It was a big year for takin' it to the streets. (via foursquare)

It's cold as a witch's tit, the Port Authority was evacuated this morning thanks to a rank gas smell, and one Betabeat reporter just burnt her arm on the heating pipe in her bathroom. Clearly 2013 is already off to a great start.

Oh, and throw one more thing on the pile: After a banner year for startup types getting their way in Washington, the New York Times reports that regulators are expected to tighten the reigns on tech companies in 2013. That means Alley and Valley types alike are looking uneasily in the direction of D.C., trying to figure out what the swamp things in the capitol district will be cooking up this year.

Welcome to the big leagues, boys and girls!

2012 was the year tech companies, who often act a bit above the fray when it comes to politics, beefed up their Washington lobbying organizations and learned to keep one eye on Congress. As a result, the startup community was able to rally the troops against SOPA and PIPA. But that was just a tiff, in the grand scheme of things.

The Times says:

“Now that the election is over, Silicon Valley companies each are thinking through their strategy for the second Obama administration,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official.

The F.T.C. is getting a new chairman, for example, which will likely impact what happens with the investigation into Google's competitive practices.

Also looming large is the possibility of bills addressing either online security or (heaven forfend!) consumer privacy. It's not like Congress is going to ignore the Internet when the merest revision of Instagram's terms of service inspires near-revolt among users. That means industry can't let up the gas if it intends to get its way. Let's not even get into the headache that is the European Union.

As Intel's director of security policy told the Times,

“Industry has realized it is important to be engaged,” he continued, “to make sure government stakeholders are fully informed and educated about the role that new technology plays and to make sure any action taken doesn’t unnecessarily burden the innovation economy while still protecting individual trust in new technology.”

In short: Expect to see many more White House check-ins and sepia-toned Instas of the Capitol Building from techie luminaries.

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.

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.

(Photo: Indiegogo)

First came the Declaration of Internet Freedom, a document defending a free and open internet that would probably have moved the Founding Fathers to eye-roll, hard-core, had they been around to see it. Then there was the Internet Defense League, a collection of websites that promised to bond together in the name of the internet whenever the signal of a cat is flashed. And now? Well, now there's a bus tour, spearheaded by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, to raise awareness about the importance of a free internet across the country.

The "free internet" movement cropped up following the SOPA and PIPA debates, and its devotees believe that the government should not censor the internet. Mr. Ohanian and Reddit's general manager, Erik Martin, are raising $20,000 on Indiegogo for the Internet 2012 Bus Tour,  a raucous ride from Denver, Colo., to Danville, Ky. "We’ll host meetups, highlight candidates who support free and open Internet, get people to sign up to vote, feature local tech jobs, and shoot awesome video of the whole thing," reads the campaign statement.

The gang will be collecting suggestions for route stops on the subreddit r/Internet2012; at those stops, they plan to "talk to local startups, college students, media, politicians and grassroots organizations about the power and promise of the Open Internet."

It's interesting to note the campaign's planned route, which snakes from the site of the first presidential debate in Colorado to that of the first vice presidential debate in Kentucky. The tour is focused on middle America, the everyday users of the internet who aren't engaged in the Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley battle, and instead are simply interested in how policies might affect the way they live their lives.

Choosing middle America was "a very conscious choice," Mr. Martin told Betabeat by Gchat. "The Open Internet often gets categorized as an issue for Silicon Valley & Hollywood, and a few other specific regions, but the Open Internet is important in every district. And it's not even about Internet and high-growth tech start-ups (of which there are many in the midwest), but it's about all of the tools now in the hands of small business, local governments, and individuals."

A teaser of the service.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom sure seems to be keeping busy down in New Zealand. A series of late-night tweets suggests that his long-awaited music service, Megabox, is on track to launch sometime before the end of the year.

However, the way this story played out is a little wacky, as things involving Mr. Dotcom are wont to be.

Last night, Kim Dotcom tweeted a teasing message about an unidentified project in the works:

I know what you are all waiting for. It's coming. This year. Promise. Bigger. Better. Faster. 100% Safe & Unstoppable.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 13, 2012

The Next Web took this to be a hint regarding the timeline for Megabox, the new music project Mr. Dotcom has described as "a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations direct to consumers and allowing artists to keep 90% of earnings." He's also promised there'd be more updates on the project throughout 2012, making the assumption the tweet was Megabox-related a fair one.

