My Two Cents: Please ignore the fact that you’ll look like a complete asshole wearing these. Plus, you’ll probably get chin checked and have your glasses jacked in the first five minutes. End Two Cents.

This is a conceptual video demo of Google’s augmented reality glasses (‘Project Glass’), which they hope to begin testing in the coming months. Think of them as like a see-through smart phone taped to your eyeball. You know, or augmented reality glasses if you’re good at wrapping your head around concepts. Me? I’m only good at wrapping one thing around things. “Your penis?” No pervert, NOT my penis — my arms, I was talking about my arms. It’s true, I’m a hugger! Now get over here ya big lug.

Source: Geekologie.

This is an informational graphic from Intel showing some of the things that happen in a single minute of internet time. I was honestly surprised that some figures were as low as they were. Only 20 identities stolen? Those aren’t the Nigerian scammers I know! Not included on the list: 80,000 moms forward spam emails, 30 dudes sign into Chatroulette with the intention of showing their dongs, my roommate maxes out our bandwidth downloading porn and brings my internet connection to a crawl, enough Viagra to pop a 1,000-year boner is purchased, and like five million people read Geekologie. “Five-million, really?” You heard me, five-million — like a five with two zeros.

What Happens in an Internet Minute? [intel]

Thanks to Patty, who heard every four minutes on the internet a man signs up for a dating website as a woman with the sole purpose of seducing himself through his regular profile. Wow, that…sounds strangely erotic.

Source: Geekologie.

Court hearing scheduled for next week in ongoing effort by privacy group to expose details of working relationship.

The Department of Justice will ask a federal court to uphold the secrecy that surrounds the working relationship between Google and the National Security Agency in a hearing that is scheduled for next week.

Privacy watchdog group The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is returning to court once again in an effort to disclose more information regarding the widely publicized partnership between the spy agency and the search engine giant.

EPIC is suing to obtain documents that detail the relationship, and will appeal against the NSA’s so-called “Glomar” response, claiming it “could neither confirm nor deny” the existence of any information about its relations with Google, because “such a response would reveal information about NSA’s functions and activities.”

The NSA’s response stated that the agency “works with a broad range of commercial partners and research associations” in order to oversee the security of important information systems, but did not provide any further detail.

The issue rose to prominencein January 2010 following a highly sophisticated and targeted cyber attack on the corporate infrastructure of Google and some twenty other large US companies.

The attack was blamed on the Chinese government, prompting Google to embrace a collaborationwith the federal agency in charge of global electronic surveillance.

Anonymous sources informed The Washington Post at the time that “the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information”, adding that the agreement will not allow the NSA access to users’ search details or e-mails.

The DOJ is backing NSA’s Glomar response, as The Legal Times reports:

CONTINUED at Prison Planet. Written by Steve Watson.

Man walked through radiation firing machines with metal objects knowing he would not be stopped.

Google/YouTube has placed restrictions on yet another video that exposes the fraudulent claims of the TSA and highlights how the federal agency’s security theatre is part of a wider social manipulation agenda.

Engineer Jon Corbett of the popular blog TSA Out of Our Pants! posted a video yesterday that demonstrates how the TSA’s radiation firing body scanners can easily be bypassed.

The video shows Corbett carrying a metal case through the scanner, away from his body in his side pocket. Corbett explains that because metallic objects appear as black on the image the scanners produce, the machines do not pick up such objects if they are obscured by the background, which is also black.

Watch the video:

CONTINUED at Prison Planet. Written by Steve Watson.

Apple‘s legal row over its iPad trademark in China creates a window of opportunity for rivals such as Lenovo Group and Samsung Electronics as they try to chip away at the U.S. firm’s dominance of the potentially vast Chinese tablet market.

Apple [AAPL  511.04    8.92  (+1.78%)   ], the world’s most valuable technology company, is fighting lawsuits brought by debt-laden Chinese electronics maker Proview Technology (Shenzhen), causing retailers and resellers in more than 10 Chinese cities to take iPads off their shelves, according to media reports.

