TorrentFreak explains how the SOPA virus works:

[The] SOPA virus holds all files on the host computer ransom.

“Your computer is locked!” the splash screen above warns, adding:

"If you see a warning.txt or warning screen, it means your IP address was included in S.O.P.A. Black List. One or more of the following items were made from your PC:
1. Downloading or distributing audio or video files protected by Copyright Law.
2. Downloading or distributing illegal content (child porn, phishing software, etc.)
3. Downloading or distributing Software protected by Copyright Law.
As a result of these infringements based on Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) your PC and files are now blocked."

Now that the unwitting virus victim is terrified, the program goes in for the kill by warning that those who "don't pay the fine within 72 HOURS at the amount of 200 USD all your computer data will be erased." The ransom can be paid by a prepaid MoneyPak voucher or Western Union, depending on the victim's location.

Because it makes so much sense for the feds to ignore alleged downloading of child porn or copyrighted material as long as they receive a mere $200 in return.

Don't be scared if this pops up. After all, further action on SOPA was postponed by the U.S. House in January, 2012.

Simply search out guides to removing the ransomware, such as this one from YooSecurity. The same outfit created the helpful video below, which walks users through the steps to regaining control of a kidnapped computer--and hopefully restoring some peace of mind.

Video by YooSecurity.com.

Screengrab, Copyrightinformation.org

Some of the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in the country are set to take steps aimed at stopping illegal downloads.

The penalties can result in the repeat offenders losing their Internet access, though providers say it doesn't have to go that far.

Wired names the participants and describes the series of measures, called the Copyright Alert System, that will be used to clamp down on illegal sharers:

The plan, now four years in the making, includes participation by AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. After four offenses, the historic plan calls for these residential internet providers to initiate so-called “mitigation measures (.pdf) that might include reducing internet speeds and redirecting a subscriber’s service to an “educational” landing page about infringement.

The huge--and successful--online backlash against SOPA and similar legislative attacks on piracy slowed ISP plans to implement these measures, according to Gigi Sohn.

Ms. Sohn, who heads a digital rights group called Public Knowledge, told Wired that ISPs were afraid that if they were too quick to take their own anti-piracy measures, "...public opinion would be so raw, this would be caught in the whirlwind of bad PR."

Wired goes on to detail how ISPs will deal with infringement. Targets of the following will definitely feel like Big Brother is watching:

On the first offense, internet subscribers will receive an e-mail "alert" from their ISP saying the account "may have been" misused for online content theft. On the second offense, the alert might contain an "educational message" about the legalities of online file sharing.

On the third and fourth infractions, the subscriber will likely receive a pop-up notice "asking the subscriber to acknowledge receipt of the alert."

"Mitigation measures" follow after the fourth warning. While the term has a bitterly dystopian ring to it, on paper it means reduced Internet speed and possible redirection to a page encouraging the user to contact their provider and "discuss" the issue.

Jill Lesser, who directs the group that created these measures, told Wired that the program is intended to be "educational" rather than a form of punishment.

In the end the Internet may be ahead of the ISPs. For three months there has been a standing Reddit thread filled with advice on getting around the Copyright Alert System.

Surveillance nation.

It may seem that the government keeping an eye on every bit of data flowing across the Internet is an improbably vast form of surveillance, too expensive to manage. Ars Technica informs us that it is terrifyingly easy to nose around inside all our emails, chats and site visits, using a series of functions that include deep packet inspection (DPI). DPI is hardware capability that has been used by no less than that paragon of democracy, the Libyan government under Muammar Gaddafi.

