Google To Dominate Space With 180 Satellites

... Google is planning to launch a fleet of 180 satellites to provide web access for the 4.8 billion people not yet online, according to sources close to the company.

The California-based giant will spend more than $1 billion (£600 million) on the technology, which will rival Facebook’s efforts to connect remote regions of the world.

Details remain vague, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the satellites will be small and high-capacity, and will orbit the Earth at ‘lower altitudes than traditional satellites.’

Google's venture is being led by Greg Wyler, founder of satellite-communications start-up O3b Networks, and depending on the network's final design, the group may double the number of proposed satellites.

A separate project by Google, dubbed Project Loon, is designing high-altitude balloons to provide broadband service to remote parts of the world.

The helium-filled balloons inflate to 49ft (15m) in diameter and carry transmitters that could beam 3G-speed internet to remote regions.

Project Loon was developed in the company's X Lab by the same team behind Google Glasses and the driverless car.

It is hoped that it could save developing countries the high cost of laying fibre cables to get online and lead to a dramatic increase in internet access for the likes of Africa and south-east Asia.

In April, the company also acquired Titan Aerospace, which is building solar-powered drones to provide similar connectivity.

Facebook, meanwhile, has its own drone plans.  

In March, Mark Zuckerberg revealed solar-powered drones, satellites and lasers are all being developed in the firm's labs to deliver the internet to underdeveloped countries.

He has pledged to work on technology to deliver the internet to 'the next 3 billion people' - and revealed the firm has hired experts in solar power that can keep drones flying for months at a time.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology's deputy president, Professor William Webb, said: 'The idea of using aerial platforms to deliver connectivity is one that is many decades old, from low-orbital satellites to balloons and more recently unmanned aerial vehicles.'

'The difficulty has always been one of keeping the aerial platform in the right place in the sky for weeks or months at a low enough cost. As technologies mature we get ever closer to achieving this and Facebook's intervention in this space is a welcome boost to the area.'

Facebook and Google also need to overcome regulatory hurdles, including coordinating with operators so their fleet doesn't interfere with other satellites.

'Top of the list is the need to make the drones cost-effective, reliable and demonstrate to the regulators that they can operate safely in our airspace,’ he added.

'Many other issues associated with access to radio spectrum, national telecoms regulations and more will also need to be addressed.’

By ELLIE ZOLFAGHARIFARD

Google To Create An Artificial Super-Mind

Famed AI researcher and incorrigable singularity forecaster Ray Kurzweil recently shed some more light on what his new job at Google will entail. It seems that he does, indeed, plan to build a prodigious artificial intelligence, which he hopes will understand the world to a much more sophisticated degree than anything built before–or at least that will act as if it does.

Kurzweil’s AI will be designed to analyze the vast quantities of information Google collects and to then serve as a super-intelligent personal assistant. He suggests it could eavesdrop on your every phone conversation and email exchange and then provide interesting and important information before you ever knew you wanted it. It sounds like a scary-smart version of Google Now (see “Google’s Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead”).

Kurzweil says this of his project at Google, in a video posted by The Singularity Hub:

“There’s no more important project than understanding Intelligence and recreating it. I do envision a fundamental approach based on everything we understand about how the human brain [works]. And there are some things we don’t yet understand so I plan to go off and explore some of my own ideas about how certain things work.”

Kurzweil makes it sound like the effort will be based on the theory of the put forward in his new book, How to Create a Mind. In this work, based largely on observations about current trends in AI research, and his own work on speech and character recognition, Kurzweil suggests a fairly simple mechanism by which information is captured and accessed hierarchically throughout the neo-cortex, and posits that this phenomenon can explain the miracle of human conscious experience.

Kurzweil’s claims are certainly bold, and some have criticized them as hopelessly naïve. Indeed, it’s easy to dismiss any predictions he makes because of the outlandish ones he’s made in the past. But Kurzweil is nothing if not a brilliant inventor, and he indicates that at Google he’ll be rolling his sleeves up and doing real engineering. It’ll be fascinating to see how far this remarkable project takes both the inventor and the company.

Via: "Technology Review"
Image by Anatole Branch
(AKA: Morpheus)

Google Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

World-renowned artificial intelligence expert and Google’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves. “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus.

Language, Kurzweil argues, is the window to creating a genuine artificial brain, that can understand the meaning of ideas and concepts. “If you write a blog post, you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating some meaningful sentences.” For now, search engines have brute-force algorithms that pick out key words in popular pages and hope that the results, on average, will yield the best information.