Apple’s iPad enjoys a huge lead over rival tablet PCs in China with a 76 percent share. Lenovo [0992.HK  7.20    0.27 (+3.91%)   ] and Samsung trail a distant second and third with about 7 percent and 3 percent respectively, data from research firm IDC showed.

“Apple’s loss could be Lenovo and Samsung’s gains,” said Jonathan Ng, an analyst with CIMB in Singapore.

Samsung likely has most to gain, because its Galaxy tablet competes in the same price segment as the iPad.

“Samsung will probably benefit more from Apple’s ongoing lawsuit because both of them are after the same higher-end consumers given their price points,” said Dickie Chang, an analyst from IDC in Hong Kong.

“The impact on Lenovo may be less because Lepads are lower priced and are aimed more at entry-level users.”

A basic iPad 2 typically costs 3,688 yuan ($585), roughly the same price as 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, while some models of Lenovo’s Lepad were selling at roughly half that price on online retail sites.

IDC said in the third quarter Apple sold about 1.3 million iPads in China, while Lenovo, the world’s second largest PC maker, sold around 120,000 Lepads in its home market and South Korea’s Samsung sold 58,000 Galaxy Tabs.

The Lepad and Galaxy Tab both run on Google‘s [GOOG  613.845    9.205 (+1.52%)   ] Android operating system.

CONTINUED at CNBC.

After three years, Google Earth map has finally been updated to remove a gridlike pattern which sparked rumors that the underwater city of Atlantis had been found.

The exciting ‘non-discovery’ was made in 2009 when eagle-eyed internet users spotted a large grid on the seafloor that looked strikingly like the fabled city. Google was quick to explain that the misrepresentation was caused by overlapping datasets, and Atlantis had not been found, but the map remained – until now.

This week, Google announced that to mark the third anniversary of Google Earth, it had released a major update that promises to give users a ‘clearer view’ of Earth’s subterranean landscape.

CONTINUED at The Daily Mail.

Stanford scholar wants search engines to flag global warming, vaccine skepticism as thought crimes.

Former fellow of George Soros’ Open Society and current Stanford University scholar Evgeny Morozov has called on Google and other search engines to become thought crime enforcers, by providing warnings about websites that contain “conspiracy theories” such as the belief, held by a majority of Americans, that global warming is not primarily man-made.

Morozov, whose biography confirms him as a well-connected insider, decries in a Slate piecehow the Internet is a useful tool for “People who deny global warming” as well as “the anti-vaccination movement,” calling on Google to provide a “socially responsible curated treatment” that would marginalize such beliefs by amending search results.

His solution is to, “Nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like “global warming” or “vaccination.” Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.”

Morozov describes the potential that such a move will be judged as Google “shilling for Big Pharma or for Al Gore” as “a risk worth taking”.

This represents a similar argument to Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration,” an effort by Obama’s information czar to slap government warnings on controversial websites (including those claiming that exposure to sunlight is healthy). In a widely derided white paper, Sunstein called for political blogs to be forced to include pop ups that show “a quick argument for a competing view”. He also demanded that taxes be levied on dissenting opinions and even suggested that outright bans on certain thoughts should be enforced.

Giving companies like Google, which has grown to virtually become the gatekeeper of the entire Internet itself and is already engaging in SOPA-like acts of censorship, the power to denote which political and scientific positions are acceptable and which are fringe “conspiracy theories” is an insult to free thinking and smacks of Chinese-style thought control.

Morozov’s argument is also completely undermined by the fact that the two so-called fringe “conspiracy theories” he forwards as being in need of Google’s thought crime control, skepticism about global warming and the dangers of vaccines, are views held by millions of Americans and are not “fringe” at all.

According to the most recent polls, less than half of Americans now believe that global warming is caused by human activity, a number that has been slipping for the past several years.

