It’s not difficult to find someone who will sing the praises of file-sharing, but it seems the most dedicated file-sharers are taking things to a new level.

This week it was revealed that Sweden now officially recognizes file-sharing as a religion. Dubbed Kopimism, the Church of Kopimism claims that “kopyacting,” the act of sharing information through copying, is akin to a religious service. As a result, they’ve spent the last year campaigning to be officially recognized as a religion.

“For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament,” the organization said in a recent statement. “Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains, and the value multiplies through copying. Therefore, copying is central for the organisation and its members.”

Gustav Nipe, the chairman of the board, said in a press release that the group had to apply three times before it was finally registered as a religious organization by Kammarkollegiet, the Swedish Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency. Founded by a 19-year-old philosophy student by the name of Isak Gerson, the Church of Kopimism’s principal belief is the right to file-share and its sacred symbols include CTRL+C and CTRL+V.

“The community of kopimi requires no formal membership,” the church said in a statement. “You just have to feel a calling to worship what is the holiest of the holiest, information and copy. To do this, we organize kopyactings – religious services – where the kopimists share information with each other through copying and remix.”

SOURCE via Kopimistsamfundet.de

Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics no longer appear on the list of SOPA supporters. Meanwhile, Anonymous is about to strike out at Sony again for its support for the bill. Along with the PROTECT IP act, the duo gives content owners the right to take down websites they believe are infringing on their copyright. That includes mere links to content that possibly infringes on a copyright, and if that link isn’t removed as requested, then the copyright owner can have the website’s advertising and transaction revenue severed. Even more, the domain name itself – whether it’s local or overseas — could even be thrown on a blacklist, leaving the site inaccessible.

Back in November, Joystiq reported that Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics backed the Internet censorship bill that’s currently circulating in the U.S. Congress. Now they have simply vanished from the list of SOPA supporters residing on the official Committee On The Judiciary website (pdf). In fact, the list of supporters has seemingly diminished since the original plea letter to the US Congress was sent on September 22. However still backing the bill are the likes of BMI, Comcast/NBC Universal, Time Warner, EMI Music Publishing, L’Oreal, Marvel Entertainment, the MPAA, and even Sony Music.

Meanwhile, Anonymous has set its sights on Sony again thanks to the latter company’s support for the controversial bill. In its latest video, the hactivist group states that supporting SOPA is like trying to throw an entire company from off a bridge. “Your support to the act is a signed death warrant to SONY Company and Associates,” the group states. “Therefore, yet again, we have decided to destroy your network. We will dismantle your phantom from the internet. Prepare to be extinguished. Justice will be swift, and it will be for the people, whether some like it or not. Sony, you have been warned.”

For their support of SOPA, Anonymous is also going after Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and Taylor Swift. “To those doubting our powers,” the group adds. “We’ve infiltrated the servers of Bank of America, The United States Department of Defense, The United Nations, and Lockheed Martin. In one day.”

Man, there goes the PlayStation Network again.

We’ve already had an early peek at Facebook’s yet-to-be-released Messenger client for Windows, and now you can give it a shot yourself courtesy of a leaked copy that’s turned up on the TechIT website. Not much in the way of surprises here, but if you’re the sort that prefers desktop applications to websites or mobile apps, you’ll be glad to know that it provides access to not just Facebook chat, but status updates and notifications from your friends as well. You can find the download at the source link below (Windows 7 is required).

SOURCE via TechIt

Following a wave of criticism for supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), domain registar and hoster GoDaddy announced that it is no longer support the bill it helped draft over the past few years.

CEO Warren Adelman said that, while online piracy remains an important topic for the company, SOPA may not be the best solution and they can “clearly do better”. In the future, GoDaddy wants to work together with “all Internet stakeholders”. In the end, it is “worth the wait” to get it right and “Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

GoDaddy navigated around a flip-flop perception by stressing that it “remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet”, but removed “blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill” that the company supported to “avoid confusion”. To some of us, GoDaddy’s decision may not be as conclusive as GoDaddy wrote in its announcement and appear to be much more damage control than a change of heart.

GoDaddy was the target of an outrage of the web community for its support for SOPA. There was even an open proposal to move domains away from GoDaddy.

A Reddit poster aggressively responded to GoDaddy’s decision and announced that he will be moving 51 domains to show his objection and suggested that to readers that other GoDaddy customers should be moving their domains on December 29 as well.

There aren’t many companies supporting SOPA and even anti-piracy organizations such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA) said that the bill needs work and would not be supported by the organizations. However, GoDaddy filed a strong statement in favor of SOPA with the U.S. House of Representatives. In the filing, the company writes:

“Go Daddy has a long history of supporting federal legislation directed toward combating illegal conduct on the Internet. […] Go Daddy has always supported both government and private industry efforts to identify and disable all types of illegal activity on the Internet. […] It is for these reasons that I’m still struggling with why some Internet companies oppose PROTECT IP and SOPA. There is no question that we need these added tools to counteract illegal foreign sites that are falling outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law enforcement. And there is clearly more that we could all be doing to adequately address the problems that exist. […] We need to find a way to preserve American ingenuity. Starting from a place of common ground will allow us to have the conversation about how best to achieve those goals. SOPA is a needed tool to get the ball moving.”

It is unclear how much of an impact the move-your-domain proposal will be for GoDaddy. The company claims that it has more than 50 million domains registered. The post on Reddit had generated more than 2000 comments at the time of this writing, the majority of them being positive toward the post. GoDaddy itself declined to comment on the outrage and sent us the SOPA filing as a response for our request for a statement. The company also remained firm within its own forums and posted “GoDaddy’s position on SOPA“.

