Yesterday, thousands turned out across over 200 European cities to protests the Anti-Counterfeiting Trademark Agreement or ACTA. Like SOPA and PIPA in the U.S., ACTA (among other things) aims to create tougher penalties and grant broad new powers to law enforcement to stop the transmission of copyrighted works over the Internet. With the European Parliament poised to vote on ACTA in June, it’s yet unknown what effect these protests will have.

Remember how the Internet finally “killed” SOPA and PIPA? Remember how people said they might come back? Well, they haven’t but they have a cousin called ACTA that’s stirring up similar trouble of a global kind. I know we all want to rest on our laurels for a while, but until digital media is well understood and accepted by rights holders (read: A long time from now) there are no victories. That’s why it’s time to buckle down and take on the next guy: The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA. ACTA just got Signed by 22 member nations of the EU. The United States signed it months ago. It’s a very different beast than SOPA or PIPA. Hold on to your hats, this is a rough one.

So we’ve been covering SOPA a lot, specifically how horrible it is and how horribly it’s going. On the dim, but bright side, someone listed as Ji S has created a beautifully simple illustration of how utterly ridiculous SOPA really is. Under SOPA as it currently stands, this anti-SOPA petition on Whitehouse.gov would lead to a nationwide block of Whitehouse.gov on the whole. The irony is delicious, isn’t it?

In this day and age, it’s pretty much a given that you should be keeping your social networking life somewhat under control because schools and prospective employers might be looking at it. But that’s not all, banks and creditors seem to be creeping in that direction too, because why let a little free information go to waste? As it turns out, there are plenty of things that creditors might like to know about you that, legally, they can’t ask, things like your race, your marital status, and whether or not you’re receiving public assistance. Also, having deadbeat friends who are yapping on about their inability to afford weed on their completely public profile probably wouldn’t help your case either.

This week in moral panic: High school students are apparently using vodka-soaked tampons to get drunk. Yes, the boys too. I think you can figure it out. According to the officer interviewed here, the problem is real and widespread. Not only are high school students using vodka-soaked tampons, but they are also apparently doing beer bongs rectally.

The bummer about MMORPGs is that, eventually, they end. Star Wars Galaxies will be undergoing a galaxy-ending disaster in only a month or so. The Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa also had big, planned events to give their players some semblance of closure and a goodbye to remember. Players of the Japanese MMORPG M2, however, got no fond adieu when the game was taken down out of the blue, permanently, due to a simple server malfunction.

Colonel Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi, long-time Libyan dictator, has been reported dead by Al Jazeera, which showed photos of the alleged corpse. Among many, many other things, Gaddafi was responsible for the extremely unreliable Libyan Internet by likley ordering the several country-wide black-outs that occurred throughout the course of the political turmoil in the country.

So far, the details on his death are pretty sparse. At the moment, there is no word of how he actually died, but Mohamed Benrasali, of the national council’s Tripoli Stabilization Committee, reported that Gaddafi was captured alive, but injured, and died from his wounds while being taken from his hometown of Surt where he was captured. Considering Gaddafi’s stranglehold on the Libyan Internet, this is a victory not only for the Libyan rebel forces but also for advocates of free speech, freedom of communication, and Internet as a right, not a privilege, everywhere.

Video of what appears to be Gaddafi’s body via Al Jazeera after the jump. Unsurprisingly, it’s a bit graphic. You’ve been warned.

So, if you’re on the East Coast, you’ve heard everything there is to hear about Irene. If you’re on the West Coast, you’ve probably heard everything you care to hear. Well, whether it tears the coast apart or not, whether plywood boards and transit suspensions are necessary or not, whether you’re going to be eating all that canned food in the coming weekend apocalypse or over the next year, let’s focus on the one thing that is for certain: Images of Irene are just epic, especially from space. That being that case, take a few minutes to zen out to the ethereal beauty of weather patterns before your power kicks out, or not.

The ever-present, always busy Anonymous has been up to their hacking ways again, this time taking down the website for the Syrian Ministry of Defense. The hacked webpage included a message to the Syrian people, assuring them the world is on their side and against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, and a message to the Syrian army, encouraging them to “defend [their] country” by rising up and unseating Al-Assad by force.

Images at the top of the hacked page linked to videos depicting ongoing violence in Syria and the bottom of the page contained links to various protest groups. Source code from the page suggests the hack was performed by someone who uses the handle Poppy. While Anonymous is no stranger to hacks motivated by global politics, this is the first time in a while that they have hacked anything unrelated to the arrest of Anonymous affiliates or the support of WikiLeaks. Only time will tell if this is a one-off attack, or the start of an entire campaign.

James Richard Verone, a Gastonia, NC resident and former Coca-Cola truck driver has been charged with larceny from a person for robbing a local RBC Bank of $1. Verone committed the robbery to receive free healthcare while incarcerated because he has no benefits and can not take on the financial cost of his own care.

The charge is larceny from a person because Verone only took $1. The charge carries reduced jail time, but like bank robbery, the crime is still a felony. After passing the bank teller a note demanding $1 and healthcare, Verone sat quietly in the bank and waited for police to arrive. He was arrested and taken to the county jail, where his $100,000 bond has since been reduced to $2,000. He doesn’t intend to pay it, he is purposefully staying in jail.