The Local, Sweden edition:

In December, the [Swedish Language Council] unveiled its customary annual list of new Swedish words. Among the words that Swedes had begun using in 2012 was “ogooglebar” (‘ungoogleable’).

The California-based multinational [Google] soon got into a huff, asking the council to amend its definition. But the language experts refused to bow down to the demands, instead choosing a third option - removing the term altogether.

This is all incredibly silly.

Having grown up on the internet (Prodigy represent), I have a bit of a thing for the past of the web. Five and a half years ago, I used the Internet Archive’s wonderful Wayback Machine tool to compare how sites looked a decade or more ago with how they look today. I had a lot of fun with that.

So this piece by Attila Nagy wrote for Gizmodo back in November was right up my alley. Rather than looking at change, though, Nagy cataloged stasis. He’s compiled websites long past relevance that still remain on the internet: publicity sites for ’90s films, old search engines and web directories, and other old pages that no one has unironically browsed in more than a decade.

BBC News:

A high-speed fibre-optic cable connecting Cuba to the global internet appears to have finally been activated, monitoring experts have said.

…

A joint project between the state-owned telecommunications companies of both Venezuela and Cuba, the Alternative Bolivariana para los Pueblos de nuestra America cable - known more succinctly as Alba-1 - had been hit by numerous delays before being completed in 2011.

But users were left in the dark as to why they were unable to get themselves hooked up to the connection, and were forced to make do with the high-latency connections provided by satellite.

But in the past week, much lower latencies - meaning faster connections - have been observed in the country, a strong indicator that the cable was now in use.

I love that we’re spying on Cuba by measuring request latencies.

Dara Kerr, CNET:

It’s hard to imagine a group that adheres to anarchic ideology would want its actions legalized under U.S. law. But that is exactly what Anonymous is doing.

The loose-knit group of hackers submitted a petition to President Obama this week asking that distributed denial-of-service attacks be recognized as a legal form of protest.

The petition, which is posted on the White House’s “We the People” Web site, claims that DDoS attacks are not illegal hacking but rather a way for people to carry out protests online.

If I had been drinking something when I read this, I probably would’ve started choking.

Ed Fletcher, Sacramento Bee:

Two Placer County teenage girls were arrested for allegedly using drugged milkshakes to knock out the parents of one of the girls so they could log on to the Internet, Rocklin police said.

Internet access at the Rocklin home was routinely shut off at 10 p.m., said Lt. Lon Milka, a department spokesman. […]

“The girls wanted to use the Internet, and they’d go to whatever means they had to,” Milka said.

Oh for crying out loud.

Klint Finley on Wired:

Google Fiber — the search giant’s brand-new, ultra-high-speed internet service — is only available in Kansas City, and even there, it only runs to homes, so there’s no trying the thing out during a Kansas City hotel stay. But if you really want a taste of those 800 Mbps speeds — that’s about 100 times faster than your average internet connection — there’s another option. You can rent a room at the hacker house.

The Homes for Hackers house is a four-bedroom Kansas City abode where a group of entrepreneurs have bedded down to incubate their tech startups on an honest-to-goodness Google Fiber connection. But only three of those bedrooms are taken. The fourth one is available for rent at a price of $49 via the online vacation rental site Airbnb.

Pretty silly, but in a way I’m kind of impressed by the idea.

I get political on this here tumblelog from time to time, but I try to keep it to commentary and not be overt, day in and day out, about it.

I am, however, going to have to break that rule today by putting out a call to action to sign this petition to build a statue of Master Chief on the White House lawn. I can’t think of a man more deserving of the honor than him.

If you haven’t heard anything about the suicide of Amanda Todd yet, you may want to skim the Wikipedia article. It’s not necessary, as the piece I’m linking gives a short overview, but the piece isn’t strictly about her and so leaves out a lot of the details.

So, on to the piece. Michelle Dean wrote this fantastic post for The New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog that ties the awful death of Amanda Todd together with recent developments on reddit and the internet’s attitude toward anonymity and free speech. It’s hard to quote my favorite part of the Todd’s piece, as it depends on several of the themes she develops, but the sentence is so powerful that I’m going to try it anyway:

What you could call the Brutschean world view—which takes anonymity as the only meaningful form of privacy, and a key element of free speech—is nearly an article of faith in these lower levels of the Internet. …

But, as the scholar Mary Anne Franks has observed, women haven’t actually achieved this “bodiless” freedom online. They are embodied in distributed pictures and in sexual comments, whether they like it or not. The power to get away from yourself, like everything else, is unevenly distributed. Women have become, as Franks put it, “unwilling avatars,” unable to control their own images online, and then told to put up with it for the sake of “freedom,” for the good of the community.

Emphasis added by myself. It’s really harrowing when it’s put like that, and yet it’s also totally undeniable.

Read this.

Amanda Hess, Slate:

In a widely-circulated 2009 TED talk, Gallop told the crowd that she must routinely correct her young partners: “Actually, no, thank you very much, I would much rather you did not come on my face.” …

Gallop’s point isn’t that certain sex acts are inherently bad—just that talking about them makes everyone’s sex life better. To facilitate the conversation, in 2009 she created a real-talk sex-ed website called “Make Love Not Porn” to dispel some of the common “myths” perpetuated by porn’s monolithic presentation of human sexuality. …

Later, Gallop realized she could do more than just annotate the porn’s industry’s product—she could compete with it. This month, she launched a beta version of a crowdsourced online platform wherein amateurs and porn stars alike are invited to tape themselves engaging in “real world sex.”

I’ll just be honest and admit that I’m linking this almost entirely for its use of the phrase “crowdsourced porn.”