Facebook has just launched a new feature: Suggested Events. It scrabbles through your account history to find events you might like to attend in real life. But is that a great idea, or will it generate a bunch of irritating spam?

According to TechCrunch , the tool uses information from your Facebook check-in history, brand page activity, and the RSVPs of your online friends to compile a list of events. It also makes suggestions based on the music you listen to through Open Graph apps — presumably meaning that you’ll see concert tips in the list, too.

The service seems similar to Foursquare’s discovery tool Radar — but given the sheer weight of Facebook users, this will no doubt attract far more users. The feature is already live, and you can see your Suggested Events page here.

On the surface of things, it seems like a positive addition for users: knowing about interesting stuff that’s happening is a good thing. But there’s no obvious way to remove events from the list — you can either join the event or say maybe — so I do wonder just how much spam will accumulate.

And when it does, how useful will the service be? Throw into the mix Facebook’s increasing emphasis on advertising, and you may likely end up with a bunch of corporate crap in your list, too. Let’s see how good Facebook’s software is.

It’s year-in-review time! I love this time of year because all of these lists invariably wind up making me feel like I’ve wasted another 12 months of this all-too-short existence (and who doesn’t love that?) or reinforce the notion that everyone in the world is an idiot. This year’s list of most searched-for terms does the latter.

Here’s the full list, by way of Experian Hitwise:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. Facebook Login
4. Craigslist
5. Facebook.com
6. Yahoo
7. eBay
8. www.facebook.com
9. Mapquest
10. Yahoo.com

Two things here: First, yeah, Facebook’s on there four times. Same as last year. That’s idiotic; we’re you’re all idiots. Stop that.

Second, it tickles me that Yahoo’s also on the list twice. Yeah yeah, I know; Yahoo’s still a major portal for legacy users. But it’s a special kind of ironic that all those folks who are still tied to their old Yahoo accounts are presumably using non-Yahoo search engines to find Yahoo. Or are they… searching for Yahoo on Yahoo? Either way, why are you searching for Yahoo? Stop that, too.

It’s not uncommon for someone who is depressed or feeling suicidal to use sites like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace to express their emotions. This week, in an effort to help those sharing such thoughts on Facebook, the social networking giant has announced a partnership with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The company yesterday revealed the partnership, which aims to provide suicidal people with an opportunity to have a private chat with a trained crisis representative from the Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Available to Facebook users in the United States and Canada, the service Facebook users to report any suicidal comments they see posted by a friend to Facebook using either the Report Suicidal Content link or the other report links found throughout the site. The author of the comment in question will then receive an email from Facebook providing them with a link to begin a confidential chat session with a crisis worker and encouraging them to call the NSPL.

Speaking to CNet in an interview, Lidia Bernik, associate project director of the Lifeline, said that the The Lifeline has been working with Facebook since 2006 “to basically reach out to individuals who are flagged or reported for suicidal content.” Bernik said that a lot of users have said that they feel more comfortable talking over text or chat as opposed to on the phone and said the partnership with Facebook is “an attempt to reach people in a medium where they are most comfortable.”

Dr. Regina Benjamin wrote in a guest post on Facebook that more than 100 Americans commit suicide every day and in the past year, more than eight million Americans 18 or older had thought seriously about suicide. She encouraged people to learn the symptoms of mental illnesses so they can do their part to help.

“I ask everyone to help by learning about the symptoms of mental illnesses and substance abuse, the warning signs of suicide, how to stand with and support someone who is in crisis, and how to get someone you care about the help they need,” she said.

SOURCE via Facebook

24-year-old Facebook user Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria recently sent a formal request to the social network and asked for a copy of every piece of personal information the site has collected on him since he created an account a year ago. According to ThreatPost, EU Directive 95/46/EC (PDF) grants each person the right to access data relating to him/her in order to verify the accuracy of that data and the lawfulness of how long it’s being used. What he eventually received was a CD packing a 1,222 page collection in a single PDF file.

To Schrems’ surprise, much of the data he discovered to be retained in Facebook’s records were previously believed to be deleted. These records included the times when Schrems logged in and out of Facebook, the times and content of every message sent and received, and an “accounting of every person and thing he’s ever liked, posted, poked, friended or recorded.” Facebook kept records of friend requests, photos, employment and relationship statuses, and former or alternative names and email addresses.

However Schrems notes that the PDF file he received from Facebook is based on himself and his 234 friends. He also said the experience with Facebook’s obvious data collection practice has inspired him to launch a legal project he calls Europe vs. Facebook. Schrems is looking to increase Facebook transparency, make opt-in data access the default (instead of opt-out) and to encourage data-minimization on the network.

“Facebook offers no sufficient way of deleting old junk data,” he writes. “Every inconsiderate comment, every invitation to an event (e.g. a demonstration) and every ‘like’ is recorded for an indefinite amount of time. But Facebook does more than that: even removed tags, friends or messages are kept in Facebook’s systems. Even if you delete your whole account, Facebook will keep some of this personal data.”

As of this writing, Facebook has not issued a response to Schrems’ claims.

SOURCE via Threat Post

Facebook just bought Gowalla for an as yet undisclosed sum of money, CNN is reporting. It’s another big get for the blue behemoth. Gowalla is Foursquare’s cuter, but far less popular cousin. It recently shifted focus from being a check-in based service, to an app that helps create location-based travel stories. CNN is reporting that the acquisition was made to help with Facebook’s new Timeline feature. It’s likely that it was also a talent buy, snapping up Gowalla founder Josh Williams and his team.