I encountered a fascinating Web site today. The care and love behind its construction are evident. The personal messages from the site’s managers reflect their commitment to exceeding users’ expectations. The idea is novel and the implementation, from what I’ve seen, is first-rate.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that the site fills a need that doesn’t exist, as far as I can tell.

The site is compilr.com. It’s an online IDE and compiler for Python, node.js, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, C, C++, Ruby, Java, C# and VB.NET. Think of it as Google Docs for developers.

compilr.com instantiates a bunch of hot buzzwords. It’s cloud-based. It’s virtual. It’s SaaS. It supports collaboration. All good, right?

Yeah, it’s all good. But I’m left with one question. Who needs it?

If you’re a professional, you want your development environment on your machine, or at least on a local server where you can control the installation. You want to know which patches and revisions have been loaded, and which versions of the libraries are installed. At compilr.com, you don’t know what compiler is running in the back end. If the installed libraries are documented, I can’t find the details. These details matter.

Also lacking are version control and facilities for testing and debugging. Judging from the site’s user forum, these features have been on the back burner for a couple years.

I want to like compilr.com, but I think it’s a solution in search of a problem. It’s easy enough for students and casual developers to download free development environments from the Web. Professionals know where to get their power tools. A Web-based development environment sounds like it ought to be useful, but once you think about it for a few minutes, the usefulness evaporates.

Too bad.

Web recommendation: Here is another alarming article, this one from the good folks at Wired. Little by little, piece by piece, a larger picture is becoming clear, and it’s a disturbing one. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He wishes Aaron Sorkin still had a series on the air.

I heard the Indigo Girls song Galileo this morning. It’s not their best song, in my opinion, but it’s among their most popular. The song evokes Galileo as a symbol of the highest achievement of human intellect: How long till my soul gets it right? / Can any human being ever reach the highest light? / I call on the resting soul of Galileo / King of night vision, king of insight. Lyricist Emily Saliers employs Galileo as a metaphor for the search for meaning.

The song got me thinking about Galileo. I idolized great scientists and mathematicians and inventors when I was young, and Galileo certainly belongs on that list. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wrote: “Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science” – who am I to argue with Stephen Hawking?

But Galileo wasn’t on my Top 10 list. I knew of him, as kids do, as the inventor of the telescope (which, of course, he wasn’t). But my intellectual idol was Leonardo da Vinci.

I don’t mean to embark upon a debate over which of these great thinkers made the more important or substantial contributions to the modern world. Such debates are pointless at best. No, what I find interesting about my childhood preference for da Vinci is what it reveals about the way we encounter and assimilate information. I want to talk about that today. And that means I’m going to have to delve into the past a bit.

My dad was a rookie newspaper reporter when I was a kid, and my mom stayed home with a house full of toddlers. I was too young to know it at the time, but looking back, it’s clear that we didn’t have any money. My childhood was spent in a series of undersized rentals filled with hand-me-down furniture. Other kids got all the latest toys, but my sisters and I did without.

I recognize now that my mom and dad had to scrimp and save to maintain our rowdy household. But in one area, they spent like millionaires. I grew up in a house full of books. I mean it – there were books everywhere. Thousands of books, hardcover and paperback, filling shelves in every room. My dad, who never owned a new car in his life, was so idealistic he got his kids not one, but three sets of encyclopedias.

You remember encyclopedias, right? They were big multiple-volume reference works packed with articles on all kinds of topics: art, history, science, mythology, math…every branch of human knowledge. We had the Encyclopedia Americana, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the World Book Encyclopedia. (Plus, as I recall, the beautiful Time-Life Science and Nature series of stand-alone volumes on individual topics.) These weren’t picture-book references for kids, but full-scale grown-up reference works of the kind typically owned by libraries. Each was more than 20 oversize hardcover volumes. I’ll never know how my parents were able to afford them.

These (and many other wonderful reference works) didn’t appear when I learned to read, nor when I started school, nor when my academic assignments began to require research. No, they were there from the beginning. And my parents didn’t put them away on a high shelf to protect the onion-skin pages and leather bindings. The encyclopedias were on the bottom shelf so we toddlers could browse through them at will, starting before we could read. By the time I entered first grade, I had spent hundreds of hours with those encyclopedias. I had probably read 1,000 articles. (I’ll make no claim regarding the depth of my understanding.)

In some ways, my unfettered access to these thousands and thousands of pages of reference material was similar to my current access to information on the Internet. But the information differed in one significant way.

