Free Republic

A new television commercial has been called “jaw-droppingly racist” for advertising laundry detergent seemingly strong enough to turn a black man Asian. The ad — from China-based laundry detergent company Qiaobi — shows a black man flirting with a seemingly interested Asian woman. The women lures the man closer to a washing machine. She shoves a ball of washing detergent in his mouth before shoving his body into the washing machine. Moments later, the black man emerges from the water as an Asian man.

Today is the day that Netflix, Reddit and others are taking part in “internet slowdown day” to protest the FCC’s proposal to create special “fast lanes” on the internet. To draw attention to the issue, many participants are displaying “spinning wheel” icons, such as the one appearing on site Etsy on Wednesday:The Etsy website, and those of others involved in the protest, are not loading any differently than usual, but are displaying the spinning wheel to invoke the frustration of slow internet speeds. The participants hope the gesture will spur users to voice their displeasure to the FCC about the...

Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday. The news was first reported by the MIT newspaper The Tech, citing both his uncle and his attorney. Swartz was 26.

Security experts are cautioning computer users that they could be targeted by a malicious SOPA “ransomware” virus that rekindles the witch-hunt targeting information sharing introduced last year by congressional lawmakers. Hackers have brought the failed Stop Online Piracy Act back to center stage, this time by distributing a virus that demands the owners of infected computers pay a $200 fine for sharing copyrighted files, lest they want their hard drives destroyed.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who was elected to his first term with help from the Tea Party in 2010 and who is sometimes cited as a potential GOP vice presidential pick, lauded the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for following their respective visions instead of asserting “narrow American interests” in a speech today on U.S. foreign policy. In remarks at the liberal Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., Rubio sketched the advances made globally since the end of World War II as a result of America’s leadership. “The purpose of the institutions we established, from...

Former senator and current head of the Motion Picture Ass. of America Chris Dodd hopes to resurrect the reviled SOPA anti-piracy legislation in another form, but it appears the US House of Representatives is beating him to it a new bill that makes SOPA look sensible. Dodd, speaking in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, said that he hopes to get a new version of the SOPA legislation ready for debate shortly, and that the MPAA was marshaling its forces for another attack on piracy. Dodd said he was confident that the new legislation would go through, and said there...

The computer hacking group Anonymous has promised to shut down the Internet in its entirety this Saturday, March 31st, according to a post on "pastebin" which has since gotten 165,000 views. The piece states that Anonymous will be attempting this in order to protest "SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun." The post, which was then uploaded to Reddit, promises an attack on 13 root DNS servers. Anyone trying to access a website, it promises, will get an error message. The group, however,...

Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States will soon launch new programs to police their networks in an effort to catch digital pirates and stop illegal file-sharing. Major ISPs announced last summer that they had agreed to take new measures in an effort to prevent subscribers from illegally downloading copyrighted material, but the specifics surrounding the imminent antipiracy measures were not made available. Now, RIAA chief executive Cary Sherman has said that ISPs are ready to begin their efforts to curtail illegal movie, music and software downloads on July 12.

The Internet has also been a net job creator. A recent McKinsey study found that for every job disrupted by Internet connectivity, 2.6 new jobs are created. It is no coincidence that these wonderful developments blossomed as the Internet migrated further away from government control. Today, however, Russia, China and their allies within the 193 member states of the ITU want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously unregulated areas. Reading even a partial list of proposals that could be codified into international law next December at a conference in Dubai is chilling: • Subject cyber...

Late on February 15, JotForm lost access to jotform.com. The company soon discovered the U.S. government had seized the domain by lodging a request with the site’s domain registrar GoDaddy. Soon after, it had been taken down. Aytekin Tank, co-founder of Interlogy Internet Technologies, and owner of JotForm, later confirmed that he’d been in contact with the agent assigned to his case at the Secret Service. She was busy and couldn’t look at the site for a few days. So millions of web forms and thousands of customers were left without a service and no reason as to why this...