In addition, polls show that a quarter of Americans, some 75 million of them, believe that vaccines are unsafe and can cause autism. To characterize this as a minority conspiracy belief is like labeling Catholicism as a doctrine of a tiny fringe.

At best, views about global warming and the safety of vaccines can be described as being split, but to claim that skepticism over man-made climate change and the dangers of inoculations are “kooky” fringe conspiracy beliefs, as Morozov does in his article, is brazenly inaccurate and exposes the agenda-driven bias of his rhetoric.

This is further illustrated by the reader comments, which almost universally deride Morozov and attack his argument as being a thinly veiled demand for Internet censorship.

“The day Google starts doing things like this is the day I find a new search engine,” writes one.

“So, you are a supporter of internet censorship? Only of information that you disagree with, of course. So I assume Slate and NAF did not support the recent action regarding SOPA?” adds another.

Morozov’s rhetoric is merely one aspect of the wider move to turn the Internet into an echo chamber of establishment propaganda, drowning out alternative voices to the benefit of large pharmaceutical companies who make billions from selling risky vaccines and scientific bodies whose very survival depends upon the global warming myth being upheld.

It represents another effort to win an information war the establishment is currently losing, asHillary Clinton herself admitted, by not just creating a new Orwellian Internet Ministry of Truth, as Bill Clinton demanded, but by ascribing this role to the very gatekeeper of the Internet itself – Google.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

Source: Prison Planet.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

Today is a great day for liberty. As I write this it is January 18^th, 2012 and the Internet is ablaze with anger towards SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). Not only was The Swash down in protest of these dastardly bills but Internet giants Wikipedia and Reddit were down as well. Shit, even Google participated in this blackout with a unique graphic on their page that lead to information about these two horrible laws and what you can do to fight them.

I was more than ecstatic today when I signed into my Facebook account and was overwhelmed by all the people who blacked out their own photos and had status updates and links protesting SOPA and PIPA plastered all over the home page. The impact of this protest is literally reaching further than any other online protest I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of. In fact, in just a few short hours, the tide has turned and the pimps pushing this law are now starting to run like the two-faced pandering bastards they are. I guess when you shine a little light the cockroaches scatter.

One of my favorite punching bags, Marco Rubio – the Republican senator form my home state of Florida, was a co-sponsor on one of these evil bills but he has now come out against it. This is because Rubio is a dickbag, a panderer and a wolf in Tea Party clothing. This “noble” act doesn’t excuse the fact that he co-sponsored PIPA and was also a champion for the insanely tyrannical NDAA bill, which just passed recently. Don’t get excited and let Rubio fool you, when this dies down, he’ll help reintroduce the bill with a few modifications and continue on his fascist path.

Conservative darling Paul Ryan just wrote this status update on his Facebook:

The Internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history. It should stay that way. While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse. I do not support H.R. 3261 in its current form and will oppose the legislation should it come before the full House.

While that sounds all fine and dandy, Mr. Ryan doesn’t fully oppose the idea of the bill and chances are, if it was tweaked and the opposition towards it died down, he may just very well vote for it.

Senators Jim DeMint, Robert Menendez and others have come out against this tyranny. Another co-sponsor, Arizona congressman Ben Quayle has withdrawn his support. Freedom fighter and libertarian leaning Michigan congressman Justin Amash continues to speak out against this, as does Kentucky senator Rand Paul and his father, Texas congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul.

The opposition to these bills has grown so quickly in the last several hours that six Republican senators wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The letter states:

We have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights.

For those of you who have been in the dark, I’ll break down what these bills are. In a nutshell, what they are supposed to do is to protect copyrighted material and eliminate piracy. What they actually do is a different story.

