As of 2012, YouTube.com gets over 3 billion video views a day, and over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month.

Just because SOPA and PIPA, the infamous internet “kill switch” bills, are largely dead does not mean the threat to internet free speech has become any less serious. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act CISPA, also known as H.R. 3523, is the latest mutation of these internet censorship and spying bills to hit the U.S. Congress — and unless the American people speak up now to stop it, CISPA could lead to far worse repercussions for online free speech than SOPA or PIPA ever would have. Source: SOPA mutates into much worse CISPA, the latest threat to internet free speech.

UPDATE:
The House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) (H.R. 3523) with a 248-168 vote on April 26. The silver lining is that the Obama administration issued a veto threat against CISPA if kept in its current form. Now, there are two bills before the Senate that deal with cyber security, ”SECURE IT” (S. 2151) and “Cybersecurity Act of 2012″ (S. 2105). Source: CISPA passes the House, privacy battle moves to Senate, The Washington Post.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — In a move that heightens the growing tension between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, Wikipedia and other websites went dark Wednesday in protest of two congressional proposals intended to thwart the online piracy of copyrighted movies and TV programs. Source: Protest exposes Silicon Valley-Hollywood rivalry – Yahoo! News.

I oppose H.R. 3261: Stop Online Piracy Act because…it will punish every Internet consumer. First, everyone should know that the Internet removed barriers to both legitimate and illegitimate business around the globe. Second, America is a large part of the global economy and the Internet. If Hollywood or US pharmacies want to fight piracy and fraud they need to do that on their own terms and not punish the global economy. I can sympathize that they loose billions, but every industry looses to global competition – that is a consequence of globalization. America can no longer put up barriers to global commerce.

There is a link at the bottom of the Huffington Post article, “SOPA, PIPA Headed For Major Makeover“, that goes to PopVOX.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization that manages website domain suffixes, opened up top-level domains to be whatever the domain owner wants – for a price of course. They will accept applications for these new custom TLDs between January 12 and April 12. ICANN expects that the first batch of new gTLDs will be operational at the beginning of 2013.

The non-refundable price to apply is $185,000. If your domain is accepted you can expect to pay a $25,000 annual maintenance fee.

Like everything new and shiny and expensive, I’ll wait for the price to drop before I register chris.siems.

Source: ICANN Approves Custom Generic Top Level Domains – eWeek.com.

This page shows you where to change the services you share videos, favorites, likes, comments, etc.

First, log in to your YouTube account and then go to

http://www.youtube.com/account_sharing

or click on the Settings under your account menu (top right). Then click on Sharing on the left menu. This should be the Sharing and Connected Accounts page.

Click on “Connect” next to the the accounts you want to connect such as Facebook, Twitter, orkut, or MySpace. Ofcourse connecting accounts requires you to have, and log in to, the accounts.

Click the checkboxes next to items you want to share like Comment on a video.

Click Save Changes.

That’s it.

In 2004, he announced he had pancreatic cancer.

Steve died, Wednesday, October 5, 2011.

It was August 6, 1991, at a CERN facility in the Swiss Alps, when 36-year-old physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website. It was, not surprisingly, a pretty basic one… Source: 20 Years Ago Today: The First Website Is Published – Wired.com.

Wow, 20 years of the WorldWideWeb (W3)!

First Web page circa 1992

Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee along with Robert Cailliau and some folks at CERN invented the World Wide Web. By 1991 they were sharing hypertext documents. By 1992 Stanford had a “web server.” In 1993 NCSA released Mosaic, a basic, but more sophisticated, browser for personal computers.

The original page changed often with updates of the project and eventually it was removed, but a copy of it was saved to the W3C website – http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html circa 1992 version – as a historical document.

The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Source: Welcome to info.cern.ch.

I’ve spent almost 15 years looking at WWW and HTML. By 1995 it was easy for anyone to download web server software and have it running a website. I would say things were a lot simpler back then, but in fact “times” are the same. Times and hypertext documents were much less sophisticated back in 1995. The technology grew to match the demand.

Even today I think it’s important to recognize the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Web is just one services using the Internet to transmit data. The Internet was around well before the Web.

The Web is not identical to the Internet; it is only one of the many Internet-based communication services. The relation between them may be understood by using the analogy with the global road system. On the Internet, as in the road system, three elements are essential: the physical connections (roads and cables), the common behaviour (circulation rules and Internet protocol) and the services (mail delivery and the WWW). Source: CERN – How the web works.

The Internet was “invented” or started in 1958 with the ARPA project. In 1983, it went global with the TCP/IP standard.

STS-135 Last Shuttle Launch via Robert Scoble

Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour were their names and together they flew 135 missions, took 335 people into low earth orbit, flew 537,114,016 miles in orbit, launched and fixed Hubble Space Telescope, and helped construct the International Space Station. Fourteen people have died riding in shuttles.

Atlantis touched down just before 6 a.m. EDT on July 21, 2011, signaling the end of the space shuttle era, a program with 135 launches over 30 years and conceptual roots dating back to the Nixon administration. via NASA – Goddard Watches Atlantis’s Return.

I remember watching Columbia’s maiden voyage on live television in my 3rd grade classroom on April 12, 1981. I think President Reagan said a few words before hand to christen Columbia and the shuttle program.

There were two tragic accidents in the program’s 30 year history. Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff on January 28, 1986. Columbia broke up over Texas and Louisiana during re-entry on February 1, 2003.

President Reagan changed his State of the Union speech on January 28, 1986, and remarked, “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” via NASA – President Reagan’s remarks following the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger and her crew..

After Columbia’s accident, President Bush remarked, “This day has brought terrible news and great sadness to our country… The Columbia is lost; there are no survivors.”

I think FOX News and/or Twitter might want to clean this up a bit. http://bit.ly/msyMFL

The link points to the FOX News Twitter feed that shows the half-dozen or so tweets saying that President Obama had been killed.

Now, what do I do with sensational tweets? Verify! I checked Google News and found this - The Associated Press: Hacking on Fox News Twitter reports Obamas death. Tada! Mystery solved. Sensational tweets placed in the Recycle Bin.

So the lesson here kids: verify trending tweets that seem incredible – chances are they are uncredible. Oh, and, fireworks should only be played with by sober adults. #HappyJuly4th #Happy4thofJuly