While the left hand of the Marxist Soros puppet Obama is prestidigitating outrages against our US Constitution the right hand is taking notes.

Despite overwhelming evidence that memos and letters were sent to Eric Holder regarding Fast and Furious as early as July of 2010, he still used ignorance as his defense in the most recent Congressional hearing. As frustration was apparent on the faces of Republican Committee members, there was a certain smugness on the faces of Holder and his assistants, who were seated behind him.

Executive Director of the Gun Owners of America, Larry Pratt has been following the Fast and Furious scandal, practically from the time it broke early last year. One of his concerns is that without the support of...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, following a recent anti-piracy legislative debacle with SOPA and PIPA, will lead his second effort of 2012 to push Internet-regulating legislation, this time in the form of a new cybersecurity bill. The expected bill is the latest attempt by the Democrats to broadly expand the authority of executive branch agencies over the Internet. Details about the bill remain shrouded in secrecy. Clues available to the public suggest that the bill might be stronger than President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity proposal, which was released in May 2011. Reid said that he would bring the bill — expected...

This is one bowl of alphabet soup that’ll make you sick. Before the dust has even temporarily settled on SOPA and PIPA, the House and Senate anti-Internet-piracy laws that stalled in Congress last week under intense public pressure, the White House is at it again. This time it’s the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty. And, according to Constitutionalist attorney Gary Kreep, President of the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), the threat against American free speech is even greater. Unlike the House and Senate bills, ACTA is an international treaty that has been developed without Congress, serves New World Order interests...

In another example of how little Barack Obama cares about the United States Constitution and the role of Congress -as bad as it can be- the current U.S. president ratified the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA. President Obama had signed the first binding draft of ACTA last October 1, 2011, also in secret. As we reported yesterday, ACTA is much more dangerous than SOPA, PIPA or OPEN, because it is the accord that legalizes internet censorship on a global basis. That is why presidents around the planet have received an signed the agreement without any review from their congresses or...

In the midst of the battle over SOPA and online piracy, incubator Y Combinator is looking to fund startups that “Kill Hollywood.” In a “request for startups” to apply for funding, Y Combinator argues that Hollywood has peaked and is facing its own demise. It’s also run by people who are “so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise,” the statement says. Mountain View, Calif.-based Y Combinator, which has backed prominent...

Twitter has announced that it now has the technology to selectively block tweets on a country by country basis. In its blog, Twitter said it could "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country". But it said the removed content would be available to the rest of the world. Previously when Twitter deleted a tweet, it would disappear worldwide. --- In its blog post, Twitter explained that its international growth meant entering countries "that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression", citing France or Germany which ban pro-Nazi content as examples.

Because there was a discussion that i had with someone about SOPA/PIPA and i mentioned how the bill would in effect affect sites like Youtube,google,flickr,tumblr,and such. And the person turned it around to make it into about supporting music piracy. And the whole time the person made me want to facepalm so hard over the person supporting SOPA/PIPA. Because under SOPA/PIPA,if i did a cover of a song and uploaded it to say,Youtube or simiar i would get into trouble,but the person kept turning it around and stuff.

Long ago, Jefferson warned, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” The exceptions to that rule have been few and far between recently, and ought to be celebrated when they occur. One did this past week with the announcement that supporters of the so-called “Stop On-Line Privacy Act” and the “Protect Intellectual Property Act” have indefinitely postponed their measures after an unprecedented protest across the Internet. SOPA and PIPA pose a crippling danger to the Internet because they use the legitimate concern over copy-right infringement as an excuse for government to intrude...

Senator Lamar Smith, lead sponsor of the currently dead SOPA bill you’ve heard so much about, has another bill in the works that uses Child Pornography as a screen to push through an amendment that’ll have your internet service provider tracking all of your financial dealings online. Each time you use a credit card, each time you read your bank statement, all of your IP information and your search history will be required by your ISP to be stored for 18 months at all times. This bill is H.R. 1981 and will have more dire consequences than SOPA or PIPA...