On the Internet, I can launch a query and obtain links to scores of relevant documents. With encyclopedias, access was alphabetical by topic. I couldn’t ask the encyclopedias of my childhood for a list of the Top 10 contributors to modern science. I could learn about Galileo only by picking up the G volume and flipping to the appropriate page. If I wasn’t looking for Galileo, I wouldn’t encounter him.

I think that’s why I was a confirmed da Vinci loyalist. I knew about da Vinci, because I had happened upon his entries in the reference books. I’m sure the pages devoted to da Vinci were illustrated with his drawings and paintings, which would have caught my younger self’s attention. In fact, I remember studying da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (this link is well worth following).

I think it’s reasonable to conclude that Emily Saliers, who is about my age, happened to stumble onto different articles in her childhood exploration of history’s great thinkers. She bumped into Galileo, and I found da Vinci. It’s as simple as that. In the age of the printed word, chance and happenstance could have lifelong repercussions.

I have begun thinking about how today’s children will embark upon their intellectual quests, and what the lifelong results will be. The Internet is an unorganized heap of questionable facts and articles of dubious merit. My encyclopedias were produced by professionals with resources for fact-checking and a commitment to objectivity, neither of which is a strong point of the Web. But the Internet’s searchability means it can provide meaningful answers to broad, naïve questions. If you can pry the kids away from YouTube and Facebook, they just may find exploring the Internet just as rewarding, and life-changing, as my own encounters with printed references.

Oh, and about the encyclopedias. I’m sure my parents intended for them to serve as long-term resources for my academic career. But I quickly found that these secondary resources are not held in high esteem in the academic world. The pursuit of knowledge led me to consult original works rather than the encyclopedias’ condensed summaries of the works. So I outgrew them fairly quickly.

I am grateful to my parents for making the encyclopedias and other references available to me as a child. Browsing through a house full of books led me to a fulfilling information addiction, an addiction I feed now through Chrome and a broadband connection. I’m sad that today’s children won’t have the same experience.

They’ll learn to acquire knowledge in a different way, through a searchable, highly responsive broadband Internet. I wonder what effect that difference will have on the way they think, decades from now.

Web recommendation: I love Jeff Duntemann. I seem to recall that the two of us had a falling out, long ago, when we were editors of rival magazines, but I can’t remember the details now. Duntemann is a superb writer and a careful thinker. When I stumbled across his blog the other day, I realized how much I had missed reading his editorials and articles. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He intends to make a lot of ice cream this summer.

I read an alarming guest editorial at the Wall Street Journal's Web site the other day. The article, “The U.N Threat to Internet Freedom,” was written by Robert M. McDowell, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.*

The article is quite a piece of work. McDowell believes the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), under pressure from Russia and China, is poised to wrest control of the Internet away from existing technical advisory groups such as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Internet Society (ISOC). McDowell warns that the future of the Internet will no longer be in the hands of level-playing-field technologists, but under the control of national governments.

Among other things, McDowell predicts that the ITU is preparing to renegotiate a 1988 treaty and seize the power to, in his words:

• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for "international" Internet traffic, perhaps even on a "per-click" basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;

• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as "peering";

• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;

• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;

• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

It all sounds very dire. McDowell's article has sparked a ruckus at reddit, techdirt, and other technology-oriented online forums.

I agree with McDowell that a government takeover of Internet management would likely be disastrous. The Internet has grown and prospered largely because the technologists who administer it and plot its future are not beholden to national interests.

But I'm not going to ring the alarm bells just yet. As The Register points out, the ITU's publicly posted agenda doesn't include any of the issues that worry McDowell. The ITU lacks the resources to take over the Internet. An Internet takeover is contrary to the ITU's mission. And the ITU doesn't have the authority to execute the takeover McDowell fears.

Blogger Jerry Brito has additional doubts about McDowell's dire predictions:

Assuming every other country agrees to centralize control of the Internet, wouldn’t true control require the U.S. handing over the root to the UN? Why would we ever do that? And what does it mean to “Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work”? These are volunteer-run non-profits. How can they be “subsumed” by the ITU? Why would they submit?

And even if they are subsumed, all the power they now employ is merely putting out technical recommendations. It is the voluntary adhesion to these recommendations by the thousands of networks that make up the Internet which make them powerful. How would you mandate compliance with new standards from a centralized global body? Would nations have to make it illegal to belong to a rebel IETF putting out recs to compete with the ITU? I’m having a hard time envisioning how you ”repeal and replace” such a large, distributed, and successful bottom-up process.