So-called “semantic” search parses the meaning and intentions behind words. Semantic search aims to solve the ‘hotdog’ problem, as explained by Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt,

“Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.”

Eventually Google will understand why users are searching for information and provide them with answers they didn’t even know they needed. The education of such an omnipotent new mind will take the vast stores of Google’s database. Perhaps more than any other company, explains Kurzweil, Google has access to the “things you read, what you write, in your emails or blog posts, and so on, even your conversations, what you hear, what you say.”

Google can combine the personalized recommendations of a friend (who often know us better than we know ourselves) with the sum of all human knowledge, creating a sort of super best friend.

This friend of yours, this cybernetic friend, that knows that you that have certain questions about certain health issues or business strategies. And, It can then be canvassing all the new information that comes out in the world every minute and then bring things to your attention without you asking about them

Kurzweil was quick to dispel the myth he was given “unlimited” funds, but humbly suggests that Google is giving him “sufficient resources for a very important project.”

Via: "Tech Crunch"

Inside Google

Filmed in China, Russia and at the Googleplex, Google's Silicon Valley headquarters, this documentary reveals the corporation's philosophy.

NASA / Google Test Launch DTN (Interplanetary Internet)

DTN Flight Validation Experiment
( https://www.spacecomm.nasa.gov/spacecomm/programs/technology/dtn/ )

October 18, 2008:
The ION DTN software was successfully uploaded to the EPOXI spacecraft and activated on the backup flight computer and network traffic was observed being sent and received to/from the spacecraft in the DINET Experiment Operations Center.

October 20, 2008:
Images were successfully received at JPL via the first instance of an interplanetary network from the EPOXI spacecraft located approximately 80 light seconds from Earth. These same images were transmitted to the EPOXI spacecraft about 3 hrs earlier via the same network.

October 22, 2008:
During experiment Pass 2, 264046 bytes (5 images) delivered. ~97.6% link utilization.

October 27 & 29, 2008:
DINET tracking passes 3 and 4 were conducted. All contacts were completed successfully, with no diagnostic messages reported by the DINET software.

November 3, 2008:
During the 5th DSN tracking pass of the DINET experiment, an additional 35 image files totaling 1,587,420 bytes were delivered via the interplanetary network to image reception software in the DINET Experiment Operations Center.

--

The Deep Impact Networking Experiment is sponsored by the Space Communications and Navigation Office in NASA's Space Operations and Mission Directorate in Washington.

Predicting The Future Through Online Data Mining

The information to predict whether tomorrow it will rain is limited by the number of weather sites available, but sites that might refer to upcoming anti-American demonstrations in the Middle East are infinitely more numerous [AFP]

Recorded Future predicts When and Where A Demonstration Will Occur After Mining From The Web All The Related Activities.

By Santiago Zabala,

Martin Heidegger's greatest concerns when it came to technological innovations was the formation of existential conditions where, as he said, the "lack of emergency is the only emergency". In this condition human beings would be completely "uprooted" from the earth, that is, "framed" ("Ge-stell") by a technological power they are no longer able to control.

As it turns out, the software company Recorded Future (which has recently been praised by Wired, the MIT Technology Review and other media outlets, after the CIA and Google invested millions in their services) seems to be offering its clients something similar: a world where emergencies, that is, future events, can be calculated in advance. But how does this start-up actually function, and why are the German philosopher’s concerns relevant to its services? 

Recorded Future is based in Gothenburg and has offices in London, Boston, Arlington and New York. A team of 20 computer scientists, statisticians and experts in linguistics "calculate" the future. While Yahoo, Google and Bing use links to connect and rank different web pages, Recorded Future goes further by scouring (in real time) thousands of available information sources such as blogs, websites and Twitter comments in order to find "invisible links", that is, relationships among actions, people and institutions that refer to related events in the future. 

"Recorded Future is based in Gothenburg and has offices in London, Boston, Arlington and New York. A team of 20 computer scientists, statisticians and experts in linguistics 'calculate' the future."

After mining from the web all the related people ("Bashar al-Assad"), places ("Syria") and activities ("military interventions") that refer to a possible demonstration, Recorded Future uses algorithms to predict when and where a demonstration will occur. 

An example of a predicted demonstration is available in a video on the company website which illustrates how its powerful engines monitor these protests not only in the Middle East, but also in South America and North Africa. The fact that Google and the CIA have already invested millions in this company is an indication that it will be used to conserve certain interest against others as the example above indicates.