Deep packet inspection is useful because it keeps networks safe. However, it can also reveal the entirety of a web user's digital trail. If your data flashing through your Internet provider's routers is like a car going through a stoplight, data packet inspection is performing the function of the traffic cam that captures your plate number. But when used for snooping, data packet inspection doesn't just snapshot a random packet, it works full-time. This is why DPI's usefulness in probing data was feared by opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

As Ars Technica's Sean Gallagher reports, however, deep packet inspection is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to total data surveillance. There are services, Gallagher writes, that offer "Google-sized surveillance":

NetFalcon launched as a product just over a year ago. It uses a columnar database format similar to Google’s BigTable and Teradata’s Aster database systems as its data store, and can perform both real-time and after-the-fact analysis on data picked up by its network probes. Each probe can handle up to 10 gigabits per second, and the "correlation engine" that takes in all of the inputs can pull in over 100 gigabits per second for processing. NetFalcon’s “retention server” database takes inputs not only from the system’s network probes, but also pulls in feeds from external log sources, Simple Network Management Protocol “trap” events, and other databases. It correlates all the traffic and event data for weeks or even months. "Hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data, but laid out in such a way that you can do queries and searches very rapidly," [Bivio Networks CEO Dr. Elan] Amir said.

If you are imagining a kind of covert spy Google accessible only to those who feel they have reason to track what you do on the Internet for their own commercial or just plain nefarious reasons, that seems about right.

Sleep well.

Internet Defense League: Assemble.

Last night, Betabeat checked ourselves in with a nebbishy man holding an iPad, rode the elevator up to "PH" with another nebbishy man (a copy of The Leaderless Revolution tucked under his arm) and arrived upstairs at the Internet Defense League's New York launch party, just as the OpenPlans roofdeck was beginning to fill up.

It was one of those rooftops that aren't quite at the top of the world--in fact, we could see the tealights of another party happening several stories up, right next door--but rather one of those that leave you hovering smack in the middle of the skyline, feeling pleasantly loomed-over.

"It really looks like Gotham," observed one attendee--though a cleaned-up version, surely. We can't imagine Batman existing in a city with such a carefully landscaped roofdeck. The edges were covered in those wildflowerish grasses that grace the High Line, giving the whole place the feel of a rendering displayed in the lobby of a particularly hip school of architecture. Not entirely surprising, given OpenPlans' mission is to "help cities work better."

It quickly became clear that about half the crowd was there not to fight for Internet freedom, but rather for OpenPlans' happy hour. We struck up a conversation with a soft-spoken gentleman holding a large bowl of popcorn, who explained that he worked with a nonprofit that deals with "public spaces," and that he'd come from another party on a neighboring deck. (We hope he rappelled, Batman-style.)

But the occasional snatch of conversation made it clear we were among the techies: "I was programming in BASIC when I was 10," we overheard at one point, followed shortly thereafter by, "I'm pretty sure Facebook is culture." We heard at least one enthusiastic young man (college-aged, we figured) describing himself as "crazy" for the New York startup scene.

We started talking to a Laptop Magazine writer named Daniel Berg, there on behalf of his own personal blog (and hoping for a chance to meet Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian). He admitted that the name and the concept were "a little cheesy," but, given the difficulty of staying on top of every new political development, it provides a valuable rallying point.

"I can focus on my day-to-day job, and I can focus on everything else, and know that I am tuned in that if there is something important going on, I'll immediately be aware, my website will immediately be a part of the movement, and I can just leave it in the hands of people that I trust," he said.

We wouldn't have time for following the SOPA opera if we had Mr. Berg's schedule, either: He recently competed in the AngelHack competition, building a kind of Rotten Tomatoes for hotel reviews, called the Stayover. (They made it to the finals in San Francisco, but didn't quite nab the pot of funding at the end of the rainbow.)

At this point, the party was well and truly warmed up, with the roof deck getting crowded and the drinks growing scarce. Another man wandered up and told us that he'd looked up and recognized someone at the snack table, only to realize--after starting to speak--that it was in fact Jeff Jarvis, with whom he was not personally acquainted. We looked up to see Mr. Ohanian making his way through the crowd, with general manager Erik Marin barreling after him. Circulating once more, we fell into conversation with a developer (slight and fair-haired) and community manager (impressively bearded) from Turntable.fm.

