Summary: News: SOPA defeated, Megaupload taken down It was big week on the Internet. Many popular sites spent an entire day protesting SOPA, which resulted in both it and PIPA being put on life support. Good job, Internet! Megaupload was also taken down by the feds, leaving us wondering why we really need a law like SOPA. Read on for the biggest stories of the week. PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed: Wednesday's unprecedented online protest has Senators racing for the exits on the Protect IP Act. A total of 13 Senators announced their opposition to the legislation, including 11 Republicans and two Democrats. Why the feds smashed Megaupload: After a two-year investigation that moved from Hong Kong to the US to New Zealand, the US government has arrested Megaupload employees, shuttered the site, and gone after $175,000,000 in cash and prizes. Here's why. Maniac Tentacle Mindbenders: How ScummVM's unpaid coders kept adventure gaming alive: For 10 years, the ScummVM project has made beloved adventure games playable on modern systems and mobile devices, even as it dealt with legal problems and internal dissension. Here's how it happened. SOPA lives—and MPAA calls protests an "abuse of power" : The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will move forward in the House this February, its top backer announced. As for the anti-SOPA protests tomorrow, Hollywood calls them a "stunt" and a "dangerous and troubling development." SOPA Resistance Day begins at Ars: Why Ars Technica opposes the Stop Online Piracy Act. Windows 8's locked bootloaders: much ado about nothing, or the end of the world as we know it?: Microsoft's secure boot policy for Windows 8 has some Linux advocates up in arms, as it will be all but impossible to install Linux on any ARM machine designed for Windows 8. Is Microsoft tipping the balance too far towards security and too far away from freedom? And given the abundance of Linux tablets already on the market, does it even matter? Anonymous takes down DoJ, UMG websites—attack on Whitehouse.gov underway: In a pair of actions, the hacktivist group has taken down the websites of the Justice Department and Universal Music in response to the Megaupload shutdown, and is targeting the websites of Democratic members of Congress who support SOPA. Before shutdown, Megaupload ate up more corporate bandwidth than Dropbox: Before being shut down by the feds today over copyright infringement allegations, Megaupload was accounting for more corporate bandwidth usage than Dropbox and numerous other file-sharing services. Megaupload shut down by feds, seven charged, four arrested: Megaupload's co-founders and other staff are charged with crimes including conspiracy and money laundering, in an investigation that included law enforcement and government agencies from nine countries. Hard to compete with Free: €20 for unlimited voice, text, and 3G data: French broadband provider Free.fr wants to shake up mobile service. After all, it's just bits. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/week-in-tech-sopa-defeated-megaupload-taken-down.ars Google claims 90 million Google+ users, 60% "active" daily In today's earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page said Google Plus now has 90 million users, and that the vast majority are active on Google either daily or weekly. "There are over 90 million Google+ users, well over double what I announced just a quarter ago," Page said. "Plus users are very engaged with our products. Over 60 percent of them engaged daily and 80 percent engaged weekly." (UPDATE: We've confirmed what some readers suspected: the 60 and 80 percent figures refer to users accessing any Google service—whether it be search, Gmail or something else—while logged in to their Google account, and do not necessarily indicate actual usage of Google+ each day or week. The 90 million figure refers not to active users, but to the total number of people who have created Google+ accounts.)