The different fee levels for the customers of Recorded Future are probably related to the quality and quantity of information they wish to purchase, making this, and similar companies, at the service of the wealthiest and most powerful. 

From a philosophical point of view, the most interesting feature of all this is not that these demonstrations can be predicted, but rather how technology has finally uprooted and dislodged man from the world, that is, has given human existence to a power beyond human control. The secured, comfortable and calculated environment that allowed the creation of society has now become so functional and rationalised that we cannot help but become victims by existing in it.

This existential dilemma does not arise from the fact that it’s finally possible to organise all the things the web already knows about the future, which could certainly become useful to prevent diseases or famine, but rather that a private company now means to know everything, that is, all human projects. 

We have entered an age where only those framed within the approved interests of Recorded Future clients will be able to live freely, that is, without being predicted. But how free is an existence that is completely revealed to the modern "lack of emergencies"?

As Heidegger explained, emergencies do not arise when something doesn't function correctly, but rather when "everything functions … and propels everything more and more toward further functioning". It's within this logic that as soon as something critical to the interests of those who can afford it fails to function, Recorded Future will alert its customers, who will then take the appropriate measures to conserve the previous condition.

In sum, Heidegger's concerns over a world lacking "emergencies" more than 50 years ago was meant to point out how technologies such as that employed by Recorded Future (and similar companies) aim to avoid the future, that is, to change the world.

Via: "Al-Jazeera"

Google's Virtual Brain Technology

Google set a new landmark in the field of artificial intelligence with software that learned how to recognize cats, people, and other things simply by watching YouTube videos (see "Self-Taught Software"). That technology, modeled on how brain cells operate, is now being put to work making Google's products smarter, with speech recognition being the first service to benefit.

Google's learning software is based on simulating groups of connected brain cells that communicate and influence one another. When such a neural network, as it's called, is exposed to data, the relationships between different neurons can change. That causes the network to develop the ability to react in certain ways to incoming data of a particular kind—and the network is said to have learned something.

The company's neural networks decide for themselves which features of data to pay attention to, and which patterns matter, rather than having humans decide that, say, colors and particular shapes are of interest to software trying to identify objects.  

Google is now using these neural networks to recognize speech more accurately, a technology increasingly important to Google's smartphone operating system, Android, as well as the search app it makes available for Apple devices (see "Google's Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead"). "We got between 20 and 25 percent improvement in terms of words that are wrong," says Vincent Vanhoucke, a leader of Google's speech-recognition efforts. "That means that many more people will have a perfect experience without errors." The neural net is so far only working on U.S. English, and Vanhoucke says similar improvements should be possible when it is introduced for other dialects and languages.

Other Google products will likely improve over time with help from the new learning software. The company's image search tools, for example, could become better able to understand what's in a photo without relying on surrounding text. And Google's self-driving cars (see "Look, No Hands") and mobile computer built into a pair of glasses (see "You Will Want Google's Goggles") could benefit from software better able to make sense of more real-world data.

The new technology grabbed headlines back in June of this year, when Google engineers published results of an experiment that threw 10 million images grabbed from YouTube videos at their simulated brain cells, running 16,000 processors across a thousand computers for 10 days without pause.

"Most people keep their model in a single machine, but we wanted to experiment with very large neural networks," says Jeff Dean, an engineer helping lead the research at Google. "If you scale up both the size of the model and the amount of data you train it with, you can learn finer distinctions or more complex features."

The neural networks that come out of that process are more flexible. "These models can typically take a lot more context," says Dean, giving an example from the world of speech recognition. If, for example, Google's system thought it heard someone say "I'm going to eat a lychee," but the last word was slightly muffled, it could confirm its hunch based on past experience of phrases because "lychee" is a fruit and is used in the same context as "apple" or "orange."

Dean says his team is also testing models that understand both images and text together. "You give it 'porpoise' and it gives you pictures of porpoises," he says. "If you give it a picture of a porpoise, it gives you 'porpoise' as a word."

A next step could be to have the same model learn the sounds of words as well. Being able to relate different forms of data like that could lead to speech recognition that gathers extra clues from video, for example, and it could boost the capabilities of Google's self-driving cars by helping them understand their surroundings by combining the many streams of data they collect, from laser scans of nearby obstacles to information from the car's engine.