The ITU is meeting at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Geneva this week. If they agree to formulate an Internet regulatory plan, as McDowell fears, the plan could pass into law at the ITU's 2012 World Conference On International Telecommunications, slated for December in Dubai. The 1988 regulations governing the relationship between the UN and the Internet – the International Telecommunication Regulations – will be subject to renewal and renegotiation in Dubai.

A more comprehensive overview of what is at stake is available in The 2012 World Conference On International Telecommunications: Another Brewing Storm Over Potential UN Regulation Of The Internet, an article written by two attorneys at Washington-based law firm/lobbying enterprise Wiley Rein. I presume that the lawyers are speaking on behalf of an industry client. A history of Wiley Rein's lobbying efforts is available at OpenSecrets.org. It's not clear – to me, at least – who the firm's client might be in the current issue.

Is independent governance of the Internet really vulnerable to government takeover? I think it is. We've seen U.S. law-enforcement agencies take an increasingly aggressive stance regarding use of the Internet as a crime-detection and suspect-tracking tool (the news is full of more and more disturbing reports), and countries throughout the world are looking to censor or control the Internet for their own purposes. Governments are not doing enough to protect us from corporate interests and they are doing to much to morph the 'net into a tool for monitoring and controlling citizens.

Still, despite the real threats, I think McDowell is overreacting in this case. If other countries are (understandably) eager to reduce the U.S. government's control over the Internet, that may not be such a bad thing. The Internet is a global resource, and global participation in governance bodies is something to be desired, not feared.

Web recommendation: AT&T Bell Labs is rightly legendary in the programming world – indeed, in many technical fields. I enjoyed these observations about how and why Bell Labs was able to make such breakthroughs, an analysis by Jon Gertner of The New York Times. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He walks everywhere these days.

* The FCC is by law a five-commissioner body, but it's currently down to three members. President Obama has nominated a pair of attorneys, Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai, to fill the empty seats, but political wrangling is preventing their timely confirmation.

SOPA and PIPA are dead. This doesn't mean that pirating software, music, games, and movies online is legal, but that the ability of copyright holders and government agencies to shut down the piracy supply chain remains limited.

The whole Internet community banded together to defeat SOPA and PIPA. We all felt good about protecting free speech in the face of the proposed measures. And it appears that we have won.

So we are left with the status quo. Piracy is still illegal, but it's still common. Copyright holders will continue their search for legal tools to shut down the pipeline. Pirates will continue to use ingenious methods to get their hands on copyrighted works.

What if we are looking at this the wrong way. What if, instead of expending their time and energy stopping piracy, copyright holders accepted the pirates as an inevitable, even helpful, part of the creative ecosystem?

A number of researchers, writers, and even copyright holders are starting to come around to this point of view. In increasing numbers, people are sharing their opinion that piracy is a good thing.

How could this be?

First, there's evidence that piracy is an exploration and sampling tool for the studios' best customers. Survey after survey shows that pirates are more likely to spend a bundle on movies, software, games, and movies. It appears that pirates download content to see if it's worth having, then purchase copies of the stuff they like. Not every pirate turns into a paying customer, but the overlap between pirates and good customers is undeniable. It's not intuitive, but it seems to be true: Pirates are the industry's best customers. As one analyst puts it: “If piracy is a sampling and discovery tool for high spenders, then suppressing piracy could depress legal sales.” Another study, conducted by the Society for Consumer Research, found that users of pirate sites employed the sites as “try before you buy” services, leading pirate site users to “buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often, and on average, spend more than their 'honest' counterparts at the box office. A 2009 report from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don't.

Second, there's the argument that sales lost to piracy should be considered a marketing cost. Pirates are social, and they spread the word about worthwhile content. Studio execs are pulling their hair out trying to generate favorable mentions on social-media platforms. Pirates are effective at generating such word-of-mouth advertising. And they do it for free.

In an interview with IGN, the founders of game company Team Meat explained that they view piracy as part of their marketing program. Team Meat's Edmund McMillen explains, “The majority of e-mails that we get that revolve around piracy are people saying, 'I just want to get this off my chest. I stole your game when it came out because I wasn't sure about it and I really, really, really love it and so I bought it because I feel real guilty.' This is a common e-mail.”