Basically, these bills give the entertainment industry the power to censor the Internet and breed a whole new type of crony capitalism while forcing us into a digital police state. You see, private corporations want to be able to choose what can and cannot be censored on the Internet. These corporations are trying to protect their property, which is understandable, and since the Internet is a bastion for downloading music and movies, they want to be able to tighten their grip and control how the whole system works. Considering that many of the sources for this copyrighted material exists outside of United States jurisdiction, these laws are being put in place to give the government and their corporate buddies an easier way at stopping copyright infringement. Again, that is understandable but the methods about doing this are just awful.

The first thing that this does is it gives the power to United States based ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to have special access at blocking infringing domain names. This also gives companies the power to sue websites, bloggers or whoever until they remove links or information directing Internet users to anything that they deem as infringed upon property.

Secondly, the government and their corporate pals would also be given the power to cut off funds to any websites that they believe are infringing on copyrights. Essentially, they can forcibly cancel infringing websites accounts with financial services and advertisers.

Now even though this all may seem somewhat proactive, one has to look at what actually constitutes copyright infringement. The description that they provide is so broad that if you technically upload a video to YouTube and there happens to be a piece of a song playing in the background, even if it’s just on the radio while you’re talking to the camera unaware of it, you have just infringed on copyrighted material and could face some serious penalties. This is just a small example but think of all the things you come across on the Internet on a daily basis that could technically be considered as copyright infringement. Violations are pretty much fucking everywhere! Hell, the whole Internet is a violation!

Besides all that, if there is a will there is a way. These laws won’t stop Internet users from finding music and movies to download illegally. In fact, even if a URL is blocked, an Internet user can still access the site via its IP address. Hell, this might start a revolution in web browsing and millions of digital pirates will be navigating the Net with IPs as opposed to typical URLs.

Another thing to mention is that these laws are incredibly bad for business. Essentially, they will cripple and stifle startups as corporations will have the power to sue any company that they feel isn’t properly protecting their interests. In a classic case of crony capitalism or corporatism, this allows the giants to stay on top, where they can look down and crush any growing company that may become a viable competitor for their business. Basically, these bills will create and perpetuate monopolies. When large corporations have the power to bankrupt new search engines and social networking sites, there really isn’t room for growth or innovation. We might as well just go back to the days of dark dingy uninspiring chat rooms.

The scariest thing that these laws will do is tamper with the Internet as a whole from the backend. By messing around with the Internet’s vast registry of domain names we could very well end up with a World Wide Web that is less stable and less secure. At the end of the day, these laws won’t stop piracy, as they claim and they will just create an environment for a new type of corporatism while leaving the Internet less secure and less reliable than it has ever been.

The Internet has already become a playground for government and corporate meddling. Hell, they already have laws in place to protect copyright infringement yet they want to push the envelope as far as they can. As of right now, the government and corporations already have the power to block any site just off of one infringing link. Social media giants like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and others are now forced to censor their users because if they don’t, they become liable for the material their users upload and could be forced to shut down. On top of that, an ordinary Internet user could already be sentenced to prison for up to five years just for posting any copyrighted material – this includes someone like Tay Zonday who became an Internet sensation for singing pop song covers.

This situation is incredibly fucked up and it is just one more battle in a long line or tyrannous laws that the government is trying to impose on us. Just add this ingredient to the same bowl of tyranny punch that already consists of the PATRIOT Act, NDAA, indefinite detention, Homeland Security, the TSA, previous Internet censorship, FEMA, etc. The list goes on and on and hopefully people’s distrust in government has grown to the point that all future legislation the tyrants bring forth will be scrutinized and passionately opposed as much as SOPA and PIPA.

In the end, we’ve got to chain these bastards’ feet to the grill and turn up the fire until they do what we say because frankly, that’s their damn job.

Face it: Google runs your life. The search giant turned web ecosystem owns your email, calendar, and even your voicemails. Your most important data lives on Google’s servers. What you may not realize is that, despite the quality of Google’s products, someone else is doing it better—and placing all your eggs in Google’s basket isn’t necessarily the best thing. Here’s a look at alternative services you can use in place of Google’s webapps.

