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SAN FRANCISCO -- A fruitless Capitol Hill meeting to discuss digital copyright legislation prompted the late activist Aaron Swartz to launch the Demand Progress advocacy group, his former roommate said at a gathering here last weekend.

Swartz was so frustrated with congressional willingness to break the Internet on Hollywood's behalf that he created a group to channel online outrage into political activism, said Peter Eckersley, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's technology projects director.

Eckersley said Swartz had met with Aaron Cooper, who works for Protect IP author Patrick Leahy as the chief intellectual property counsel for the Senate Judiciary … Read more

It was one year ago today that an unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act proved to Washington officialdom that sufficiently irritated Internet users are a potent political force. After Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist and other major sites asked their users to contact their representatives, the deluge of traffic knocked some Senate Web sites offline, and votes on both bills were indefinitely postponed.

The massive public outcry that, by some counts, involved more than 10 million Internet users concerned about the proposals' impact on free expression has turned the protests into a cautionary tale on Capitol Hill. Aides now worry … Read more

I fancy you've been tempted. I also fancy you have feared it might happen to you.

The vast open graph that is the Web allows those who have been hurt -- in one way or another -- to bite back, bile-style.

So it has reportedly passed in the ill-illuminated corridors of power in the Chinese Communist party.

Yi Junqing, the 54-year-old director of the Communist Party's Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, has had his extra-marital laundry washed in public by a lady who is not his wife.

Indeed, Chang Yan, a 34-year-old post-doctorate research student, is someone else'… Read more

Almost one in three teen girls ages 14 to 17 say they've taken a relationship they started online into the real world, according to new research out of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

The survey of 251 teen girls finds that 30 percent of them went ahead and met offline with people they'd initially met online -- and without first confirming those people were who they claimed to be.

Not all meetings end up being dangerous, of course, but Jennie Noll, lead author of the study, has discovered a disturbing trend among the girls she's surveyed. Those with a history of neglect or abuse (roughly half of the girls surveyed) were more likely to display their online personas in sexually provocative ways.… Read more

According to a recent survey, if you're looking to buy something online, you're most likely to be pleased with the outcome if you make the purchase on Amazon.com.

The world's largest Web retailer tops the list of online vendors in ForeSee's Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index with a rating of 88 on a scale of 1 to 100. This marks the eighth consecutive year Amazon has finished atop ForeSee's annual holiday survey of online shoppers; the results of this year's survey were released on December 27, 2012.

Overall customer satisfaction with Web retailers has … Read more

Microsoft has kicked off 2013 with a few helpful additions to your SkyDrive Web site.

As detailed in yesterday's Inside SkyDrive blog, you can now move files within SkyDrive to other folders by dragging and dropping them to a specific location on the breadcrumb bar.

For example, to move a file from your Documents subfolder to the root of your SkyDrive storage, simply drag the file onto the SkyDrive breadcrumb with your name. Previously, you'd have to right-click on a file, select the Move to command, and then choose a target folder in order to move it.

Those … Read more

Target said today that it would match online pricing in all of its stores year-round -- a move deployed by many retailers this holiday season -- in a bid to stop Amazon's "showrooming" effect.

In a statement, Target said it will match pricing from Amazon.com, Walmart.com, BestBuy.com and Toysrus.com (including Babiesrus.com). In a nutshell, Target will match prices on items found cheaper elsewhere within seven days.

The move is likely to be followed by Best Buy and other retailers that deployed the price matching stunt over the holidays. However, it's unclear … Read more

France, unlike the U.S., has had relaxed rules on whether Internet service providers can block online content -- until today that is.

The French government has ruled that one of the country's biggest Web providers, Free, must halt all online ad blocking, according to the New York Times.

"An Internet service provider cannot unilaterally implement such blocking," the French minister for the digital economy Fleur Pellerin said at a news conference, according to the Times. "This kind of blocking is inconsistent with a free and open Internet, to which I am very attached."

LAS VEGAS -- The future of privacy and the cloud occupied a sidestage at CES 2013 this morning, with one panelist comparing privacy lost to something else that can't be replaced.

"Getting your privacy back is like getting your virginity back," said Jim Reavis, Executive Director of the non-profit Cloud Security Alliance, from a room on the second floor of Las Vegas Convention Center North building. The on-stage conversation between Reavis and other privacy experts focused mainly on desired changes to how to make the nebulous concept of online privacy more user-friendly.

Sid Stamm, lead privacy engineer … Read more