In his blog at Futurebook.net, publishing pro Timo Boezeman writes about the opportunities available to publishers who embrace piracy as a new avenue for reaching customers instead of a threat: “Think about why people pirate your books. Why would they do that? Think negative and you might say: they don’t want to pay for it. Could be. But the main reason is: they want your book! And that is a good thing, right? So if you want to use that in your own advantage, you could see piracy as sampling. Hey, an opportunity! Take over control and spread the work for free yourself. Not just the complete work with no further actions attached. But for instance a management summary of your (non-fiction) work. Or a version with ads (additional income!). Or a version with social media buttons included to let the readers spread the word (so they become ambassadors of your work, free marketing!). Of course with links included that can help people to buy the original work if they like it (and I know from experience that people do this) in a format they choose (e-book, hardcover, etc.). If you take this even one step further, you can also see that this could help the author spread his name (and expertise), which could lead to extra lectures, workshops or seminars. And if you offer the author a complete package (including arranging his presentations), this could become an alternative source of income for you as a publisher.”

The producers of a a small, independent movie called “Man from Earth” tell a common story: Their movie languished unwatched until it became popular on pirate download sites. Then sales took off, and revenues too. The whole story is here: Internet Piracy is Good for Films.

A similar dynamic helped the sales of the humorous parenting book Go the **** to Sleep. The book grabbed the #1 spot on Amazon's bestseller list—a month before its release. It seems that a pirated copy in PDF form became popular on download sites before the release date. Instead of depressing sales, the pirated version generated interest and demand, and led to higher sales.

You can listen to similar experiences from bestselling author Neil Gaiman in this video. Gaiman used to be against piracy, but his view changed when he noticed that his sales went up in countries where his books were being pirated. As an experiment, he put his novel American Gods on his Web site for free downloading. Sales went up by 300 percent – not just for American Gods, but for all of his books.

Author Paulo Coelho agrees. Coelho not only approves of piracy, but he has actually posted “pirated” versions of his own books at torrent sites like Pirate Bay. Coelho relates the publication history of one of his novels in Russia. The first year, it sold 3,000 copies. The next year a pirated copy was released, and he sold 10,000 copies. The next year saw 100,000 sales, and sales grew to more than a million the next year. Coelho says people bought the printed books after sampling the pirated versions.

Also rethinking piracy is Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds and other games. “Piracy may not be a bad thing,” he said at this week's Midem music conference in Cannes, France. “It can get us more business at the end of the day.”

The studios' claims of revenue lost to piracy are grotesquely inflated, but they surely are losing some sales to illegal downloads. It's just possible, however, that they are getting more than sufficient value in return.

Web recommendation: Here is the page in which Google details some of its charitable giving in 2011. The company says it donated more than $100 million to charity over the course of the year. That sounds like a lot...until you realize that it amounts to about one-fourth of one percent of the company's $37.9 billion in revenues. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He wonders if any of his old friends from the dial-up Bulletin Board of the Absurd (7 cps speed limit enforced 24 hours per day) ever read these posts.

I have written several times about proposed legislation that would give copyright holders and law-enforcement agents unprecedented powers to censor the Internet. Although both the House and Senate versions of the legislation continue to grind their way through the adoption process, they have encountered setbacks that seem to ensure that the final versions, if approved, will no longer incorporate their most damaging provisions.

Most news reports, including mine, have referred to the legislation as SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. In fact, the House and Senate versions of the bill have different names. SOPA is the name of the House's version, authored by Lamar Smith of Texas. The Senate version is called the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act – the PROTECT IP Act-- or PIPA for short.

Both bills are essentially the same. It is common for proposed legislation to make its way through the House and Senate separately. Once both houses of Congress have passed the legislation, it goes to a committee that sands and polishes the language until it has created a single bill that reflects the wishes of both chambers. That bill then gets a final vote, as a formality, in the House and Senate. It's a complicated process.

In the past few days, both the House and Senate versions of the bill have experienced setbacks.

The Senate version of the bill – PIPA – was written by Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont. In response to public outcry and expert testimony before the Senate, Leahy now says the DNS-blocking provision of the bill requires “further study” and should not be implemented when and if the bill is passed. Leahy posted a statement on his Web site.

In the House, SOPA author Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has taken a further step. He has rewritten the bill to strike the DNS-blocking provision entirely. Like Leahy, he posted a statement on his official Web site.

Both versions of the bill retain other controversial provisions. For example, search engines will be instructed to block links to sites accused of direct and indirect copyright infringement – including, it appears, links to copyrighted material hosted on other sites. Suspected infringers will also lose access to payment services such as PayPal. U.S. companies will be prohibited from advertising on sites suspected of infringement.

