Occupy Wall Street is now entering it’s second month, and the campground in Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan is now a symbol in cities across the world of a new type of nonviolent civil disobedience.
So far, the New York City Police Department has made 992 arrests connected to the Occupy Wall Street protests. These arrests have cost the city $3.4 million in overtime for police officers.
The city is certainly facing litigation as a result of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which will also cost the city in both court costs and damages awarded.
Youtube has been trying to rid itself of all the videos from the “Radical Cleric,” Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been pinned with instigating the stabbing of a British member of Parliament and for the shootings in Fort Hood, Texas.
Youtube had agreed to remove all videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, but their attempts has been futile. After their effort to remove the content from the website, you can still find hundreds of videos of the cleric that contain everything from standard scriptural commentary or clerical advice to more radical indoctrinating calls for terrorism and jihad. The video content has been posted repeatedly as copies. This struggle is magnified when you consider the vast array of sources online for posting such video content–distribution of any type of content from pirated music to terrorist indoctrination videos can be spread quickly, speedily and with innumerable copies.
The whistle-blower website, Wikileaks, has been facing immense pressure from world governments. Recent actions taken by businesses (and possibly instigated by governments and news coverage) may have caused the greatest damage to-date.
Earlier this week, the web hosting company for the website, Amazon, canceled it’s account on the EC2 cloud computing environment, saying that the work of Wikileaks may have contributed to the endangerment of innocent people.
Shortly after, the domain name provider, EveryDNS.net, for the website terminated it’s domain name.
Wikileaks.org had become victim to massive cyber attacks, which may have been conducted by nations. As a result of these distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), approximately 500,000 other websites were affected.
Paypal joined the attack on Wikileaks by suspending the website’s account, which was it’s primary fund raising tool. The suspension of Paypal’s service was stated to be on account of: “violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”
The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with top internet industry leaders to discuss a new proposal to make it simpler to conduct wiretaps on Internet users.
Facebook and Google were among the top companies, with whom Director Mueller met on his trip.
The proposal would expand upon a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, and impose regulations on Internet companies. Currently, Internet service providers are required to immediately respond to wiretap orders. This is not true for Internet companies, and this new proposal would change that entirely.
Some, including the Commerce Department, feel that this could hurt innovation and, by extension, hurt the US innovation-driven economy.
Many people do not trust Facebook, yet still don’t want to go as far as delete their Facebook accounts permanently. Facebook by no means has assured it’s users that their privacy is a top priority. Certainly the movie The Social Network has not helped Facebook in their PR problems with information privacy either.
Information independence is becoming a greater concern and need for people, as privacy issues come to light in the news and at the dinner table (so to speak).
Lifehacker recently produced a video (displayed below), which shows how to export all your Facebook friends’ email addresses using Yahoo’s recently awarded access to Facebook data. After exporting your Facebook contacts, you can then freely migrate to another provider.
President Obama announced a Patient’s Bill of Rights that will be made possible under new health reform. Essentially, the bill would create a basic set of consumer protections that end some of the health insurance companies’ abuses and establish a sense of fairness for the consumer.
Some highlights:
Prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions.
Stops insurance companies from canceling your policy if you get sick.
removes barriers to receiving emergency care
Allows the consumer to select any available participating primary care doctor
Closes the book on annual dollar limits on coverage over the next three years.
Prevents insurance companies from taking away coverage at the very moment when patients need it most
The Patient’s Bill of Rights will take place this Fall.
It is hard to imagine really how much oil is leaking into the Gulf from the BP oil spill. This video is a visualization of that amount of oil using mass physics — simulating 25,000 barrels. The video was created by Elude (youtube.com/user/Elude87) and was rendered using the UDK Unreal Engine 3.
Facebook has launched a new page devoted to US politics (Facebook.com/USpolitics). The page will monitor how US politicians, political campaigns and elected officials use Facebook to connect with citizens.
Facebook and other forms of social media have become vital places for politics, political support and interest, and building connection between users, campaigns and political figures.
Facebook already has a similar page for sports and celebrities.
