Mr. Parker. (Photo: Flickr/Le Web)

NYC-based non-incubator Betaworks has acquired a majority stake in the article-bookmarking service Instapaper. Creator Marco Arment wrote on his blog that he will slide into an advising role "indefinitely" as Betaworks oversees operations and expands Instapaper's staff. [PC Mag]

CISPA, the controversial Internet bill, is (probably?) dead. An anonymous source said that "there is no possible plan" to bring it up in the Democratic-controlled Senate because it faces little support from the party. [Daily Dot]

Some big names, like Sean Parker, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates, are joining Mark Zuckerberg's political action committee, FWD.us. We would love to be on those brunch-planning emails. [AllThingsD]

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer has joined the board of Jawbone, the hardware maker behind those groovy wireless headsets and speakers. [AllThingsD]

A study of Bitcoin exchanges revealed that 45 percent of them fail, often taking peoples’ money with them. And the exchanges that don't shutter are more likely to be the target of cyber attacks. [Wired]

Us IRL on Monday. (Photo: Flickr)

Anonymous has a totally calm and measured response to yesterday's news that CISPA, a controversial law that would let the government access personal data from Internet companies without a warrant, passed the House of Representatives: it's demanding that websites "blackout" on Monday. 

The hacker collective posted a salty letter on its "Anon Insiders" blog earlier today demanding that the American government will "not get our Internet" and lambasted CISPA for turning social media sites into "legally untouchable government spies."

So, this is how Anons will fight back:

We are going dark on MONDAY April 22nd at 6 AM GMT for 24 hours to protest your illogical and terrorizing bill against the Internet itself. Even with the whole Internet crying out to stop this BILL, the US House of Representatives failed to do so blinded by lobbyist’s money and cum in your eyes.

Huffington Post notes that the group doesn't plan on attacking the Internet on Monday, rather it's requesting sites from operating similar to last year's SOPA protest. And there's already a hashtag associated with the event called #CISPABlackout. So far, it seems to be receiving an apathetic response since only 3,000 tweets containing it have been recorded.

But Anonymous shouldn't enter full-on freak-out mode yet. CISPA will now move to the Democratic-controlled Senate where it will face a tougher fight and President Obama has threatened to veto the bill if it landed on his desk.

After this shit week, it sure feels like Anonymous is doing all us a favor by granting us an excuse to have a long weekend. Thanks?

(Photo: EFF.org)

CISPA, the cyber-privacy bill facing opposition from open Internet advocates, passed the House of Representatives today with a vote of 287 for, 127 against and 18 abstaining. The bill will now move on to the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it may face a tougher fight. President Obama has also threatened to veto the bill in its current form.

If passed, CISPA would give the U.S. government the ability to obtain personal user data from Internet companies without a court-ordered warrant.

Photo: Conservativedailynews.com

Amid the media’s Boston Marathon suspect screwup, the D.C. ricin scares, and the Senate’s rejection of gun background checks, one bit of news quietly slipped through: the House of Representatives passed a resolution that will bring CISPA, the cyber security bill that tackles the government’s ability to monitor personal information users give to website, to the floor. The resolution passed 227-193, a year after SOPA, another cyber-security bill, was shot down after an enormous amount of backlash from tech companies and Internet freedom advocates. This time though, that support has largely vanished, with companies such as IBM, Intel, and Oracle backing CISPA. President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the bill if it reaches his desk, according to a statement from the White House:

"The Administration, however, remains concerned that the bill does not require private entities to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information when sending cybersecurity data to the government or other private sector entities."

Internet users are primarily in a tizzy over a component of CISPA that would give the U.S. government the ability to ask private companies’ for the personal user data of ordinary U.S. residents when identifying “threat information," without requiring a court-ordered warrant.

The passage of the resolution had reddit users engraged, with many of the top posts wondering why public support seems so low this time around. "Why didn't this blow up as much as SOPA did?" reddit user seetons asked. "Honestly, it's impossible to get the entire internet to rally around this for 2 years. Money will eventually win, no matter how hard I try," replied user MarcusTheGreat7.

Too bad Alexis Ohanian is busy trying to buy Jay-Z's Nets share.

Correction: A previous version of this post said that CISPA had been passed, when in fact a resolution to bring it to the floor had passed. The final vote is expected later this week.