Note that in all cases I said “suspected” of infringement. The penalties go into effect without the benefit of due process. First the site is booted off the Internet. Then, perhaps, if the site operator has sufficient cash to protest the move, a trial begins.

A further blow to the proposed legislation has come in the form of a statement from the Obama administration. In response to a petition at the recently created We the People Web site, the President's technical advisors have composed a statement against the current versions of SOPA and PIPA. “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small,” the statement says.

Despite these developments, a January 18 protest will apparently go ahead as planned. On that day, a large number of Web sites will “go dark,” pulling themselves off the Internet temporarily to dramatize what they see as the legislation's censorship of the Internet. Reddit, Wikipedia, the Cheezburger Network, Destructoid, Red 5 Studios, Major League Gaming, Mozilla, Tucows, the Free Software Foundation, and many other sites are participating in the blackout.

The tide appears to have turned against this poorly conceived legislation, but even with the DNS-blocking language removed, the bills go too far. Here's hoping the legislators' waffling on the legislation's most onerous provisions proves too little, too late, and the blackout puts a stake through SOPA's heart.

Web recommendation: The hacker collective Anonymous is agitating against SOPA too – no surprise there. Have you ever watched one of their videos? I just did today, on YouTube. It's here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He spends far too long reading blogs and news on the Web every day.

I often find myself experiencing something in real life -- good or bad -- and immediately want to share it on my networks. I take out my iPhone and instantly share it with my networks. Depending on which "app" I open, I could share it with 720 people (many of whom I've never met), 350 people (many of whom I know in real life) or over 500 business associates. These networks define us, the generation that shares (my new definition of Gen Y), but how do you deal with this mentality when creating your applications? Do you ever think about "saving us" from ourselves? 

As I took my daily Starbucks run the other day (I mean, I am a classic example of Gen Y, what did you expect? Dunkin Donuts??), I began chatting with a co-worker about AIM profiles. Remember the days when the Internet was brought to you in a nice, localized, safe package? Remember the AOL homescreen and the friendly "you've got mail" notification? 

For many of us those days are gone, but all of the new technologies we use today have origins in these older systems. Our Facebook profile, my co-worker and I realized, is really just an extension of our masterfully designed AIM bios. The only difference is that there's a lot more on the line these days; these days we're sharing our actual name. 

Not many people used their real name for screennames or MySpace profiles back in the day, but today's society demands that we share that -- and a whole lot more. 

Thinking about this, I started to wonder -- how does privacy and security fit into a culture that is bent on sharing every little thing that happens to them during the day? How can developers save us from ourselves? Is that even a possibility? 

Of all the applications on my iPhone, I think the best example of this is my Chase bank application. I log in, it remembers my username but never my password, and then I check what I need to and close the app. All other apps that I do this with (Facebook, Twitter, AIM) stay logged in. Chase (after 15 mins or so) logs me out. Even if I opened the application again, I wouldn't be able to do anything without putting my password in. 

Do you incorporate bank level security into your consumer apps? Or do you think it is up to the consumer to protect him/her self? 

How will you connect privacy, security and sharing in 2012? Tell us! 

WebSockets is finally going prime time. The Internet Engineering Task Force gave a nod, yesterday, to RFC 6455, which describes how WebSockets work. Essentially, this document defines a way for browsers and Web servers to communicate with one another over port 80 in a full duplex fashion. That means TCP packets go both ways through the same port, thanks to a bit more protocol overhead on the part of the browsers and servers.

The IETF has upgraded RFC 6455 to a Proposed Standard, which is the last step before it becomes a fully supported Internet Standard.

This will simplify life for developers, if it hasn't already. The standard, even before it reached standards level, was already supported in Firefox 4 and beyond. Unfortunately, due to some security limitations of the previous versions of the protocol, WebSockets was disabled by default in most browsers until only very recently.

There's still time for changes to be made to this standard, but it's good to see that the work towards HTML5's completion is moving along at an acceptable pace outside of the W3C as well.

From the release email:

The WebSocket Protocol enables two-way communication between a client running untrusted code in a controlled environment to a remote host that has opted-in to communications from that code. The security model used for this is the origin-based security model commonly used by web browsers. The protocol consists of an opening handshake followed by basic message framing, layered over TCP. The goal of this technology is to provide a mechanism for browser-based applications that need two-way communication with servers that does not rely on opening multiple HTTP connections (e.g., using XMLHttpRequest or iframes and long polling). [STANDARDS-TRACK]

This document is a product of the BiDirectional or Server-Initiated HTTP Working Group of the IETF.

