tom moody

In March of 2010, Facebook was being described as having 400 million users.

By July of 2010 that year the number had increased to 500 million, according one expert named Mark Zuckerberg.

By July of 2011 the LA Times was reporting that the company had 600 million active monthly users. (Source: Facebook)

These are some nice round numbers!

Today, six months after the last count, an infographic appears claiming the number is now 800 million users! "One in ten humans on the planet" now use Facebook, we're told.

Everyone loves a good story. Also, the price of housing only goes up.

via Rising Tensions

Tomorrow, Thurs, Jan 12 at 7 pm Eastern, 4 pm Pacific I'll be giving an artist talk in connection with the "10,000 Pixels" show.

It's taking place on Art Micro-Patronage's "talks" page via an embedded Ustream channel.

Ideally at the announced time my face will show up in the video screen and I'll start talking. You comment/ask questions by typing into the grey box beneath the video. You can also communicate via Twitter using the hashtag #AMPatronage

Let's see how this goes.

Naked Capitalism has a good explanation of what's at stake in the these bad Internet blacklist bills, SOPA and PIPA, which the movie industry is trying to ram through Congress. Yves Smith quotes Techdirt:

SOPA... contains a crazy scary clause that's going to make it crazy easy to cut off websites with no recourse whatsoever. And this part isn’t just limited to payment providers/ad networks — but to service providers, search engines and domain registrars/registries as well. Yes. Search engines. So you can send a notice to a search engine, and if they want to keep their immunity, they have to take the actions in either Section 102(c)(2) or 103(c)(2), which are basically all of the "cut 'em off, block 'em" remedies. That’s crazy. This basically encourages search engines to disappear sites upon a single notice. It encourages domain registries to kill domains based on notices. With no recourse at all, because the providers have broad immunity.

This will do little to deter copying of easily-copyable entertainment but will be used as a political weapon. If, say, a polluting company doesn't like something an environmentalist website is saying, one email to that website's host complaining of "copyright infringement" -- no matter whether the charge is valid -- and that site is gone from the Web. All of us who enjoy a diverse and open internet need to make calls and send letters to Congress to make sure these terrible laws don't get passed.

PIPA, the Senate version of the bill, comes up for a full Senate vote on Jan. 24.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some suggestions for how we can stop the bills. Please spread the word.