If only this reporter were able to follow the finer points of the programming language Ruby, she might've learned something.

About that time came the event we'd all been waiting for (well, those of us who were there for the Internet Defense League, rather than the OpenPlans' get-together): The unveiling of the cat signal. Several sites have already adopted the digital version, a few lines of code that'll switch on if the IDL detects anything it deems a new SOPA-style threat to the open web. But it's hard to match a giant, crazy-eyed cat projected onto the side of a Manhattan building for sheer spectacle.

Mr. Ohanian, making a few remarks.

After leaning over the edge for a good look, we practically bumped into Mr. Martin--who does, as another attendee pointed out, look the the tiniest bit like Tintin's sidekick, Haddock.

"This is fun, and, like, the cat signal thing is fun. But people are out here because they want to be a part of something," he told us. "It's cool to see people actually, like, get out and support this." Betabeat remarked on how nice IRL events are, to which Mr. Martin replied, "Yeah, which is weird, cause we're about defending the Internet."

He returned to floating about the party, while groups continued to form and reform around Mr. Ohanian. Finally giving up on catching him alone, Betabeat crept up to eavesdrop. Here's what we learned: Mr. Ohanian is, for lack of a better term, a complete cat lady. An earnest young woman had gotten him onto the subject of Karma (get it?), his beloved black cat. "She's a diva," he informed us, adding that "she's waiting for me at home." Whipping out his phone to show everyone a picture, he confessed she used to be the background, but "it got weird."

Someone pulled him back to the topic of the IDL, which he explained simply as designed to deal with "anything that threatens to fuck up the Internet." That's a pretty broad mandate.

Then the aforementioned startup-crazed young man asked Mr. Ohanian for tips about how to "make it." Mr. Ohanian immediately began preaching the gospel of programming. Developers, he explained, are like Jay-Z. Everyone wants a minute of his time, or his advice, or his presence, and Jay-Z can't do it all. Learn enough Ruby to get a quick and dirty prototype up and running, and, "No offense, but if I'm a developer, I'll have more respect for you."

All the while, a tall, pony-tailed acolyte nodded his agreement. "Listen to this man," he chimed in.

Making one last round of the room, we bumped into Nick Grossman, the event's organizer, who told us he's affiliated with Union Square Ventures and the MIT Media Lab, but working on a new advocacy organization, "focused on innovation and the open web." Even he admitted the event's sweep was wide: "The purpose of all of these events, as far as I understand it, is to get people excited about the web and standing up for the web," he said.

He had a positive spin on the mixed crowd: "Everybody for both events I think shares a certain ethos about openness and creativity and the potential of things like the web and open systems and collaboration, et cetera, et cetera," he said.

By this time, the party had long since peaked and was winding down to a few stragglers. Mr. Ohanian, however, was still surrounded.

We hope they didn't keep him from Karma too late.

Despite their signs, these people are not with Backpage. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Backpage.com, owned by the Village Voice, is one of the more controversial web enterprises: according to some reports, it hosts 70 percent of the web's sex ads. On Wednesday night, there were two protests outside the Voice's offices in Cooper Square. One was led by radical feminists and evangelical Christians who compare Backpage to a pimp, hoping to shut it down the way Craigslist's "adult services section" was shut down. The other protest was led by Backpage users: escorts, dommes, and rent boys, who say shutting down the site will run them out of business or onto the streets.

Police tell members of the Sex Workers Outreach Project where they can protest. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

The New York chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project faced off with a coalition of anti-prostitution feminists, 33 evangelical Christian youth, their faith leaders, and a girls' theatre troupe. While the SWOP folks passed out flyers explaining the controversy to people rolling out of work early on the hottest and longest day of the year, the anti-Backpagers walked a picket line on the street just outside the doors of 36 Cooper, inside which no sex trafficking takes place, but where the Village Voice is housed.