This is now a Proposed Standard Protocol.

The latest Google acquisition is Apture Inc., developer of an innovative search-in-place feature for Web pages.

Apture is the maker of Apture Highlights, a plug-in for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Once the plug-in is installed, users simply double-click or highlight a word or phrase on a Web page. A window then pops up with search results for the highlighted word or phrase. Search results come from YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and other sources – more than 60 in all. Apture calls it “a glossary for the Web.” (You can see a short video of Apture in action here.)

Why is such a plug-in a good idea? The Apture Web site explains that 30 percent of publishers' outbound traffic is lost to search sites, suggesting that users leave Web pages to research topics they have encountered there. Apture Highlights lets users conduct that research without leaving the page. It's more convenient for users and better for Web-site publishers, who get their users to stick around longer.

A notice at the Apture Web site suggests that Google is acquiring the company in order to integrate in-page search features into its Web browser, Chrome.

I think this acquisition is an encouraging sign that Google is not taking its dominance of Web-search services for granted. In particular, it seems Google recognizes that the Apple iPhone's Siri feature signals a change in the way mobile users conduct online searches.

I installed Apture Highlights to try it out, and after a few hours of use I find that I'm using Chrome's “open link in new tab” feature much less often. I'll let you know if I'm still using Highlights in a few weeks after the novelty has worn off.

Web recommendation: Inc. magazine has called Penelope Trunk “the world's most influential guidance counselor.” I bumped into a thoughtful post on her blog two or three weeks ago and I've reread it a couple times since. The article provides a refreshing perspective on a dilemma that is increasingly common in our industry: When it's OK to take a pay cut. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He gets nostalgic for life in the U.S. now and then.

Congress is currently working on a bill that would cause significant alteration of the way the Internet works. Variously called the Protect Intellectual Property Act (the Senate version), the Stop Online Piracy Act (the House version), and the E-PARASITE Act (the House version), this legislation would make it much easier for the government to shut down or block access to Web sites suspected (or merely accused) of committing or facilitating certain copyright or trademark violations.

The bill in its various forms enjoys the support of music and motion-picture industry trade groups, who despite record revenues and profits seem to be almost comically frightened of the potential for pirates to disrupt their revenue streams.

Opponents of the legislation call it “the end of the Internet as we know it” and claim it “would officially bring Internet censorship to the U.S. as a matter of law.”

I support legal protection of intellectual property. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't – I've collected decades of paychecks based on my generation of intellectual property for various companies. I believe that copyright, trademark, and patent regulations generally do more good than harm.

But SOPA/PIPA is bad law. It goes much too far. It gives government too much power to harm businesses and people before their culpability has been legally established. It criminalizes behavior that benefits the very enterprises the legislation has been drafted to support.

CNET's Molly Wood provides this explanation of the legislation's implications:

SOPA would allow rights-holders to get court orders to take down Web sites or blacklist entire domains based on accusations of infringement. The "infringements" themselves can constitute a single link on a single page of a site, or even an accusation that the site is taking steps to "avoid confirming a high probability" of infringement. Let me translate: if someone, anyone, who holds a copyright or trademark on anything, thinks you're deliberately not doing anything about something they consider infringement, they can get your site taken offline and there's virtually nothing you can do to stop them. What?

There's more, and the "more" is even more insidious. The bill would also allow a rights-holder to send an infringement notice to an ad network like Google or a payment processor like Mastercard or Visa. In that case, with zero legal proof of infringement, the ad networks or payment processors would have five days to stop doing business with the accused site--an accuser can kill the alleged infringer's business, with, again, no proof or legal recourse.

CNET's Larry Downes has written a detailed and objective report on the legislation: If you're inspired to read more, click here. Ars technica's take is here.

The good folks at fightforthefuture.org have set up a Web service that helps you write your Congressional representatives about the bill. If, like me, you'd like to do your part to torpedo the legislation, click here (there's an informative video, too). Or sign the We the People petition at whitehouse.gov by clicking here.

Web recommendation: The good folks at Journalism.org – the Pew Research Center's project for excellence in journalism – have completed a study of how tablet computers have changed the way people read the news. Among the report's findings are demographic details about the people who use tablets. Pew concludes that tablet users are better educated, more likely to be employed, and more wealthy than non-users. Is this information relevant to developers of tablet apps? Sure – it's always good to know more about your target users. The report is fascinating. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He once met Salman Rushdie.