Google's work on making neural networks brings us a small step closer to one of the ultimate goals of AI—creating software that can match animal or perhaps even human intelligence, saysYoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal who works on similar machine-learning techniques. "This is the route toward making more general artificial intelligence—there's no way you will get an intelligent machine if it can't take in a large volume of knowledge about the world," he says.

In fact, the workings of Google's neural networks operate in similar ways to what neuroscientists know about the visual cortex in mammals, the part of the brain that processes visual information, says Bengio. "It turns out that the feature learning networks being used [by Google] are similar to the methods used by the brain that are able to discover objects that exist."

However, he is quick to add that even Google's neural networks are much smaller than the brain, and that they can't perform many things necessary to intelligence, such as reasoning with information collected from the outside world.

Dean is also careful not to imply that the limited intelligences he's building are close to matching any biological brain. But he can't resist pointing out that if you pick the right contest, Google's neural networks have humans beat.

"We are seeing better than human-level performance in some visual tasks," he says, giving the example of labeling, where house numbers appear in photos taken by Google's Street View car, a job that used to be farmed out to many humans.

 "They're starting to use neural nets to decide whether a patch [in an image] is a house number or not," says Dean, and they turn out to perform better than humans. It's a small victory—but one that highlights how far artificial neural nets are behind the ones in your head. "It's probably that it's not very exciting, and a computer never gets tired," says Dean. It takes real intelligence to get bored.

Via: "Technology Review"

The Polaris Moon Rover

The Polaris rover is for catching solar rays which shine almost horizontally at the Moon's north pole, a location Polaris is due to explore before 2016. 

Built by Astrobotic Technology, it'll be ferried aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to our celestial companion, where it'll drill into the surface in search of ice. 

The company, spun out of the Carnegie Mellon University, hopes to identify resources at a depth of up to four feet that could be used to support manned Moon expeditions in the future. 

The plan is to complete the mission during a 10-day window of sunlight, digging at up to 100 sites over a three-mile stretch. However, if it can live through the harsh two-week-long nights, then it may continue to operate "indefinitely."

NASA is backing the project, providing ice-prospecting gear and money, although Astrobotic hopes to get more cash for its work -- over $20 million from Google's Lunar X Prize. 




Via: "EnGadget"

"Google Glasses" and The Surveillance State

Techies Are Pumped For Google Glass, The Real-Time Recording Eyewear. But Will They Further Normalize Spying?

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
June 3, 2012
Courtesy Of "AlterNet"

Google Glass is, on the surface, the next step toward the future promised to us in science fiction: it ain’t flying cars, but a pair of “glasses” with the ability to record exactly what you’re doing in real time—”AUGMENTED REALITY GOGGLES”—is nothing to scoff at.


Brin informs us that we should be ready for a Google Glass world within two years, which is ambitious considering a pair costs $1500—about the price of a super tricked-out MacBook (or in New York City terms, rent). But if we’re fantasizing about the future, let’s imagine that in 2014, inequality is wiped out and Google has distributed Glass(es) to every American for free. Not only will we all be walking around like extras from Minority Report, we will be able to surreptitiously record video and take photographs of whatever we’re seeing, without anyone’s knowledge. In a closed-circuit television world, our future is looking pretty dystopian.

In April, when word of Google Glass emerged (before the demo showed us exactly how easy, effective and hi-fi using the accessory actually could be), an ominous thread began on the official forum of the International Private Investigators Union. “Undercover Surveillance Just Got Easier,” it declared, “with the New Google Glasses.”

Of course, those who claim surveillance as their line of work were beside themselves, chattering excitedly about the glasses, and speculating on other types of surveillance devices that do indeed portend the future from the movies and paranoid Philip K. Dick novels: contact lenses with built-in Internet, for one, which one poster predicted could turn us all into mini-Terminators: “Based on what the bio-science will be doing with connectivity in your eyes, I suspect an iPhone or any standalone item will be obsolete.” And you thought the iPad changed your life.

Also in May, Forbes columnist Kashmir Hill was less enthusiastic than the gumshoes, and posited that the “surveillance state” was now “inevitable":

Imagine how helpful this could be for reporting crimes. If you witnessed a boy being attacked in your yard, or a hit and run, or a robbery, you could immediately upload that file to police databases. Inevitably, we would all become watchmen, critical parts of the surveillance society. Alternately, law enforcement could use cell location tracking to figure out who was in a certain area at a certain time and get a warrant (or subpoena) for access to their vision logs.