There was also a drum circle.

It wouldn't be a protest without a drum circle. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Out with the SWOP protesters was Vivian, a sex worker who's been blogging her experiences using Backpage. "Because I could work for myself and control my working conditions, I was able to screen clients for the first time," she wrote. That meant being able to avoid potentially violent customers approaching her online.

About twenty feet to her left--at least spatially, if not at all politically--the anti-Backpagers carried mini pink umbrellas from Duane Reade as they marched. Picket lines, a not entirely extinct form of protest, are most often performed by workers outside their own workplace, in solidarity with the workers inside. Not so this time. Picketers carried signs likening the Village Voice to pimps.

The marchers prefaced their "Prostitution has got to go!" chant with the unlikely "Hey, hey! Ho, ho!" a few times until a 20-something Caucasian man in a pressed shirt, who held a sheet listing the chants of the day, chimed over them with "No more selling women here, Village Voice, change your career."

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Despite the words they were saying, several of the anti-Backpagers told me that they were not there in opposition to prostitution, or to adult women who work online as escorts. Some of them had also used Backpage. One was Jonathan Walton, the director of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's New York City Urban Project, who brought out 33 members to the protest. As 20 women circled around us bearing placards demanding the abolition of Backpage, Mr. Walton told me he uses the website to create "prayer maps."

"I use these sites to figure out where the girls are for sale. We can figure out what the men are saying they want on Backpage, and then we can find the brothels by cross-referencing that with their blogs," he explained, referring to the blogs that some customers of sex workers have begun to publish. "They're all online. It's so easy."

Once a brothel (or an apartment believed to be one) has been mapped, Mr. Walton leads his youth ministry there for prayer. "We go to these places and pray. God loves the traffickers as much as he loves the exploited victim."

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

I noticed that the majority of anti-Backpagers on the picket were wearing yellow armbands bearing a cross with a hand on one side and a foot on the other. I asked four different people wearing them what they meant, but no one would tell me. "Have you met Jonathan?" a man who looked much older and a little less pulled together than the cleaned-up kids who were picketing. "He could tell you." He handed me a bottle of water imprinted with a heart draped in chains and the URL priceoflifenyc.org. (The website advertises a 1.2M initiative targeting 10 New York college campuses with social media and evangelism – "Stop Kony" with a sex trafficking twist.)

Our conversation was interrupted by a series of speakers. A handler identified the one with a mop of brown pretty boy curls, who called Internet pornography "a sea monster, a leviathan, that will eat our women and children alive," as "Aaron Cohen, slave hunter." Mr. Cohen traded his rock and roll lifestyle ("he used to be known as Perry Farrell's best friend and spiritual collaborator," a LA Weekly profile notes – the LA Weekly, owned by Backpage parent company Village Voice Media!) for raiding brothels in Southeast Asia.

Following Mr. Cohen came Norma Ramos, a 50-ish woman in a khaki-colored dress and wide-brimmed hat that recalled the kind of get-up I imagined Nicholas Kristof might favor while rescuing "sex slaves."  Ms. Ramos, one of the protest's lead organizers, brought up New York City Council Member Brad Lander, the co-author of a city resolution demanding the closure of Backpage. Mr. Lander recalled the contentious hearing at which Village Voice's general counsel, Liz McDougall, attempted to explain Backpage's best practices for identifying ads that might include illegal content, including references to underage persons. "She had the audacity," he told the assembled crowd, now swelled to 50, "to say that Backpage knew better, than the mayors, than all the Attorneys General."

Norma Ramos, holding a sign. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

One of those Attorneys General, Rob McKenna of Washington state, is the architect of policy that threatens not just Backpage, but free speech online. In an amendment to Washington State Senate Bill 6251, Mr. McKenna aimed to make Backpage illegal by criminalizing any individual or company who "knowingly publishes, disseminates, or displays, or causes directly or indirectly, to be published, disseminated, or displayed, any advertisement for a commercial sex act, which is to take place in the state of Washington and that includes the depiction of a minor."

