Many sites on the Internet (including this blog) were "blacked out" yesterday as part of a protest against SOPA/PIPA. Opposition to these bills has been mounting for some time, and a few days ago it appeared that SOPA, at least, had been shelved by the House, but it turned out that it had only been delayed until February. (Even if does eventually get "shelved", the cynical read on that, which would be mine, will be that Congress is simply taking it off the radar, knowing how short the public's attention span is, and will try to slip it in later as an amendment to some other bill that is expected to pass without much scrutiny. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.)

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This is just a quick update to my previous posts on SOPA to collect a few more links of interest.

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Years ago, Doug McIlroy, the inventor of the Unix pipe, published a paper on techniques for computing the terms of power series. The paper talks about a number of key concepts in programming, such as "lazy" evaluation, that were not well supported by most programming languages at the time, which is why McIlroy spent a good portion of the paper describing an implementation of his techniques in a new language designed by Rob Pike.

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I thought I was done with this topic for now, but I can't help adding one more quick post, because it now appears that it isn't just media companies who want to put a stranglehold on the Internet. Chanel is getting in on the act.

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This is just a quick update to yesterday's post. According to Ars Technica,

Last Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution ahead of a forthcoming summit between Europe and the United States. It included a section on "the need to protect the integrity of the global Internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names."

That provision was added at the urging of the civil liberties organization European Digital Rights (EDRi). In a presentation to the Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee, EDRi's Joe McNamee noted that "the United States has, up until recently, never sought to exploit its theoretical jurisdiction over the companies and infrastructure that are at the core of the Internet."

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I've posted twice now about the Protect IP Act, or SOPA (the former is the Senate version, the latter is the House version), which is the latest attempt on the part of big media companies to put a stranglehold on the Internet.

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Amidst all the news about Steve Jobs' passing, you may not have heard that Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and one of the original designers of Unix, also passed away this past weekend.

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Unusually for me, this post will be almost entirely links to and quotes from articles by others. But I should explain briefly why I'm linking to them and quoting them. It's not to set the stage for my own comments about Mac OS X, or about iPods and iPads and so forth. I made comments about OS X in an earlier post, and there's no need to rehash them here. Nor do I have any personal anecdotes to share. My reason for linking to these articles, and quoting briefly from them, is, quite simply, to draw attention to what they say.

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I've seen a number of online articles and blog posts recently with the common theme of being uncomfortable with Facebook. For instance, this at Slate, or this from a programmer, or this from a Facebook developer.

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This is a culture interlude, not a nerd interlude, although of course the kind of culture I'm about to focus on might well be called nerdish. A new production of Le Carre's classic spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is out. A short video of the cast at the premiere in Britain is here.

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