Photo remixed from originals by Jan Kranendonk (Shutterstock) and Alfonso de Tomas (Shutterstock).

You might want to move away from Google entirely, whether you’re tired of things like the Google Plus-ification of your search results or the fact that Google’s mining ridiculous amounts of data and selling you to advertisers, or maybe you’re just plain tired of Google creating services it doesn’t actually improve over time. You may scoff at the idea of using Bing or other less popular competitors, but they’re quite good—sometimes even better—than Google. We’ve just become too entrenched to notice.

If you want to take a serious look at the alternatives, we did some digging and a lot of experimentation to find the best alternatives to Google’s most popular services (and we alsoasked you guys to share your favorites). Most of these services are still from big companies, like Microsoft or Yahoo!, but we’ve tried to include a few services off the beaten path as well. The fact of the matter is just that the highest quality services around are going to be from the companies with the most resources. Below, we’ve listed the best Google alternatives in each category, as well as a few runners-up we think are worth checking out.

CONTINUED at Lifehacker.

It’s on — at least partially: Reddit has announced that it will be going dark for 12 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that he hopes to coordinate with the site so that Wikipedia does the same. Will other sites join in? Should we prepare for the Great Internet Strike of 2012?

Writing that it’s “not taking this action lightly,” Reddit announced on Tuesday that it will blackout its site on Wednesday, January 18 for 12 hours, starting at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time. During that period, the site’s content will be replaced with “a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action.” The company will also run a live video stream of that day’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on Internet security, intellectual property and economic growth.

On the site’s blog, the Reddit team admitted that “We’re as addicted to reddit as the rest of you,” but explained that “We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it. Blacking out reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community.” The company admits that support for a blackout isn’t unanimous among the Reddit community and it’s asking for the community’s input as it decides what to do next.

(MORE: At the Top of Congress’ New Year Agenda? Regulate the Net)

If support isn’t unanimous within Reddit’s community, it’ll be interesting to see how things go for Wikipedia if that site follows suit. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales writes ”it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit,” thought adding the community needs a “thumbs up/thumbs down vote” on whether or not to participate, and “we don’t have the luxury of time that we usually have, in terms of negotiating with each other for weeks about what’s exactly the best possible thing to do.” I suspect the ratio of those in favor of a blackout to those opposed would be greater for a more activist site like Reddit than one that’s more mainstream (and let’s be honest, passive) like Wikipedia.

Something I appreciate about Reddit’s announcement is that they’ve factored in the importance of educating would-be visitors to the site about why they’ve decided to go dark, what SOPA is and why it’s so important. I can only assume Wikipedia would do the same thing, should the site community decide to go dark on the same day. After all, protests only work when people understand why they’re happening.

That said, now that we have a date for a potential shutdown, the question becomes “Who else will join in?” Google, Twitter and Facebook have all been rumored as contenders, in part because of comments made by NetCoalition’s Markham Erickson (when I asked, Google and Twitter declined to comment on their support for an Internet blackout). But with a real strike looming and despite attempts to push the issue onto agendas, support for this kind of action may be shifting in favor of alternative methods. Finding other ways to protest may be ineluctable — after all, we’re talking about the Internet’s most popular sites going dark for 24 hours.

Sure, there may be some disappointment that we’re not days from Temporary Internet Apocalypse To Prove a Point, but I suspect there’s relief as well. The idea of a multi-pronged attack on pro-SOPA arguments — of different flavors of activism and discussion for different people — feels like the more mature response on behalf of tech companies (who after all may not agree on what’s wrong with SOPA as it stands). Let Wikipedia close for the day and generate headlines, while others like Google and Facebook pursue alternative forms of protest that engage their respective audiences. In the end, the more people paying attention, the better.

MORE: SOPA: What if Google, Facebook and Twitter Went Offline in Protest?
Source: Tech Land.