This is where the issue transcends debates about sex; like two high-profile anti-piracy bills that were halted earlier this year, a law like this threatens to drastically change the way the Internet works. The word "indirectly" in the bill recalls the issue with the unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act–its breadth potentially guts the core protections in the Communications Decency Act, the law that prevents websites from being held liable for material posted by their users. Such a sweeping change, digital rights advocates fear, could force the entire web into the purgatory of comment-moderation.

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

New York City Council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, who co-sponsored the resolution to demand Backpage shut down, shrugged when I asked her what we could expect if Backpage did close. Would it be a repeat of the the Craigslist "adult services" closure, which drove so many sex ads to Backpage in the first place?

She passed me back to Mr. Lander, the resolution's other co-sponsor. "Look, sex trafficking won't end tomorrow if Backpage is shut down," he said. "But the internet, it's pretty good at expanding business. It makes it easier to buy things you might otherwise be ashamed of buying."

Mr. Lander assured me he had consulted with SWOP. "I can't imagine why they wouldn't want to set up their own website, and have their own people advertise on it."

I circled back to Vivian, who confirmed Mr. Lander had one meeting with her, but hadn't addressed SWOP's concerns. "I told him there were serious problems with the bill, that we needed to be brought into the process as the real experts on Backpage. But he said, 'this is what I believe, and this is how I'll vote.'"

(Photo: Flickr.com/intelphotos)

Good news for everyone still struggling with slow DSL connections: President Obama is making a major effort to increase broadband connectivity throughout the U.S.

POTUS is slated to sign a new executive order tomorrow that will streamline the construction process of broadband infrastructure, according to a White House press release:

The new Executive Order will ensure that agencies charged with managing Federal properties and roads take specific steps to adopt a uniform approach for allowing broadband carriers to build networks on and through those assets and speed the delivery of connectivity to communities, businesses, and schools....The Executive Order (EO) will require the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Interior, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs as well as the US Postal Service to offer carriers a single approach to leasing Federal assets for broadband deployment.

The release also states that the White House has established a public-private partnership called US Ignite that will "create a new wave of services that take advantage of state-of-the-art, programmable broadband networks running up to 100 times faster than today’s Internet."

Now if only we could convince our government officials that legislation like SOPA is actually harmful to the Internet, we'll be all set.

Mr. Martin (Photo: Reddit)

The top-scoring link of all time on the social news website Reddit is a post that users were never meant to see at all. It is titled “test post please ignore,” but almost 27,000 Redditors found it so amusing that they voted it up.

That is testament to the website’s impassioned community—and their brand of dry, often geeky humor (the site’s logo is an alien, after all). But Reddit’s user base, which a recent PBS documentary pegged as 72 percent male, has wide-ranging interests. Other top posts include a link to a news item about the elderly volunteering to clean up nuclear waste in Japan following the 2011 tsunami, and a Q&A session with the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Reddit is one of the country’s most highly trafficked websites, but its general manager, Erik Martin, keeps a remarkably low profile. Most Redditors know the 33-year-old Mr. Martin solely by his username: HueyPriest.

“Part of that’s just me, but part of it is like, we never wanted Reddit to be about the people who work there,” Mr. Martin told Betabeat on the second floor of a San Francisco café that was swiftly inching toward sweltering in the late April heat. Dressed in a plaid button-down and jeans, with dark circles forming beneath his eyes, he looked every bit the startup ingenue. “We don’t want it to be this cult of personality thing that I think some sites get turned into.”

