SOPA Halted in House

So there is still hope for a free web! U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) announced today that the House Judiciary Committee, which he heads, "will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution." Smith added that he has taken critics' concerns "seriously."
Seriously, or do they not have any other choice? Read more here and here.

English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout

Wikipedia is going to be shutdown for 24 hours beginning at 0500 UTC on January 18th to protest the "Stop Online Piracy Act" aka SOPA and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). According to wikipedia, these bills, if made law, would seriously damage the free and open internet, including wikipedia.
SOPA, as described in wikipedia:
"The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitatingcopyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months.".
Read more about SOPA here.
Read more about the Wikipedia January 18th blackout message here. You can join them twitter or facebook to support them in these protests.

Update: some more interesting links to SOPA protests, in the news is the father of Internet Tim Berners -Lee who backs SOPA protests. Says "If you're in America then you should go and call somebody or send an email to protest against these (censorship) bills because they have not been put together to respect human rights as is appropriate in a democratic country."

xkcd protests sopa: http://xkcd.com/1005/

It appears that a congressman Lamar Smith who is the author of SOPA has a background image on his campaign website which was taken from someone's flikr account and the author was not credited, which violates SOPA and makes Smith a criminal. Check this page: http://twitpic.com/88ueqz. Here are the comments of the guy who owns the image.

Intel's Medfield platform review

AnandTech has published a great review of Intel's processor for the cellphone/tablet market, which is based on their Medfield platform. Its a single core processor but it performs better then the processors found in the latest and greatest cell phones today.

Check out the review here.

Atoms as bits

IBM researchers have found a way to store bits of information on the atomic scale. Currently, just one bit takes about a million atoms in modern hard disks, where as IBM research has made it possible to store a bit through 12 magnetic atoms. Read about this more here with photos.

Share large files with friends

Here is an excellent app that sends large files to your contacts. Its called Share, it can send files of virtually unlimited sizes, both the uploads and downloads are resumeable. Its made by the same guys who bring you the Bittorrent. You can sign in with your facebook account to share files with your contacts there, or you can just use this app to send files from email to email without signing in. Pretty cool.

Google Slam

So google has launched this thing called Google Slam. From their website:

"This is the place for discovering talented amateur singers, the most adorable clips and the craziest videos on YouTube. Watch pairs of videos and vote for your favourite. Videos are scored based on your votes and the best videos are featured on the Slam leaderboard."

Nokia N9 gets a unofficial landscape mode

Nokia N9 now supports landscape mode. Nokia N9 has 3 main screens (apps icons, messaging status update which includes sms/im and social networking updates, and multitasking view that shows running apps) which can be accessed by swiping a finger on the screen from one side to the other while in the portrait mode. While there are applications that support both landscape and portrait orientation in N9, the main 3 screens only worked in portrait form. This is changed with an unofficial app for N9 making it feel a bit like N900. N900 in its stock firmware didnt support portrait mode and only functioned in landscape mode, which was changed through a community ssu to give support for portrait mode.