News broke Tuesday that a British police agency called the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), had taken control of the popular music blog RnBXclusive and arrested one of the site’s creators for fraud. The normal content from the site was completely unavailable, replaced with a new splash page: a notice from SOCA stating that it had taken control of the domain. Initial reports claimed that that the RnBXclusive.com domain had been seized by the UK government agency -- bringing to mind images of a post-SOPA fractured Internet -- but it turned out that the website takeover was done with the cooperation of the UK-based hosting company, Rackspace’s UK arm. For its part, Rackspace claimed that the music site was taken down for breaching its Terms and Conditions.

Everyone, take a deep breath: it seems we’ve had a moment of sanity in the patent wars. Last week, a jury invalidated the dangerous Eolas patents, which their owner claimed covered, well, essentially the whole Internet. The patents were originally granted for an invention that helped doctors to view images of embryos over the early Web.

A few years later, smelling quick cash, their owner insisted that they had a veto right on any mechanism used to embed an object in a web document. Really? The patents were obvious—now in 2012, and back in 1994, when the first one was filed. Thankfully, a jury realized that and did what should have happened years ago: it invalidated these dangerous patents.

MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd gave an interview to the New York Times yesterday, in which "Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise." While framed by the Times as his acceptance of defeat (the MPAA had rejected a prior meeting), the article shows that Dodd still doesn't get it. 

File-hosting services all around the world will have looked on in horror yesterday as MegaUpload, one of the world’s largest cyberlocker services, was taken apart by the FBI. Foreign citizens were arrested in foreign lands and at least $50 million in assets seized. So what exactly prompted this action? We read every word of the 72-page indictment so you don’t have to, and we were surprised by its contents.

Yesterday a massive operation took down MegaUpload, one of the world’s leading file-storage services and one of the world’s biggest sites, period.

Tesla, candidly but non-egotistically, wrote, 'It seems I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, and fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless, which I gave to the world in 1893, were applied universally. I announced the cosmic ray and my theory of radio activity in 1896. One of my most important discoveries---terrestrial resonance---which is the foundation of wireless power transmission and which I announced in 1899, is not understood even today. Nearly two years after I had flashed an electric current around the globe, Edison, Steinmetz, Marconi, and others declared that it would not be possible to transmit even signals by wireless across the Atlantic.'

This was stated around 1930-40 but wireless power transmission (radio) is also apparently not understood even today, or at least not taught correctly. Although Tesla attained world-renown fame in his day for his electrical inventions, both unprecedented and prolific, his name has been withheld from all text books.

In the face of mountains of evidence that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) will censor online speech, hurt Internet security and infrastructure, and criminalize tools used by human rights activists in oppressive regimes, supporters of the blacklist bills say one subject trumps all others: jobs.

Yet for unknown reasons, Congress is ignoring that SOPA/PIPA would depress the growing tech sector, all while citing the MPAA's misleading and debunked numbers on how piracy is “decimating” their industry.

Jobs certainly thought differently, but the company he created acted the same as the competition.

The late Steve Jobs was, without question, a brilliant designer, a skilled businessman, and a talented aesthetician. His leadership of Apple fundamentally changed how we use computers and how we listen to music, and it is largely because of him that many of us now live our lives through the small devices we keep in our pockets.

Jobs was, moreover, an inspiration to those who wanted to believe that a different kind of businessman—even a different kind of American—could master the capitalist system. He was, in the words of progressive blogger Juan Cole, an “Arab-American, Buddhist, Psychedelic Drug User, and Capitalist World-Changer.”

But Steve Jobs was something else, too: the personification of Apple’s anti-establishment brand. He was a living, breathing monument to the underdog and the freethinker, an image most famously peddled by Apple in its notorious “1984” commercial heralding the arrival of the Macintosh computer. In the days since his untimely death, the social media universe has been suffused with quotations from Jobs’ addresses to students, his thoughts on life on death, and his exhortations to the passionate yet frustrated youth of the world, bearing testimony to the resilience of his reputation.

Back in December of 2010, Facebook debuted its tag suggestion feature, which works by using facial recognition technology to examine photos in which you’ve already been tagged, and then creating what Facebook calls your “photo summary” or “photo comparison information,” or what we’ll call your “facial fingerprint.” Using this information, FB suggests your name to your friends when they upload a photo of you, and invites them to tag you in that photo. Over the last few months, Facebook has been slowly rolling this feature out to all of its users, which caught the attention of security firm Sophos, The New York Times, and the European Union, which has launched a probe to investigate the new feature.