Yogi Land

Torrent-Finder.com is down today; the site was apparently seized by government agencies for reasons unknown. In all likelihood, the site was taken down due to intellectual property concerns including copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods.

The agencies named in the notice include the Department of Justice, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm of Homeland Security Investigations.

While torrenting in general is one of the seedier parts of the underbelly of the Internet, Torrent-Finder itself did not host or link to any torrents. Instead, it simply acted as a sort of torrent search engine, returning iframes with other sites that do contain torrent links.

If you’d like to see how the site works for yourself, you can check out Torrent-Finder.info, which hasn’t apparently popped up on the government’s radar yet.

This technicality was apparently not enough to keep the hounds at bay, however. Currently, the site’s homepage looks like this:

Most troubling of all, however, are statements made by the owner of Torrent-Finder.com. He told the bloggers at TorrentFreak that his site was seized “without any previous complaint or notice from any court… While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation, and they say it was totally from ICANN.”

What do you make of this site’s seizure by the U.S. government? In the struggle to protect copyrighted works, should the powers that be still have to notify site owners that their websites are in violation? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

More About: file sharing, government, piracy, torrent

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Prop 19, California’s controversial bid to legalize marijuana, lost at the polls on Tuesday by a slim margin: Just 53.9% of voters said “No” to the proposal.

However, if that vote had been up to the wider web of Internet users, Prop 19 would have passed with a 55% majority.

According to data gathered by Yahoo during the company’s Ask America online survey, more than 8 million responses were recorded overall. With regard to Prop 19, 133,000 online “votes” were cast on the question of whether marijuana should be legal. In Yahoo’s survey, a slightly higher number of responses favored marijuana legalization.

Clearly, this is one of the more controversial topics that arose around the midterm elections. But Yahoo also tracked other popular issues from the American political landscape — from Tea Party antics to immigration and healthcare.

When it comes to right wing-left wing bickering, 72% of Yahoo’s respondents said the political discourse had reached an unnatural level of animosity. However, 61% said they were not too worried about Tea Partiers steering Congress in a radically right direction.

Around 75% of respondents actually favored Arizona’s controversial and conservative new immigration laws, saying they’d approve of such measures in their home states. And 65% said they wanted the U.S.’s newly passed healthcare laws to remain in effect.

To see other issues and results, check out this inforgraphic based on survey data, created by JESS3:

Click image for larger version.

Of course, Yahoo’s data was gathered from a wide range of Internet users, not all of whom were eligible to vote.

This infographic is the fourth and final installment in the Ask America series based on Yahoo’s data. Images were created by interactive agency JESS3.

Header image courtesy of Flickr, GUS314159.

More About: Ask America, election, elections, infographic, JESS3, Political, Yahoo

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Federal judge Vaughn Walker this morning overturned California’s Proposition 8, which had denied marriage to same-sex couples. Shortly afterward, a PDF of the judge’s ruling appeared on document-sharing site Scribd and became the most viral doc the site has ever hosted.

Scribd user goodasyou uploaded the PDF titled “Prop 8 Ruling FINAL” shortly after 3:30 PM ET today. We learned about it when we received an e-mail from Scribd Senior Communications Director Michelle Laird, who said that the document was receiving over 1,000 views per second within minutes of its publication.

Later, Scribd CEO Trip Adler was quoted by GigaOM saying that while most documents the company considers “viral” reach 100,000 views within 24 hours, the Prop 8 ruling had reached 100,000 views within 24 minutes. Its propagation has since slowed, and it’s now sitting at just over 200,000. The Internet is fickle — we all know that — but that first burst of interest can be significant.

In addition to embedding options and Twitter or Facebook sharing features, Scribd has its own system for following people who post interesting documents and seeing what new items they upload in a Facebook-like news feed.

A few months ago, the service added new features for sharing documents easily to mobile devices like e-readers and smartphones. The point is, propagation is easy with so many sharing options and such broad platform support, so that probably helped this historic ruling find a digital audience.

This happened while news outlets like the LA Times were simply publishing excerpts from the ruling rather than the complete document.

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“Prop 8 Ruling FINAL” from Scribd

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More About: california, document, law, pdf, prop 8, Proposition 8, ruling, scribd, vaughn walker

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According to various reports, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering instituting a “do not track” list, similar in concept to the Do Not Call registry, for Internet users who want their browsing activity hidden from online advertisers.

If implemented, this registry would keep advertisers from tracking your browsing and shopping history via cookies and serving customized ads based on your behavior.

This opt-out solution would be great for consumers who’d rather not have the commercial version of Big Brother watching their every online move while still allowing those more lax in matters of online privacy to benefit from increasingly sophisticated e-commerce technologies.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz told members of the Senate Commerce Committee recently, “We may explore in the context of behavioral advertising… a do-not-track mechanism that’s more comprehensive and easier to use than the procedures currently available. Under such a mechanism, users could opt out of behavioral advertising more easily rather than having to make choices on website-by-website basis.”

Back in 2007, similar legislation was proposed. At that time, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Action, the Consumer Federation of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation were among the registry’s advocates. These groups also suggested that advertisers should give consumers details about exactly what data they intended to track.

We’re unclear on exactly why this idea wasn’t implemented three years ago. What we do know now is that it’s going to be difficult for the FTC to make these changes when it might not have the deep and wide control it would need to institute such a registry. Moreover, this list is guaranteed to be extremely unpopular in the online ad industry, which itself is one of the main arteries of Internet revenue.