And of course, any time we see something funny, embarrassing, sexual, disgusting, inspiring, or otherwise interesting, we will be able to more easily capture it and tweet it out. And once Google (or some other, braver company)  inevitably introduces facial recognition to the system, we’ll be able to include a stranger’s Twitter handle.You see two people having sex in a parking garage? Sure, take a photo, tag them in it, and upload the photo to Facebook, captioning it “OMG.” It’s creepy. It’s awesome. And it’s increasingly seeming inevitable.

Hill was on the right track but her whimsy was optimistic. Certainly we’re looking at a better, more interesting YouTube (which Google also owns) and potentially a safer society in regards to everyday crime. As we accept that our every move has viral potential, it seems we are helping to normalize the concept of actual surveillance—that not only our government, but corporations (and our employers), can know our entire lives to the point to living them vicariously through us, via footage captured on our devices and fed back to Google.

It's not alarmist to speculate; we've seen what Facebook can do with our personal information, trying things out to see if we'll accept it, and rolling back invasions only under pressure. So while Sergey Brin's BMX-and-skydiving stunt was truly awesome, it behooves us to go into our brave new world with a skeptical eye.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and websites.

Data Collection Arms Race Feeds Privacy Fears

Google and Facebook Last Year Both Agreed To 20 Years Of Privacy Audits By The FTC 

By Reuters 
Updated 2/19/2012 12:35:51 PM ET 
Courtesy Of "MSNBC"

SAN FRANCISCO — This week's revelations that Google Inc, Twitter and other popular Internet companies have been taking liberties with customer data have prompted criticism from privacy advocates and lawmakers, along with apologies from the companies.

They are the latest in a long line of missteps by large Internet companies that have faced little punishment for pushing privacy boundaries, which are already more expansive than most consumers understand.

Despite all the chatter about online privacy and the regular introductions of proposeddata protection laws in Congress, Silicon Valley is in the midst of a veritable arms race of personal data collection that is intensifying.

Many innovative companies, most prominently Facebook, base virtually all of their services on the ability to personalize, which requires them to know their users well. Their business models likewise depend to an increasing degree on the ability to target a banner advertisement or other marketing pitch to an individual. Millions of times each day, the right to advertise to a specific user is auctioned off in a fraction of a second by computers talking to one another.

For both the buyers and the sellers of the advertising, the business advantage goes to the participant with the most knowledge, and that race is driving companies like Google to learn as much about its users as Facebook does. policies forbade it. On Friday, a Wall Street Journal report showed that Google was tweaking ads on Apple's Safari Web browser to install tracking cookies which, while commonplace on other browsers, are blocked on Safari unless the user specifically allows them.

Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), co-chairmen of the Congressional Privacy Caucus asked for a Google probe by the Federal Trade Commission, which declined to comment. Google said Friday that its intentions were innocuous but it nontheless dropped the practice. Twitter and Path said they would seek explicit permission before grabbing address-book contents, and Apple said it would update its software to prevent further leaks.

Promises, Promises 

The developments fit what is by now a well-established pattern that has thus far kept major new laws off the books, longtime policy specialists said.

A company over-reaches, gets caught, and promises to do better. If a greater than usual display of outrage prompts introduction of plausible legislation, the industry counters with a new plan for self-regulation, such as the publication of privacy policies that users seldom read.

Sooner or later, the plan is rendered obsolete by new technologies in the data arms race, and the cycle repeats.

Google and Facebook last year both agreed to 20 years of privacy audits by the Federal Trade Commission after they made public customer information that users had considered private. But with few restrictions on data collection, the audits are not likely to have a major impact on business practices.

Internet companies and their investors argue that data-collection is essential to their businesses, and enables them to provide services that would otherwise be impossible. Consumers get more accurate search results, more relevant advertising, and more intimate connections with friends and others when Internet companies know something about them.

"For that value tradeoff, they're willing to provide information," said Ron Conway, a well-known Internet investor.

"I don't like people tracking my location, but I want to know, 'what are some nearby Italian restaurants that my friends have liked,'" said Auren Hoffman, CEO of Rapleaf, which compiles profiles of Internet users.

The equation is different in Europe, which has long-standing data protection laws that limit some practices that are standard in the United States. The European Union is now weighing updated rules that would allow any resident to ask companies to delete the information on file about them; the United States only has equivalent rights for those under age 13.

