When GoDaddy‘s public and unapologetic pro-SOPA stance initially came to light, the backlash was big enough that GoDaddy backed off its “support” to something a little more lukewarm and moved to “not supporting SOPA,” but dancing around the issue more than actually opposing SOPA. Now, GoDaddy has come full circle and claims to oppose SOPA in an about-face that has occurred at a pretty staggering speed: 1 week. The cause of this speed is doubtlessly because of the loud voices, particularly those of reddit, railing against the registrar nonstop, calling for a boycott, and advocating the transfer of domains. Their efforts seem to have worked, although the boycott itself may not be as responsible for the change as we all might like to think.

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.

A couple of months ago, we Geekolinked a thread on reddit asking if one could destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if one traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion. The thread was (and still is) very fun, and it turns out, it was fun enough for Warner Bros. to preemptively buy the pitch, Rome, Sweet Rome. The movie will follow marines as they are transported into the past, where they encounter one of the world’s most legendary villains, which in turn causes them to disrupt history. In order to return home, they have to set things right and put history back the way it was.

Adam Kolbrenner of Madhouse Entertainment caught James Erwin’s, the writer of Rome, Sweet Rome, well-thought out responses on the reddit thread, and contacted him to begin working on the concept. When the project was in shape, Kolbrenner brought it to executive Chris Gary, who encouraged Warner Bros. to pick it up, and pick it up they did.

User-submitted content aggregators are a fairly popular method of creating a cohesive community out of scratch. From the olden days of newsgroups, to Slashdot, to Digg before the fall, allowing users to find or create their own content and submit it at their leisure can end up creating a surprisingly informed community with lightning-fast updates. Of course, that can also lead to a bunch of superfluous garbage, but a few communities out there are able to surpass that hurdle. More often than not, reddit tends to be one of the few examples of a user-submitted content aggregating community. If you aren’t hip to reddit yet, or are the hippest of cool cats but want to brush up on your history, Sortable created an informative infographic full of information and graphics just for you, seen below the break.

In 2006, popular social news website Reddit was purchased by publishing giant Condé Nast where it grew into the juggernaut we know and love. Today, Reddit announced that it had declared independence and was being spun off into Reddit Inc.

Though Reddit is now separate from Condé Nast, it is still wholly owned by Condé Nast’s parent company Advanced Publishing. However, Reddit will now be operated by a board of directors. According to the site’s official blog, the board will consist of:

…reddit co-founder Alexis (kn0thing) Ohanian (read his thoughts here) will serve on that board, along with Bob Sauerberg (President) and Joe Simon (Chief Technology Officer) from Condé Nast, and Andrew Siegel (Senior Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development) from Advance. Other internal or external directors may be added in the future.

Reddit Inc. has also begun a search for a CEO to head the company. There is currently no word on what factors will enter into that search, or how much karma candidates are expected to have.

Redditors LawyerCT and pibbman have done a great service to the world by providing a list of websites that collect your personal information for “background check” purposes, along with the links you need to remove yourself from these sites. If you’re the kind of person who has freaked out about Facebook privacy breaches, you should probably go ahead and do this if you haven’t already thought of it, because this information tends to be way more detailed. Luckily for you, the real juicy stuff is hardly ever free, but these sites will still give it out if they can find a paying customer. Unless you stop them.

Instructions after the break.

The joke in the blogosphere is that the Internet “comes from” only a handful of places. This chart created by webcomic Endless Origami doesn’t teach you where to find content, but helps you choose which source for what ultimately ends up being the same pool of content is right for you. Granted, the chart leaves out neat geek culture blogs that sift through all the rabble to cull the top content, and generally also has some pretty killer original content of its own.

(Endless Origami via Geeks are Sexy)

Amazon’s elastic compute cloud (EC2) is a popular hosting platform for social websites because it provides a cheap, scaleable, generally reliable place for them to live online without having to purchase a floor full of their own servers. But a major EC2 outage today highlights the potential perils of outsourcing one’s own hosting needs onto the cloud: When the cloud goes down, there’s not all that much you can do.

Many of the people who frequent social news site and geek hangout Reddit aren’t aware that it’s owned by Condé Nast Publications, the 100-year-old magazine publishing giant behind such titles as Vogue, The New Yorker, and Wired. It may seem like an odd fit, but with Reddit resurging following rival site Digg’s spectacular implosion last year, Condé’s 2006 purchase of Reddit is looking increasingly like a smart bet.

In the past, Reddit’s small, beleaguered staff has frequently complained that Condé Nast treated them like a second-class citizen within the company, refusing to give them resources until they made more money, but failing to give them the ad sales staff to make that money in the first place, but times are changing. Reddit has recently announced new staff and a bigger budget and has reportedly moved up within the byzantine Condé org chart.

But with Reddit’s newfound success, Peter Kafka reports that Condé Nast is quietly contacting investors about buying a stake in Reddit, valuing the site at $200 million, and is trying to spin Reddit off into a semi-independent entity. Reddit denies this, however.

The Android Police blog is reporting that not only has some nasty malware been released into the Android market, but that it has been downloaded by 50-200 thousand users, all of which may have had their device completely compromised. The attack came in the form of dozens of popular free apps that contained a plethora of nasty tricks. The apps were actually re-packaged free apps from different publishers, presumably to maximize the chance it would be downloaded and minimize the work the ne’er-do-wells would need to spend making their own apps.

Reddit user lompolo made the discovery, writing:

I just randomly stumbled into one of the apps, recognized it and noticed that the publisher wasn’t who it was supposed to be.

Super Guitar Solo for example is originally Guitar Solo Lite. I downloaded two of the apps and extracted the APK’s, they both contain what seems to be the “rageagainstthecage” root exploit – binary contains string “CVE-2010-EASY Android local root exploit (C) 2010 by 743C”. Don’t know what the apps actually do, but can’t be good.