Owned by Advance Publications, Reddit is not a publisher but a platform that allows users to share links, stories and multimedia. Often referred to as the “front page of the Internet,” it is notorious for inside jokes. While cartoon rage comics, for instance, may have originated on the ever-more-offensive 4chan message boards, they certainly reached their apex on Reddit (just read the recent New York Times article for confirmation on that). Users also can create their own “subreddits”—or sections—based on any topic of their choosing, and volunteers with no formal association to Reddit moderate them. Democratization is inherently woven into the site’s functionality: users vote posts up or down at their pleasure: The more votes a post gets, the better chance it has of making it to the “front page,” where the most readers will see it.

And an eye-popping number of users do see it: the site averages 2.5 billion pageviews a month. With user statistics like that, and an especially loyal following, detractors have derided it as a “hive mind,” but that doesn’t fully account for the complexity and generosity of the community: A few months ago, the site hosted a poignant question-and-answer session with a survivor of Norway’s Utøya massacre, for example, and there are countless threads that help collect donations for the community’s sick or needy members.

“‘Hive mind’ is often used pejoratively, and I definitely understand what people are referring to, but I think the idea of a hive mind works pretty well for bees,” offered Mr. Martin, when asked about Reddit’s “upvote now-assess later” tendencies. For bees, he explained, a hive mind means that it takes a democratic consensus to make an important decision, like where to construct a new hive.

“[The hive mind] is a very fast, sort of reactionary thing, and that has bad results sometimes, results where people are not as skeptical as maybe they should be. You need to make sure enough bees are going to double-check the new location. You need a bunch of bees going like, ‘You are right, that is a pretty great new home, it has a tire swing.’”

A little history: In 2005, the site’s young co-founders, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, were accepted by the startup incubator Y Combinator for its first-ever round. A year later, in a push to expand its online brand, Condé Nast acquired Reddit for between $10 million and $20 million. At the time, Reddit averaged just 70,000 unique daily visitors.

After the sale, Condé worked feverishly to fold Reddit into its stable of well-established print brands, like Vogue and Wired. “We thought of Reddit, [technology blog] Ars Technica and Wired as what Condé Nast deemed the ‘innovation group,’” said Jena Donlin, who runs business operations for Reddit and still works out of the Condé Nast office in Times Square.

Mr. Martin, who had majored in American Studies at Tulane and worked in the documentary film industry, served as the site’s community manager at the time, a role that he said entailed “answering user questions, dealing with spam and finding cool things in the community to promote.”

By all accounts, Mr. Martin also played a significant role in ushering in a successful transition from an independently run website to a division of a major publishing conglomerate. What made the job even harder was that Reddit’s approach to publishing exemplified the democratizing influence of the web, which at that very moment was violently destabilizing the whole we-speak-you-listen model that Condé Nast, with its pantheon of all-powerful editors, had long since mastered.

As Reddit’s user base continued to grow following the acquisition, the tension between the democratized user-generated site and its ancient publishing parent became more pronounced. Reddit does not offer traditional advertising, so its primary stream of revenue came in the form of Reddit Gold, a paid premium membership subscription, as well as what Mr. Martin called “self-serve ads for mom-and-pop shops” and carefully selected marketing partnerships.

The site, which boasts a barebones user interface that harkens back to the halcyon days of ’90s Usenet groups, has always shunned traditional advertising, a stance that even a cash-starved, ad-hungry Condé Nast couldn’t change. Monetizing Reddit is something Condé Nast “has still not been able to figure out,” Mr. Ohanian said in a 2010 episode of Big Think, adding, “Reddit has a fantastic audience ... How do we advertise to them in a way that isn’t screwing them as a user and at the same time providing enough value to an advertiser to want to do it?”

(Photo: Flickr.com/teuobk)

But in August 2010, an advertising controversy erupted between the stodgy parent company and its willful child. The activist group “Just Say Now” wanted to host self-serve ads on Reddit in support of the proposed California marijuana legalization law Prop 19, but Condé Nast refused. The Reddit team responded by agreeing to host Just Say Now’s ads on their site for free, a move that was still technically within the bounds of the parent company’s rules, but made a strong point.