Privacy advocates in the United States say they do not expect big changes anytime soon.

"Trying to pass a bill through Congress that's actually going to safeguard user records, especially when you've got huge advertiser lobbies trying to defang that law, is an incredible challenge," said Rainey Reitman, activism director with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

At best, they say, a law might allow consumers to opt out of some tracking.

"That is more likely today than it was 24 hours ago," said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, which gets funding from foundations and major technology companies.

"But the 'right-to-be forgotten,' erase-button thing, you would see more of a fight."

7 Signs We're Living In The Post-Privacy Era

By Helen A.S. Popkin 
January 3, 2012 
Courtesy Of "MSNBC"

Whether by corporate subterfuge, government decree, hacker invasion and our own ambivalence, our digital rights have never faced more peril than they will in 2012. Here's a look at the most egregious losses in privacy — the ways in which the stage was set — during this past year.

Facebook's meaningless settlement with the FTCEverything about Facebook is designed to make it easy for people to reveal things about themselves. Nothing about Facebook's FTC settlement in November — and a spin-heavy mea culpa from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and/or his media consultant — changes that.

According to the FTC complaint, Facebook "deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public."

As we reported on the FTC settlement, Facebook is now barred "from making any further deceptive privacy claims." It also requires "that the company get consumer's approval before it changes the way it sharestheir data, and requires that it obtain periodic assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors for the next 20 years."

The settlement does not require that Facebook restore the privacy settings it rolled back in 2009, which led to the FTC investigation. Much of your information is still widely available to the public — as well as to Facebook's business partners — by default. If you want more privacy, you need to "opt out," otherwise your info is out there for anyone to see.

Meanwhile, the much celebrated Facebook Timeline — which rolled out to most users in December — may prove to be the ultimate Trojan horse,  soliciting users to add personal information and life details that occured before Facebook even existed. All the better for direct marketers to sell you stuff, my dear.

Now, the Electronic Privacy Information Center questions whether the rollout of the much celebrated Facebook Timeline conforms to the FTC settlement, sending a letter to the FTC, stating that, "with Timeline, Facebook has once again taken control over the user's data from the user and has now made information that was essentially archived and inaccessible widely available without the consent of the user."

SOPA vs. your right to Internet accessThe obsessive concern among free speech activists and the technorati over the Stop Online Piracy Act and similar Internet blackball bills went mainstream following the recent "Dump Go Daddy" campaign.

The anti-piracy bill, which the U.S. House Judiciary Committee is set to review next year, makes the streaming of unauthorized content a felony. Which is all well and good, but as the EFF warns, the bill's "vague language would create devastating new tools for silencing legitimate speech all around the Web."

"Netizens angered by the initial support of Web hosting giant Go Daddy for a controversial online piracy bill voted with their 'domain' — moving tens of thousands of website names to other Internet domain registrars in a coordinated day of online protest," msnbc.com's Miranda Leitsinger recently reported in Technolog. Go Daddy stopped its havering, making a solid statement opposing SOPA, and in doing so, joining other anti-SOPA corporations such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia.

"All of the sudden there really is a lot of mainstream attention … we're seeing a lot of people waking up to these issues and taking a firm stance," Parker Higgins, an EFF activist, told Technolog. "It is an important issue and it's one that really affects the future of the Internet."

Why such a strong anti-SOPA turnout? Despite its authority in the U.S., SOPA has international ramifications. Websites that run afoul could be de-indexed by search engines, blocked by Internet service providers, and blackballed by payment processors such as Visa or PayPal as court-ordered by the U.S. Attorney General.

Here's a worst-case scenario free speech supporters say is entirely possible: Proxy servers such as those that aided Arab Spring by allowing protesters to share information on social media are also used to stream pirated content such as movies and music. Shut down the proxy server for a SOPA violation — such as aiding copyright violations — and the voices of protest could be muffled as well.

Given the success of the Go Daddy boycott, odds are SOPA won't pass — sooner or later however, a similar bill will. What we're seeing here is the first, clumsy attempt at inevitable regulation. Call that cynicism if you will, but as the history of radio and TV reveal, such is the fate of all new forms of major media.

Yeah, your cellphone is pretty much stalking you"Locationgate" — the kerfuffle following researchers' discovery that Apple iPhones send user locations back to Apple via unencrypted files — seems like small potatoes compared to a discovery made later in the year, but it was a harbinger of the many phone-related privacy threats ahead.

