m. ET. On Thursday 6/4, it appears a WRH member posted a link to a YouTube video: Congresswoman Kaptur Grills Federal Reserve Chair Bernanke at 12:18 Hawaiin time (I assume the time zone). So a day later (at the very least 16 hours) YouTube shows zero referrals from Mike Rivero’s site?

I went there exactly one time to see the interface. What it is is internet text messaging. It’s a virtual cell-phone. What’s more interesting is what people are saying about it (see the following comments). When you’ve got something that’s composed of high fructose, spun through forced hot air turbines into wall board insulation, you’ve got Twitter. I’ve seen one functioning value which Twitter provides. Twitter allows you to determine the useful value of any person in your life simply by discovering whether they use it or not.

Internet radio host Hal Turner — accused of inciting Catholics to "take up arms" and singling out two Connecticut lawmakers and a state ethics official on a website — was taken into custody in New Jersey late Wednesday after state Capitol police in Connecticut obtained a warrant for his arrest.

At the end of last year the RIAA admitted it's practice of threatening to drag old ladies and children into court unless they paid it shedloads of money on somewhat dubious evidence wasn't working out. Instead it said it would be working with ISPs that would shut the 'pirates' down.

However, CNET reports that the recording industry is still waiting to hear from the RIAA which ISPs have agreed to work with the association. While the RIAA claims that a number of different ISPs have forwarded nearly half a million notices to alleged P2P copyright infringers during the last six months, it is refusing to say which ISPs, exactly, those would be.

In fact, so far we have not heard of anyone who has actually received such a P2P filesharing notice from any ISP, let alone paid any heed to one.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating whether the hiring practices of Google, Yahoo, Apple and some other technology companies may have violated anti-trust regulations, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The focus of the investigation is not clear, but appears to address the possible agreements among these companies not to poach top executives from one another. The investigation includes biotech company Genentech, as well as other tech companies the Post said, citing two unidentified sources.

It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship - to put it mildly - on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which exists outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However today Chinese authorities have come down like a tonne of bricks on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com, Blogger and a number of other sites. And that’s no joke, given that we’re talking about the Great Wall of China here.

Those were the hilarious words shouted Monday night by the actor Will Ferrell during a silly bit on Conan O'Brien's debut as host of NBC's The Tonight Show (which was a solidly funny and successful debut, btw). But it got me thinking: how cool would it be if instead of typing away in such an impersonal manner on Facebook and Twitter, millions of people used CB radio's and even the phone!