Bye bye. (Photo: Microsoft)

If you were hoping to get rich off of being one of the first to build apps for Google Glass, think again: Google has prohibited developers from using ads or charging for apps. We're betting Google wants to keep  that potential ad revenue all to itself. [The Verge]

Sources tell Bloomberg Twitter is seeking a deal with Viacom and Comcast that would allow it to host clips (as well as ads alongside those clips) on the site. Can't you at least verify @Jack's parents first? [Bloomberg]

Binge-watching shows is about to get a whole lot easier: Netflix is finally ditching Microsoft Silverlight in favor of HTML5 video. [The Verge]

IBM execs are headed to Washington to try to convince politicians to pass CISPA. Paging Alexis Ohanian! [Hillicon Valley]

Cory Booker's Waywire startup has finally launched in beta. [PandoDaily]

(Photo credit: Twitter/UG)

A hacker who claims ties to the Underground Nazi Hacktivist Group (UGNazi) says the collective is responsible for yesterday's Twitter outage. The hacker, who goes by the handle Cosmos, told the Telegraph she was surprised how easy it was to take down the service. 

“It wasn't really difficult at all, I myself honestly thought Twitter would be more protected from a DDoS Attack, but I guess not,” she said.

Twitter denied the outage was the result of an attack, referring back to its cascaded bug explanation. According to the group's Twitter handle, UGNazi is based in New York City. In the past, the group has been affiliated with LulzSec.

Cosmos offered differing motives for the attack to various press outlets. In an email to SearchSecurity.com, she claimed it was in protest of Twitter’s support for the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which calls for sharing network traffic information and data about cybersecurity threats between the U.S. authorities and private companies.

However, Cosmos claimed fewer political aspirations in her conversation with the Telegraph, telling the paper:

“The attack was mainly for the ‘lulz’, it goes to show what we are capable of.”

So, which is it? Because if you ask us, the outage was about as amusing as UGNazi's Twitter avatar, which is to say not at all.

Rep. Issa discussing CISPA, which he supports, at the Personal Democracy Forum.

One of Andrew Rasiej's favorite jokes is that legislators don't know the difference between a server and a waiter. Mr. Rasiej, chairman of the NY Tech Meetup and founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a summit on tech and politics, moderated on stage at NYU's Skirball Center. Mr. Rasiej faced off with netizens Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA). "Why is it that so many members of Congress don't seem to understand the Internet?" he asked.

"We don't use our children enough as advisors," Sen. Wyden said, in a joke that fell flat. "There is a generational divide on this issue."

Rep. Issa had a more thoughtful answer. "The path to Congress or elected office usually doesn't lead through tech activities," he said. "More than half of Senators are lawyers, slightly less than half the House are lawyers. There are more doctors than people who have ever started their own business."

He agreed there is a generational divide, with Congresspeople relying on IT staff to understand the Internet for them. "A lot of times, people have just simply gotten into the habit of not wanting to learn how things work because they're doing
other things... then they make these terrible jokes that show they really don't know how it works."

The uprising around SOPA and PIPA seems destined to hover around industry conferences indefinitely. Cheezburger Network chief Ben Huh said the now-legendary online protest that stopped the twin anti-piracy bills, SOPA and PIPA, would be the dominant topic at the Internet comedy gathering ROFLCon.

The pair positioned themselves as Internet-friendly, with Sen. Wyden even name-dropping TweetDeck. Rep. Issa thanked the audience and 15 million digital protestors "for what you did on January 18" to stop the bills.

Sen. Wyden proposed a "digital bill of rights," to repair the relationship between Congrees and the American web industry.  "It sounds like you're starting what amounts to a digital Constitutional convention," he told Mr. Rasiej. The bill of rights would enumerate broad rights such as "freedom," "open Internet" and the right of digital citizens to "share."

"The more I learn about the 'net, frankly, the less I know," he admitted.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post described Mr. Rasiej as a lobbyist. While he is a politically active techie, coordinating the Personal Democracy Forum as well as the large anti-SOPA protest in New York, he has never been employed as a lobbyist. Betabeat regrets the error.

That exoneration, however, did not remedy the harms caused by a full year of censorship and secret proceedings — a form of “digital Guantanamo” — that knocked out an important and popular blog devoted to hip hop music and has nearly killed it.