In April, Steve Jobs hotly denied during Locationgate that Apple tracked anyone, but in an email declared that Google's Android sure did. Google countered with an official statement that "location sharing on Android is opt-in by the user. We provide users with notice and control over the collection."

Apple's passive collection of user data was eventually declared to be "a bug," and it was revealed that the company never shared any of the info anyway.

Congress invited both companies to explain themselves, but as msnbc.com'sBob Sullivan pointed out in Red Tape Chronicles:

If you sensed from Apple — and Apple sympathizers — a bit of, "everyone does this, why is this such a big deal?” that's because they're right. It's true that location information greatly helps their network function. Anyone who's ever turned on a GPS and waited five minutes for the gadget to get a "fix" can appreciate the enhancement Apple was implementing. Plenty of other companies do collect and use detailed location information about us. Many will tell you they “anonymize” the information, they have strict policies about how it is used and stored, that they always get users’ permission before collecting it, that  they secure it, yadda, yadda, yadda. The Apple incident shows that location information is toxic, and the consequences of its collection can be very hard to control.

The bigger privacy scare came in November. Researcher Trevor Eckhart announced that he'd discovered that Carrier IQ — a cell phone diagnostics software company — didn't just track user location, but keystrokes as well (including, yes, passwords). As the case made headlines, it was revealed that Carrier IQ is, or may be, installed in handsets sold by AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, from brands including Apple, HTC and Samsung. Verizon Wireless is the only company that says it never installed the software.

The organization also reverse engineered the software to find out just what was going on. ExtremeTech's Sebastian Anthony broke down the process:

There are three parts to a Carrier IQ installation on your phone: The program itself, which captures your keystrokes and other "metrics"; a configuration file, which varies from handset to handset and carrier to carrier; and a database that stores your actions until it can be transmitted to the carrier. Now, the Carrier IQ program is a binary application and fairly hard to reverse engineer, and the database sounds like it's stored in RAM and thus hard to obtain — but the configuration profile … well, it turns out that that is very easy to crack.

On Dec. 1, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) — who earlier this year launched the Location Privacy Protection Act — requested that Carrier IQ "explain exactly what the software records, whether it is transmitted to Carrier IQ or any third party, and whether the data is protected against security threats that could risk the safety and privacy of American consumers."

For all the sneaky stuff our smartphones do, we increasingly have the opportunity to be complicit in our own e-stalking, aptly noted by Gawker's Ryan Tate.

The predicted Facebook phone, Google Wallet and the fact that Apple recently obtained a number of patents, "including one that would turnthe device into a key to your home," present more ways we will voluntarily allow three major tech companies to track or locations, our financial info, our correspondences, our contacts and even open our front door. At the same time.

Some judges are cool with cops accessing your cell phone"In January 2011, the California Supreme Court ruled in People v. Diaz (PDF), that the police were authorized to search any person's cellphone, without a warrant, after they had been arrested under the narrow 'search incident to arrest' exception to the Fourth Amendment, that permits a brief search in the area immediately around a person for the purposes of officer safety and protection of evidence from immediate destruction," the EFF reports.

Since the beginning of the year, we've seen a disturbing trend throughout the United States in which police officers apprehend the telephones of bystanders.

"A high-school student who used her cellphone to take video of police on a city bus was arrested by police and taken into custody after she refused to turn her cellphone off," Technolog reported of a Newark, N.J. incident in May. "Police later released her, but not before they erased the video on the teen's phone."

It was followed by this more alarming story in June from Miami Beach:

A police shooting of a man in Miami Beach on Memorial Day was terrifying, but when it was over, officers turned their attention to a man filming the violent scene with his cellphone. They demanded the device, smashed it and probably thought that was that; no video anymore. It was not: Narces Benoit had had the presence of mind to pull the phone's memory card with the video on it from his cellphone and put the card in his mouth.

"Now, people are carrying years of email correspondence, text and instant messages, bank and financial records, personal photos, calendars, websites they've visited, places they've visited, even the books they read," the EFF points out. "So, with all the mobile computing smartphones are capable of, it comes as no surprise that law enforcement wants to get their hands on the digital goodies. And unfortunately, in 2011 courts gave them the ammunition to do so."

Oh yeah, and the Feds want to know what you're up to, tooIn December, a Carrier IQ senior executive said that the FBI approached the company about using its technology but was rebuffed, Associated Press reported. "The disclosure came one day after FBI Director Robert Mueller assured Congress that agents 'neither sought nor obtained any information from the company, Carrier IQ."