But Mr. Dotcom proceeded to tweet the Next Web's article and add:

Yes... Megabox is also coming this year ;-)

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 13, 2012

So is Mr. Dotcom launching some other unnamed and heretofore un-hinted-at project besides Megabox?  if so, our money's on that “doomsday device” the FBI reportedly believed he had at the ready to nuke everything on Megaupload’s servers. 100% Safe & Unstoppable!

Someone called the cops. (Screencap)

No wonder Kim Dotcom spends so much time taunting the authorities from his Twitter account. A New Zealand news outfit has released the first footage of the January raid on the Megaupload mogul's mansion, and sounds like Mr. Dotcom's dealings with the authorities have been aggravating, to say the least.

The video opens with a helicopter landing and the deployment of the officers participating in the raid. The disgorging of black-clad SWAT-type officers and unfriendly-looking police dogs is pretty much the extent of the spectacle, and there's no footage from the goings-on inside the house. However, the video also includes radio communications exchanged during the raid, and Channel 3 has spliced that with testimony from Mr. Dotcom himself to create a pretty good play-by-play:

http://youtu.be/pMas0tWc0sg

Frankly, we'd suspected that the colorful Mr. Dotcom might've been exaggerating just a tad for effect, but the video attests that the raid was just as Hollywood-blockbuster as he makes it sound.

For starters, Mr. Dotcom didn't suspect anything from just the chopper noise—as his guests often arrived early—but when he began hearing mysterious "pinging" sounds, he pressed a button to alert the entire household (via SMS) that something was up. From there he ducked to the "red room," how he apparently refers to the supposed "panic room" where the authorities found him. The door wasn't locked, he claims. "I thought, you know, I'd better wait for them to come to me," he told the court, "rather than me popping out of that secret door and maybe, you know, scaring someone who might shoot me."

That's probably the most commonsense thing Mr. Dotcom has ever said.

The room itself is a tad disappointing, though—just a chamber tucked behind a secret door in a hall closet. We were hoping for something a little more high-tech, not just an enormous empty room with tacky red carpeting. If you're going to bother with a hidden room, at least put some bookshelves and a liquor cabinet in there, you know?

Mr. Dotcom also reports that he got a little roughed up: "I had a punch to the face, I had boots kicking me down to the floor, I had a knee into the ribs."

One also gets the sense that the tide of opinion in New Zealand might be drifting to Mr. Dotcom. The anchor's voice-over drolly notes that, "If it all seems slightly ... American ... the FBI were there on the day and during the planning period leading up to it."

Subtext: Leave it to a bunch of Americans to turn the arrest of a suspected copyright violator into Live Free or Die Even Harder.

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.

After the vote, lead committee member and (and crusading ACTA opponent) David Martin explained that the document was simply too vague and the sanctions seemed disproportionate. Then he got a little grandiose, as parliamentarians have been known to do: "I'm glad that civil liberties won over," he said.

This isn't technically the end of A.C.T.A. Unlike in the U.S. Congress, where bills must make their way out of committee onto the floor for a formal vote, I.N.T.A. was merely deciding whether or not to recommend the treaty's passage. It'll still go up for a Parliament-wide vote in July. But the committee's decision carries a great deal of weight, and if rejected in that vote, it's curtains.

This prompts us to wonder what an Anon party looks like.

I suspect I spy copyrighted content. (screenshot)

As anybody in the music business can tell you, every crew needs a suit. And Pinterest just picked up a high-profile one to handle any legal issues that might crop up. Business Insider is reporting that the company has hired Michael Yang, Google deputy general counsel, to serve as as their head of legal. As BI points out, Mr. Yang has been the point man for many a controversy.

We suspect Pinterest didn't hire Mr. Yang merely to look over contracts, though. Anyone who's scrolled through Pinterest lately has probably noticed a lot of professional-looking content, and we're not talking about the images taken from catalogs, either. The main feed shows more than a few pictures that look an awful lot like copyrighted images

In recent months, the site has implemented some safety measures, like auto-attribution for Flickr images and making it possible for sites to disable pinning. Plus, the company also promises to take down any infringing images upon receiving a notice from copyright holders. But none of those measures entirely prevents a lawsuit, and then there's always the chance of SOPA-like legislation.

Yet another potential wrinkle is the possibility that users could be vulnerable to infringement lawsuits.  Back in February, one photographer/lawyer took a look at the terms of service and got so nervous she just nuked her pin boards. And it might  seem far-fetched now, but nobody who downloaded music in the early 2000s [looks around, shifty-eyed] thought that was a big deal, either.

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.