Reddit’s traffic continued to explode, and in early 2011, the site was getting upward of two billion pageviews a month. Condé Nast wasn’t equipped to handle the technological and cultural challenges that came with that kind of traffic. And the tensions between the little-website-that-could and its old-school parent company were starting to take their toll. “In the spring of 2011, we had one programmer and two system administrators and me,” Mr. Martin explained. “It was kind of a rough time, and I was like, ‘If Reddit needs me to move out to San Francisco, I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever Reddit needs. I can’t let this fail.’”

Mr. Martin agreed to move to San Francisco at the behest of Condé, and took on the general manager role. He began to grow the team, hiring a handful of programmers to administer the site. Finally, in September 2011, the company spun Reddit out of the Condé Nast family into its own standalone subsidiary, while still retaining ownership.

“We don’t want to get in users’ way,” Ms. Donlin explained. “We want to serve what the community is already doing. Condé Nast understood that, and it’s why we’re independent. They understood that we needed to be able to do that in order to grow. And they realized in the current structure of Condé Nast, it wasn’t as easy to [grow] because there wasn’t a precedent that was set. We’re more bottom up whereas Condé is more top down.”

Mr. Martin agreed. “The process didn’t allow for [what Reddit needed], that was the main tension. [Condé’s] process is set up for sales cycles that take longer and there’s more sort of time for that kind of vetting and decision-making. But most of the Condé brands have more people on the sales side than we have total employees.”

Reddit hired its first-ever CEO in March 2012, an ex-Pay Pal and Facebook engineer named Yishan Wong. Now, Reddit is a subsidiary of Advance, separate from Condé, and reports to a board populated with executives from both Condé and Advance, along with Mr. Ohanian. “We’ve been working with Advance Publications to complete [R]eddit’s spinoff,” Mr. Wong wrote in a triumphant blog post on Reddit, “[including] a revamped capital structure that will allow [R]eddit to manage its own finances and operations.”

“The way that the site works,” said Kevin Morris, a staff writer at the Daily Dot, in a recent PBS segment about Reddit, “[is that] it tends to attract people who want to know the truth.” In January 2012, the Reddit community’s large-scale vocalization of their opposition to SOPA and PIPA, coupled with support from equally passionate communities on Tumblr and Wikipedia, eventually persuaded lawmakers to table the legislation. Reddit, an online community that had only been around for six years, had successfully helped to defeat the American government.

IN APRIL 2012, MUCH to his surprise, Mr. Martin was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people. For the event, Mr. Martin donned a tuxedo for only the second time ever—the first being a friend’s wedding—and completed the outfit with a shiny pair of Reddit cuff links.

“It was very surreal,” he confided a few weeks after the event. “I’ve never been to something like that. I got to meet Ralph Nader, who is adorable. He asked about Reddit and I explained it to him, but I don’t know if I was successful.”

Mr. Martin is unfailingly humble about his contributions to Reddit. “Any credit I would get,” he said, “would be for not fucking it up.”

“At Reddit, he doesn’t say, ‘Hey, check me out,’” explained Nils Olsen, an old friend of Mr. Martin’s. “He says, ‘Hey, check you out.”

“He can be very humble,” agreed Ms. Donlin. “That humbleness has also been what’s made him so successful.”

Mr. Martin will be moving back to New York in July to focus on the business and media aspects of the site and to run the New York office.

As for that TIME 100 award, it doesn’t appear to have gone to his head.

“Ralph Nader went to give me his business card and he said, ‘Well, I kind of ran out of my current cards, but I grabbed this stack of cards from the 1970s.’ All it had was a P.O. box. It didn’t have a phone number, so he scribbled it on the back,” he said.

“I was like aaahhhh, I am framing this! It was amazing.”

That sounded like an upvote.

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of Wednesday, June 13th.

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.

(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.