Social media makes for a tempting treasure trove of information for a lot of different people. Naturally, the government often has an interest in checking out your private social media interactions and since social media is such a new phenomenon, at least in legal years, the method of getting that info has yet to be firmly established. That’s why it’s so important for social media companies to put their foot down on privacy issues to protect their users. That’s exactly what Twitter is doing in the case of Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris.

While there was a big outcry against SOPA that included protest from many well-known Internet giants like Wikipedia and Reddit, the backlash against CISPA hasn’t had quite as many champions. Some sites that came out against SOPA, like Facebook, are actually pro-CISPA for very self-interested but logical reasons. Along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), whose opposition to the bill is frankly no surprise, the American Library Association (ALA) has also come out against CISPA, and in doing so have suddenly become my heroes. Here’s why.

While Bioware is off not standing by its ending to Mass Effect 3, EA is making it clear that it does stand by the presence of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) characters in its games, most notably Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. This progressive, sticking-to-its-righteous-guns move comes just after EA was awarded the Consumerist’s Worst Company in America award of 2012. For the past few weeks, EA has been receiving thousands of letters complaining about the games’ same-sex options and now, perhaps at a calculated moment, EA’s made a point of telling dissenters exactly where they can shove their complaints.

Maybe by now we’ve all saturated the Internet with so much anti-SOPA, anti-PIPA content that you’ve finally decided you want to do something about stopping these bills, even if it’s just to get everyone to shut up already and talk about something else. Great, but what steps can you take, and where can you get the information to take those steps? Well, this super fantastic interactive flowchart from Ape Con Myth will walk you through the steps and direct you to where you need to be to know what you need to know and do what you need to do. Step up everybody, and then we can all go back to talking about video games and silly cats again. Check out the chart after the jump.

Just the other day, some intrepid bloggers turned up several instances of Google breaking it’s own paid link policy by indexing paid links pointing to the official “Download Google Chrome” page. It was revealed to be a technical mistake on a blogger’s part, caused when said blogger forgot to throw in a nofollow tag. Nonetheless, Google had broken its own rules and has always been strict about dishing out punishment. That being the case, Google has punished itself, ranking the offending, sponsored-content blogpost as “untrustworthy” and reducing the Download Google Chrome page’s PageRank for 60 days, knocking it off the first few pages of results.

For the most part, the technically-inclined world is against SOPA and it seems that only big businesses like Viacom and Universal Music Group are for it. There is one strange exception though: GoDaddy. After customers started asking about the company’s position, GoDaddy came out with this statement, one of the few arguments for SOPA. Needless to say, this has a lot of people upset, the kind of people who have a number of domains, the kind of people who are now calling for a boycott.

If you go to Wikipedia in the next couple of days and don’t see anything, there probably isn’t anything wrong with your Internet connection. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is considering blanking out all Wikipedia pages in protest of SOPA, a bill that countless Internet-based content providers and freedom of information advocates are particularly wary of. Wales pitched the idea to the Wikipedia community and feels that a blackout could send an extremely powerful message to law-makers.

Back in October of 2007, Simon Glik was walking past the Boston Common, heard some commotion relating to an arrest and when he suspected police officers were using excessive force he pulled out his cell phone and started filming. That did not go particularly well for Glik, who was promptly arrested for breaking Massachusetts law that prohibits audio recording without the express consent of the NFL of all parties involved.

Long story short, the charges against Glik were ultimately dropped, at which point, Glik filed a suit of his own, claiming the officers had violated his first and fourth amendment rights. After a back and forth of dismissals and appeals, the case reached the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and the ruling was that, yes, the arrest did violate Glik’s First and Fourth Amendment rights. The implications? That citizens who film cops are subject to the same protections as the press and cannot be arrested for it.

In what could become a landmark court decision, New York district court Judge William Pauley has ruled that music locker service MP3Tunes does indeed qualify as a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) “safe haven,” thwarting attacks by music labels against the service. In their reporting, Ars Technica says that the ruling could bolster the arguments of other music locker services like Google and Amazon that their activities are legal, pending an inevitable appeal.

For those unaware, music lockers are online services that allow users to upload their digital music to remote servers and then stream that music from a computer or mobile device.  MP3Tunes, the brainchild of Michael Robertson, gives users this uploading and streaming ability, but also a service called sideload.com to search for tracks already available online and transfer them into the users’ lockers.

In their suit, lead plaintiff EMI maintained that streaming user-uploaded tracks without a license from the music’s copyright owner is illegal. Furthermore, they claimed the sideload.com service gave users access to music they had not paid for, thus perpetuating piracy. The suit also attacked MP3Tunes’ use of a process called “deduplification” where instead of hosting thousands of copies of a song, such as Richard Harris’ MacArthur’s Park, the service hosts one copy and streams it to multiple users.

Even more fingerprint news today! How many times have you seen a crime drama where the bad guy lures a victim just to get ahold of their fingerprint, either by cutting off their digit or making an imprint? The fingerprint is then used to steal the victims identity and unlock secrets guarded by the ever important fingerprint scanner. While many of the things you seen the movies and on television seem far-fetched, this scenario is actually something that has played out in real life.

But now, researchers in Germany have come up with a way to foil criminals intent on manipulating fingerprint scanners. Researchers at Dermalog Identification Systems have discovered that there is a difference in the amount of light that gets absorbed by living tissue versus tissue that is dead (like that of a severed finger). The process is based on the fact that living tissue will blanch when blood is squeezed out of capillaries, but dead tissue won’t.