We won’t know anything about the fate of this idea for quite some time; whether or not it’s even feasible will be explored in a comprehensive report on online privacy due to be released later this year. If the online ad industry takes proactive steps toward explaining and protecting users’ privacy and data beforehand, the legislation may not even be necessary, Leibowitz noted.

What do you think about the concept of a do-not-track list for online advertising? Would it harm the Internet industries as much as it would protect citizens? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

[img credit: icki]

More About: advertising, do not track, FTC, government, online ads, privacy

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Bangladesh ended its ban on Facebook today after the social networking company agreed to block access to the images that the government deemed offensive, according to the AFP.

Depending on which region’s news outlets you trust, the ban was imposed either because of “obnoxious” images of prominent Bangladeshi politicians, a user-hosted Facebook group that encouraged members to participate in a competition to draw the Prophet Muhammad, or both.

Many Muslims deem any visual depiction of Muhammad to be blasphemous.

As we predicted, Facebook blocked access to the controversial images for users within Bangladesh, but they remain accessible for users in other countries — except Pakistan, which had also blocked Facebook access but restored it earlier this week for the same reason. One man was arrested in Bangladesh over the political cartoons, but the Muhammad contest group originated outside of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh’s one million Facebook users will be relieved to have access to the majority of the social network restored; protests were organized after it was first blocked.

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Tags: bangladesh, censorship, facebook, islam, politics

While many of us were focused on the Facebook privacy saga, an ongoing debate about access and transparency in regards to the much more critical problem of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was taking place.

British Petroleum (BP) originally announced that it was going to live stream video of the “top kill” procedure to the public, only to later backtrack and say it wasn’t sure if it could “maintain a live feed” during the operation.

After considerable blowback from government officials, such as Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass), BP acquiesced and announced via its Twitter stream that it would continue to serve its live stream.

The “top-kill” procedure was started about five hours ago, but because most of what takes place is happening inside of pipes, most of the action won’t appear on camera anyway. You can still watch the live feed for any noticeable changes in the plumes of oil. BP says the procedure could take up to two days.

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Tags: bp, environment, gulf oil spil, gulf oil spill, oil, public policy

The Federal Communications Commission has decided to change Internet regulations in a way that will favor users over Internet service provider (ISP) companies and help bolster the net neutrality movement.

The FCC has been trying to regulate and enfore net neutrality — the concept that all Internet traffic, including music downloading and other file sharing, is equal — for some time. Results have been mixed. Just last month, a federal court ruled that the FCC didn’t have the right to enforce certain regulations when Comcast was monitoring and blocking user traffic because of file downloading.

But today, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski made Internet lines subject to the same rules as telephone networks, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. These rules, which come from Title 2 of the Communications Act, state that service providers should not block or restrict speed or bandwidth for websites or applications because of their content or the nature of the traffic. According to this act, carriers are required to provide service when requested, to provide service at a reasonable rate, and to provide service without “unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities or services.”

The FCC has also recently proposed a plan to bring more broadband service with faster download speeds to more homes across America. We applaud the Commission’s stand for Internet access and the freedom of users to browse and download as they please. We do wonder, however, just how far the FCC will get in this newest attempt to regulate net neutrality for ISPs before the big telecom companies start fighting back.

What do you think: Will, or should, the FCC be able to mandate net neutrality any time soon?

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Reviews: Facebook, Internet, Twitter

Tags: fcc, net neutrality

Controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said during a visit to Bolivia that he would like to invite Bolivian President Evo Morales and Cuban political leader Fidel Castro to join him on Twitter, according to Reuters.

Chavez joined Twitter on Tuesday, taking the username @chavezcandaga. His arrival on Twitter was a surprise, in one part because only 30% of his country has Internet access (though that figure is far higher than it was before he took office) and in another because he raised concerns about Twitter just two months ago, calling it a potential “tool of terror.”

Chavez — who describes himself as a Bolivarian soldier, a socialist and an anti-Imperialist — said he would use the site to spread Bolivarian revolution. Castro and Morales are two of his strongest allies in anti-American sentiment.

Chavez has acquired more than 100,000 followers since signing up. “This has been an explosion,” he said. Of Twitter in general, he was quoted by Reuters saying: “The potential this has … it’s not capitalist, it’s not socialist, it depends on how it is used.”

So sit tight and you might soon see the South and Central American political leaders retweeting one another.

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Reviews: Twitter

Tags: bolivia, cuba, evo morales, fidel castro, Hugo Chavez, politics, social media, social networking, twitter, Venezuela

The United Kingdom parliament has passed the Digital Economy Bill, an extensive and controversial piece of legislation, by a vote of 189 to 47. The legislation encompasses online copyright infringement, Internet piracy, regulation of TV and radio, the classification of video games, regulations over ISPs, and a hodgepodge of other digital topics.

The bill, which you can read in its entirety here, is rather complicated and extensive, encompassing over 40 different sections covering online and digital media. Its goal is to clamp down on Internet piracy and illegal file-sharing, although its many critics believe that it is an overreaching piece of legislation. Its potential impact on public Wi-Fi and its harsh penalties for illegal file-sharers have been hotly debated.

The bill passed by a vote of 189 to 47 in a “wash-up” process, which limited the amount of debate MPs took on the bill.

Until the bill is actually utilized in the real world, it’s tough to tell what its impact will be. Protests have already begun on Twitter though, centered around the #Debill hashtag.

Have you been following the Digital Economy Bill? If so, what do you think of it? Let us know in the comments.

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Reviews: Twitter

Tags: Digital Economy Bill, legislation, parliament, uk, United Kingdom