The back story of how the government continually failed to prove cause in its case against Dajaz1 is certainly creepy enough to feed into the web's long-standing paranoia regarding federal efforts to control sharing content online. Los Angeles-based federal prosecutors were able to keep the site shuttered so long by obtaining extended time on three separate occasions--and they did it in secret.

Dajaz1's attorney termed these actions equal to "seizing the printing press of the New York Times" because the Times referred readers to concerts given by promoters who didn't pay A.S.C.A.P. fees for performances.

Attorney Bridges's remarks end with a direct statement regarding recent government efforts to make new laws supposedly aimed at piracy:

This entire episode shows that neither the government nor the recording industry deserves any additional powers with new so-called “antipiracy” legislation, especially in the context where copyright law has been expanded and new anti-piracy remedies have been crafted ***16 times*** since 1982. This episode shows that the copyright establishment and the government are very much the “rogues” that deserve to be reined in.

Critics of S.O.P.A. and its successor, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (C.I.S.P.A.)--one a failed attempt at shoring up digital piracy laws, the other a similar attempt that could well succeed--might consider a statement like that a rallying cry.

This one's good for a lot of things.

So maybe the House passed CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) and all our private online data is imperiled, mewling before the greedy claws of the the government, but hey--some in congress apparently think giving your password to your boss is a step too far. To that end, New York representative Eliot Engel and Illinois congresswoman Jan Schakowsky have introduced a bill in the House that would ban employers from seeking your Facebook password! They've got that going for them, which is nice.

The inelegantly named Social Networking Protection Act is a response to multiple reports indicating prospective and current employers are demanding full access to employees' Facebook accounts. Ars Technica has more:

The bill seeks to block any employer from requiring current or potential employees to turn over login credentials to any person; online content can not be used as a condition of employment to "discriminate or deny employment to individuals, nor punish them for refusing to volunteer the information." The bill would apply the same prohibitions to colleges, universities, and K-12 schools. Similar legislation being written by Senators Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut) and Chuck Schumer (New York), is expected to be introduced in the Senate later this year.

Facebook is also prepared to legally block companies that demand passwords as a matter of course. After all, as Ars Technica notes, it's against a 26-year-old law.

(icanhascheezburger.com)

First SOPA, then ACTA, now CISPA—will the barrage of acronyms attacking the Internet never relent? Even the Obama Administration has condemned a bill that will hit the House of Representatives for debate on Thursday this week: the ominously-named Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or the even ominous-er CISPA. The act is inspiring petitions, press releases and blog posts from the same fearmongering contingent that mobilized the opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act.

"Right now, the US Congress is sneaking in a new law that gives them big brother spy powers over the entire web -- and they're hoping the world won't notice. We helped stop their Net attack last time, let's do it again," reads the petition on the webby activist site Avaaz.org. The bill is opposed by Obama, Ron Paul, Tim Berners-Lee, online privacy advocate the Electronic Frontier Foundation, security experts and engineers, and other people who have bothered to learn about it. So we still need to know what it is?

CISPA is intended to give the federal government greater ability to collect information on individuals from private companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Match.com, Instagram and YouPorn. The most commonly-cited objection? The bill is too vague, even after reference to copyright and piracy were removed and amendments were introduced last week.

"Internet users across the political spectrum voiced their concerns with how the bill allows companies to spy on users, filter content, and transfer personal information to agencies like the NSA," the EFF wrote after the amendments were introduced. "CISPA still allows companies to share lots of sensitive and private information about our internet use with the government," is the ACLU's interpretation.

The bill will hit Congress along with two less controversial—as of yet!—cybersecurity bills. With such widespread disapproval, CISPA seems unlikely to go forward, and we wonder how many times Internet activists can sound the alarms.

"Reddit, we took the anti-SOPA petition from 943,702 signatures to 3,460,313. The anti-CISPA petition is at 691,768, a bill expansively worse than SOPA. Please bump it, then let us discuss further measures or our past efforts are in vain. We did it before, I'm afraid we are called on to do it again," wrote one user on Reddit, was was a stronghold of anti-SOPA activity. "Just want to say that people should SERIOUSLY call. I got off the line with mine on Friday, and they haven't taken a stance yet because they wanted to see if 'enough people in the district has a certain view,'" another user wrote in the same thread.

Ugh, how many times do we have to interrupt our browsing to call our Congresspeople? Seriously, someone get the Internet a lobbyist.