Much more:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/congress-mulls-spy-powers/

Much more:
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-celebrates-independence-day-six-years-after-the-raid-120531/

More:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4236514,00.html

Fact #2: You can’t notify Google about the scope of the problem if it limits the notices it will accept and process through its automated tool. And that is what Google does. On top of the query limitation, Google also limits the number of links we can ask them to remove per day. Google has the resources to allow take downs that would more meaningfully address the piracy problem it recognizes, given that it likely indexes hundreds of millions of links per day. Yet this limitation remains despite requests to remove it.

Fact #3: One needs to consider these numbers and Google’s activities in context. Google says it received requests to remove 1.2 million links from 1000 copyright owners in one month. But consider that Google has identified nearly 5 million new links posted in just the last month in searches for free mp3 downloads of just the top 10 Billboard tracks. The constraints Google has placed on the tools they promote to deter infringement are well below what is necessary to identify and notice infringements on the Billboard top 10, much less the entire catalog of the American creative community.
Googl
Fact #4: Google’s “transparency report” calculates the percentage of a site that is infringing – but this data is flawed and of little value on its own. Specifically, Google claims that the DMCA notices it has received for a site represent less than .1% of the links it had indexed for the domains at the top of this list. But this number is misleading given the constraints imposed by Google on a copyright owner’s ability to find infringements and send notices to Google. If these constraints did not exist, how many more links on these sites might be identified? For example, Google calculates that infringing links account for only .1% of links on filestube, a notorious source of infringing links. For anyone who knows filestube, this seems unlikely, especially given that Google’s data doesn’t include DMCA notices sent directly to the site. Moreover, Google’s methodology fails to account for the percentage of traffic to the infringing portion of the site compared to any potential non-infringing portions. Let’s give copyright owners the ability to access all the pages on a site and take down all the infringing links, and then let’s rationally discuss how to categorize the sites.

Fact #5: Google’s data shows why its interpretation of the DMCA makes it ineffective. Let’s take a step back for a moment. Everyone – including Google – knows that the worst sites are repopulated with links to infringing files of the same content as quickly as links are taken down. For example, in a recent one month period, we sent Google, and the site in question, multiple DMCA notices concerning over 300 separate unauthorized copies of the same musical recording owned by one of our member companies. Yet that song is still available on that site today, and we reached it via a search result link indexed by Google. This highlights the futility of the exercise: if “take down” does not mean “keep down,” then Google’s limitations merely perpetuate the fraud wrought on copyright owners by those who game the system under the DMCA.  

More:
http://www.riaa.com/blog.php?content_selector=riaa-news-blog&blog_selector=Clear-Facts-&blog_type=&news_month_filter=5&news_year_filter=2012

Reports show that Tor stopped working a week ago — even with bridges configured. Websites such as https://gmail.com/, https://facebook.com/, https://twitter.com/, and even https://torproject.org/ continue to work. The graphs below show the effects of this deployment of censorship based on Deep Packet Inspection:

An analysis of data collected by a volunteer shows that they are doing some sort of TLS fingerprinting. The TLS server hello, which is sent by the Tor bridge after the TLS client hello, never reaches the client. We don’t know exactly what they are fingerprinting on, but our guess is that it is either the client hello or the server hello. An illustration can be found in this network flow diagram.

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ethiopia-introduces-deep-packet-inspection

More:
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-google-car-protest-20120530,0,6380083.story

The move follows an April 2012 ruling by the High Court of Justice in London (here), which imposed a court order upon the ISPs that required them to block the website. The Pirate Bay is one of the world’s largest BitTorrent (P2P / File Sharing) trackers but also allows internet copyright infringement (piracy) to take place.

Sky Statement

We have invested billions of pounds in high-quality entertainment for our customers because we know how much our customers value it. It’s therefore important that companies like ours do what they can, alongside the Government and the rest of the media and technology industries, to help protect their copyright. Such protection makes sure that consumers continue to benefit from TV programmes, movies and music both now and in the future. This means taking effective action against online piracy and copyright infringement.

Increasingly content owners are turning to the courts to present evidence of copyright infringement by websites that offer content illegally to users. When they do so, and the court agrees that copyright infringement has occurred, the content owners can seek a court order which compels the internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to those sites over their broadband networks.

To date Sky has received court orders to block the following websites that were found to have breached copyright laws:

* Newzbin 2, which Sky blocked on 13 December 2011
* The Pirate Bay, which Sky blocked on 30 May 2012

More:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2012/05/uk-isp-sky-broadband-blocks-internet-piracy-website-the-pirate-bay.html

Frequent attendees, including Henry A. Kissinger and David Rockefeller, are expected again. A copy of last year’s guest list, leaked to a journalist covering the conference, offers a window into just how much influence Bilderberg guests wield.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Greek Minister of Finance George Papaconstantinou were reportedly among those in attendance at the 2011 meeting in Switzerland.

Global business titans, government officials and political figures rounded out the guest list of more than 100, though skeptics suspect dozens of names, especially of high-profile individuals, are kept off of it.

More:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/30/security-tighter-than-ever-for-power-players/?page=all#pagebreak

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/reeling-acta-treaty-rejected-by-three-european-parliament-committees/

De Vries does not mention specific traffic data and also does not elaborate on whether the website itself has become more popular in The Netherlands.  Also, the blocking measure relates to a website, not the entire BitTorrent protocol, so one can expect file sharers to seek out other BitTorrent platforms now that The Pirate Bay has been blocked.

Secondly, XS4ALL isn’t one of the major ISPs active in The Netherlands and the blocking measure has not been widely implemented by every Dutch ISP just yet.

Regardless, The Pirate Bay website’s popularity in The Netherlands has recently dropped from the 27th spot to number 43 on Alexa’s site popularity list for The Netherlands.

In The United Kingdom, similar events are taking place as The Pirate Bay website has recently dropped to the 63rd spot, starting out as the 39th most popular website in that country, before it was subject to site blocking measures very recently. As in The Netherlands, not every ISP in the UK is fully blocking The Pirate Bay website just yet.

Dutch language news article:
http://www.elsevier.nl/web/Nieuws/Economie/339993/Pirate-Bayblokkade-werkt-niet-tegen-downloaden.htm

Previously:

XS4ALL Home Page ‘Black Out’ As A Protest Against Imposed Pirate Bay Blockade. Mere Conduit?

Translation of banner text:

Today is a black day

Wednesday 1st February 2012: for the first time in history a Dutch ISP is being forced to render a foreign site inaccessible. On the basis of an order of the Court of The Hague, XS4ALL is required to block a number of IP addresses and domains.

The judge felt that freedom of information – a fundamental right of European citizens – was being outweighed by the interests of the entertainment industry. A wrong judgment. Therefore XS4ALL will appeal the ruling.

Theo de Vries
General Director XS4ALL

In his verdict, the judge noted that he should be careful and even reserved when being asked to impose remedies related to access to the internet. He noted that those remedies can only be applied when it is sufficiently certain that claimed (copyright) infringements have occurred and conditions in relation to proportionality and subsidiarity have been taken into account. The Court felt that those conditions had been met.

The judge specifically noted that this was about a balance between the protection of copyrights and neighbouring rights of the rights owners versus the protection of the freedom of entrepreneurship of ZIGGO and XS4ALL.

Dutch language verdict:
http://zoeken.rechtspraak.nl/detailpage.aspx?ljn=BV0549&u_ljn=BV0549

http://www.xs4all.nl/ on 1st February 2012

Dutch language news article:
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2729223/xs4all-zwart-protest.html

See also:
http://vrritti.com/?s=xs4all

http://vrritti.com/2012/02/01/xs4all-home-page-black-out-as-a-protest-against-imposed-pirate-bay-blockade-mere-conduit/

and

Every XS4ALL Customer To Receive Free Spotify Premium Subscription
http://vrritti.com/2012/05/23/every-xs4all-customer-to-receive-free-spotify-premium-subscription/

To prevent hostile takeovers or even situations where buyers would acquire a portion of the company which the Dutch deem to large, KPN has in the past established a foundation that carries the name ‘Protection KPN’. Members of that foundation are:

• Jacques Schraven, former executive at SHELL as well as employers organization VNO-NCW;
• Professor Jan Klaassen, former executive at KPMG and special adviser to the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security;
• Pieter Bouw, former executive at KLM and the Council of Banks at The Dutch Bank (DNB);
• Hans Zwarts, former executive at Randstad and ING Netherlands;
• Peter Wakkie, former executive at Ahold, ABN-AMRO and former partner at De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek.

In addition, KPN has asked advisers at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Allen & Overy to protect KPN and support the work of the foundation in this critical time.

It is clear that Carlos Slim has closed in on the Dutch Crown Jewels.

Dutch language news article:
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/82243/kabinet-mivd-overtreedt-wet-bij-aftappen.html

Previously:

Experts Discover That Nobody Cares Whether International Cybercrime Enforcement Is Based On Any Legal Framework Or Not
http://vrritti.com/2012/04/06/experts-discover-that-nobody-cares-whether-international-cybercrime-enforcement-is-based-on-any-legal-framework-or-not/

Dutch Prosecutor Van Zwieten: Remote Investigations Are Illegal, But Inevitable. Laws Need To Be Modernized
http://vrritti.com/2012/03/10/dutch-prosecutor-van-zwieten-remote-investigations-are-illegal-but-inevitable-laws-need-to-be-modernized/

Dutch Public Prosecutor Lodewijk van Zwieten: Dutch police was allowed to hack systems of botnet victims. Says that police should also be allowed to hack straight into PCs of cybercriminals in foreign countries
http://vrritti.com/2011/11/16/dutch-public-prosecutor-lodewijk-van-zwieten-dutch-police-was-allowed-to-hack-systems-of-botnet-victims-says-that-police-should-also-be-allowed-to-hack-straight-into-pcs-of-cybercriminals-in-foreign/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/30/no_new_privacy_investigation_into_google_oz/

Now, though, there’s another layer: Google is collecting money from vendors its search engines point users toward. The results seem to be the same as pure “organic” results, just now companies are paying Google for the referral. So if you grab a Delta flight through Google Flights, Delta will kick back a percentage of your ticket price to Google. Totally fair!

But it also goes against the Google’s fundamental principle that search results should always be organic and transparent.

http://gizmodo.com/5914381/googles-letting-companies-pay-for-search-results