Meanwhile, "several court decisions in recent months have sent mixed messages about the legality of GPS and cellphone tracking by the government, and the issue has just landed in the U.S. Supreme Court," Security News Daily reported in November.

In August, a federal judge in New York ruled that police would need a warrant to track an individual using cellular-tower triangulation. In early October, a different federal judge, this one in Washington, D.C., ruled that police did not need a warrant to use same method to track the cellphone of an armed-robbery suspect in an ongoing case. And just last week, a third federal judge,  this one in Houston, ruled that a warrant was necessary.

When it comes to location, there's also the matter of the feds attaching GPS devices directly to your car. "Cases of surprised citizens finding government GPS units on their car aren't everyday occurrences, but they are happening,Technolog reported in November.

"In March, an Egyptian-American college student filed suit against the FBI for secretly putting a GPS tracking device on his car. Yasir Afifi, a California native who said he had and has nothing to hide, said a mechanic doing an oil change on his car found the device between his car's right rear wheel and exhaust."

In November, Wired's Threat Level reported a "Hispanic American who lives in San Jose at the home of his girlfriend’s parents," found not one, but twohidden GPS devices on his Volvo.

And if you're not being tracked directly on your vehicle, perhaps it's from above. The New York Times reported in December:

The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday warned of the prospect of "routine aerial surveillance of American life" and called for new regulations to govern the use of unmanned aerial systems, or drones, over American skies.

Know what else the ACLU ain't happy about? That National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) President Barack Obama signed on Dec. 31 — the one that allows the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. "The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield,"  Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director, said in a statement.

Even if you don't leave your house, there's always the Internet. As we mentioned earlier, a quick review of the EFF's growing gallery of evidencerevealing social media monitoring by various U.S. government agencies only goes to show: There are no secrets among "friends."

Don't forget the hackers! While the Matrix-like intrigue of Operation AntiSec  —  the distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) against banks, corporations and the government — made for a more exciting read, individuals still have more to fear from far more malicious cybercrime.

In April, a company called Epsilon released a statement reporting an unauthorized entry in its clients' customer database. Though nobody had really heard of this company, it turns out, most Internet-active Americans were affected one way or another. See, Epsilon is an electronic direct marketing outfit that sends 40 billion emails annually and counts over 2,500 clients, including 7 of the Fortune 10, as well as the New York Times.

For the most part, only emails were exposed — no passwords or other personal information.

That was a mild relief, yet not a breach to be taken lightly, as Technolog noted at the time. Following the breach, customers of any of Epsilon's clients needed to be wary of spam, that could take the form of fake emails that appear to be from a trusted company, tempting you to click.

Scammers use hijacked email addresses to create email based on your interests or email that appears to be from your bank or other company you know and trust. Clicking the malicious link within an email can hijack your computer and turn it into a spam bot without your knowledge or worse, install malware that can record your passwords and credit card info.

During the past year or so, similar user or employee database hackings were reported on Gawker Media's blog network, Sony's PlayStation Network (and other related services), the Citigroup bank, defense contractor Lockheed Martin, military consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton — even the Hershey chocolate company, among others.

Also, we're jerksIn November, an inexcusable number of media outlets found it super awesome that Andy Boyle, a newsroom web developer for the Boston Globe, live-tweeted the ugly details of a young couple's argument in Burger King.

As David Pell pointed out best, "The fight was loud enough for Boyle and other patrons to overhear. The fighting couple was certainly aware of that. They chose to argue in public. They, in effect, gave up their right to privacy among those at the restaurant. But should they have assumed their fight would be broadcast on Twitter and eventually featured on ABC News?"

But in an act similar to say — a journalist emailing crime scene photos to friends for giggles with no thought to the victims — Boyle also tweeted a photo of the couple. Mainstream media outlets ran the photo as well.

Pell, one of the shamefully few to call shenanigans on this incident, goes on to write:

In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple's marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint. We can't stand by and let an alliance between technology and poor judgment disintegrate all decency, and turn every human exchange into another tawdry and destructive episode on a never-ending social media highlight reel.

If our disgust with this kind of secondhand sharing is widespread enough, maybe there's still a chance such invasions of privacy will be the exception and not the rule. But I wouldn't bet on it.

As 2012 moves forward, we may not have much control over our own privacy, but we can at least control what we do with the privacy of others.