First POST: Putin and Protests

• President Vladimir Putin launched his reelection website yesterday and encouraged Russians to submit suggestions. The site soon was overrun by a barrage of negative comments, before those in turn were lost in a flood of positive comments from Putin supporters, the New York Times reported:
  

  But already, chatter about the calls for Mr. Putin’s resignation had taken off, and a blogger discovered a way to access comments that had been submitted but not published. Mr. Putin’s press secretary was forced to respond on the issue, saying during an afternoon interview with the online news channel Dozhd that the site’s moderators were removing only those suggestions that contained obscene language. He also said the flood of suggestions had frozen the site.

• Following the "For the Dogs" ad yesterday, the Gingrich campaign has released a new web ad linking Mitt Romney and John Kerry because they both speak French. Previously, a Democratic group had aired an anti-Romney ad featuring Romney speaking French. In Ad Age, Simon Dumenco argues that the ads critical of Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital channel the Occupy movement's message.

• Google takes a look at the searches for the Republican candidates in South Carolina. Nationwide, users yesterday were searching for "marines urinating on taliban" and "bain capital."

• Reps. Darrell Issa and Ron Wyden plan to introduce a Stop Online Piracy Act alternative when the House returns to session next week. Meanwhile, SOPA backer Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is in some hot water over his choice to not attribute the photography artist behind his background image on his website. The worst part? It’s a CC licensed image, meaning all he had to do was provide attribution. In an interview with Reuters, Smith vowed to press on with the legislation. But the Texas Tribune notes that companies that have received economic incentives to create jobs in Texas oppose the bill, such as Facebook, eBay and Rackspace. Demand Progress is encouraging its supporters to urge Wikipedia to organize a blackout to protest SOPA next week.

• The AP notes that Ron Paul frequently invokes SOPA in his campaign speeches:

  The heavily wired generation of younger voters also responds to Paul's warning that the federal government is poised to limit Internet privacy. He often rails against a bill pending in Congress called SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act, that Paul insists would allow the government to snoop on people's Internet searches. "They want to take over the Internet," Paul said to boos at a campaign stop in Iowa. "Can you imagine how much we're going to be curtailed in the spreading of our information if we lose the Internet?

• Salon.com reports that the conservatively affiliated Citizens United group is planning an Occupy Wall Street documentary titled "Mic Check: The Untold Story of the Occupy Movement.”

• CBS News has launched a social media tracker with TNS to "measure and evaluate the daily Twitter conversation about Republican presidential candidates. The tool...captures and analyzes people's real time opinions about the Republican contenders as expressed on Twitter."

• A federal judge has urged the government to do a more extensive search for e-mails that an F.B.I. agent involved in a terrorism investigation in Nigeria said she deleted from her computer because she was running out of storage space.

• Leaders of the House counter-terrorism subcommittee last month wrote in a letter to the Department of Homeland Security that they "believe it would be advantageous for DHS and the broader Intelligence Community to carefully parse the massive streams of data from various social media outlets to identify current or emerging threats to our homeland security."

• A Republican candidate for governor in Missouri has corrected his website to say he had majored in home economics, not economics.

• The New York Times reports that Chinese hackers have been using new malicious software to target smart cards used by government employees to access restricted servers and networks. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that a Pentagon pilot program that used National Security Agency data to protect the computer networks of defense contractors has had mixed results. At the same time, Google is renewing a push in China with a focus on business areas that are not directly affected by by the country's censorship, the Wall Street Journal reports.

• The Delhi High Court has ruled that Facebook India and Google India must install a way to remove objectionable content or face a China-style site block.

• The federal government is crowdsourcing better practices and ideas on how best to streamline their mobile technology usage.

• Rupert Murdoch called the governor of New York "chicken Cuomo" on Twitter, but praises Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

• Stephen Colbert revealed on his show last night that he is forming an exploratory committee to run for president in South Carolina and is handing over the reigns of his Super PAC to Jon Stewart. A recent poll put him just slightly ahead of Jon Huntsman in South Carolina.

• A full court martial is recommended for Wikileaks suspect Bradley Manning.

• The Texas Tribune notes that Rick Perry's son Griffin Perry has been making a name for himself on Twitter.

• In response to what has been reported as an attack on credit card information originating in Saudi Arabia, the BBC reports, an Israeli hacker retaliated with a hack of Saudi credit card information. The Israeli government warned its citizens "not to act as vigilantes."

• North Korea's main newspaper launches an English-language website, the Korea Times reported.

• The European Commission has established a framework for a more cohesive digital single market with the goal of doubling the volume of e-commerce by 2015.

• The German President Christian Wulff continues to face questions over his handling of a scandal involving a questionable home loan and his attempts to interfere with media coverage about it. While he had promised in a TV interview last week to release all the questions he had received from journalists from various newspapers online with his answers, this week his lawyer said that would not be possible since the newspapers would have to give their permission first, which many have since done. One newspaper, Die Welt, has now gone ahead and itself published online the questions it posed with what it called the paltry and unsatisfying answers it received (in German). Many Germans have been mocking Wulff online by coining a new verb to describe his mishandling of the situation: "wulffen."

• A German conservative member of parliament and president of an organization representing German expellees from Eastern Europe has received unwelcome attention for unwittingly accepting a Facebook friend request from the press secretary of the right-wing nationalist NPD party. (in German)

• The German government urged Internet users in the country to check their DNS configuration on a special new website after a virus had previously infected 33,000 computers and had the capacity to reroute them into a fake DNS system. Even though the FBI and European authorities arrested the operators of the fake system in November, they had left it running, but now plan to shut it down in March, meaning any remaining infected computers could lose their Internet connection.

With Miranda Neubauer and Raphael Majma