First POST: Backtracking

• Nancy Pelosi released a web ad supposedly attacking Stephen Colbert that is aimed at getting support for the DISCLOSE act, which was reintroduced into the House yesterday to counter secret, unlimited campaign donations. In the pseudo-attack ad, complete with unsettling, black-and-white images of Colbert, Pelosi says, "Stephen Colbert used to be my friend ... But since the day he started his super PAC, taking secret money from special interests, he's been out of control, even using his super PAC to attack my friend Newt Gingrich ... I'm Nancy Pelosi, and I support this ad because Americans deserve a better tomorrow, today." The ad has received close to 13,600 views. It links to the Facebook page www.facebook.com/StopColbert, which has over 2,750 likes.

• Mark Zuckerberg inadvertently appeared to "like" Mitt Romney because of a Facebook design flaw.

• The Romney campaign is inviting donors to give money in order to "join Mitt on the campaign trail."

• Zach Seward from the Wall Street Journal collected together the 29 songs that the Obama campaign has announced as its official campaign soundtrack. Yesterday morning, the songs — enclosed in a Spotify playlist — began making the rounds.

• The official Obama Tumblr created a gif of the president's reaction to a science fair experiment at the White House that had been going viral, with the comment "Yeah, we had to."

• The FBI file on Steve Jobs was released yesterday.

• Apple Stores, such as the new one in New York City's Grand Central Station, received 250,000 signatures from activists that had been collected online against working conditions at the company's factories in Asia.

• Foxconn, the main company that recently came under fire for poor working conditions in factories that supplied Apple with products, has been hacked by a group called Swagg Security. The leaks included personal emails from CEO Terry Gou and employee email accounts and passwords.

• Bradley Manning’s arraignment has been scheduled for February 23rd.

• Republican Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra has taken down a very-offensive-to-many Super Bowl ad and replaced it with an ad called “Spend”. A similarly incendiary microsite supporting the ad has been taken down; accessing the URL now redirects visitors to Hoekstra’s campaign site.

• A Muslim convert from Brooklyn has pleaded guilty to creating a website that he used to post online threats against the creators of South Park.

• The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed suit against the FTC over Google’s new privacy policy. EPIC argues that a prior agreement between Google and the FTC allows the FTC to prevent their proposed privacy update.

• David Carr suggests that even though the Occupy movement may have lost his tangible presence in many cities, its ideas are gaining currency.

• The CEO of J.C. Penney went on CBS News yesterday morning to once again speak out in favor of Ellen DeGeneres as a spokeswoman for the company. The talk show host herself had directly addressed a campaign against her on her show. A group called One Million Moms seeks to have J.C. Penney end its relationship with her because she is lesbian. On her show, she said, "For those of you who are just tuning in for the first time, it's true. I'm gay. I hope you were sitting down," and thanked J.C. Penny for standing by her.

• The New York Times reported on how the debate over bills to regulate security of privately owned critical infrastructure that is often controlled by Internet-connected systems has been shaped by the controversy over SOPA and PIPA.

• Representative Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) announced on Facebook and YouTube that she would not be seeking another term.

• A man has created an online petition at Change.org demanding the return of paper savings bonds. So far only 128 people have signed.

• BP has won the exclusion of several potentially damaging e-mails from an upcoming trial related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

• Reporters in Pasadena can no longer hear police calls after the department switched to an encrypted radio signal.

• Poynter explored the differences between the news websites users said they turned to for political news in a Pew study compared to websites users actually visit according to comScore. CNN.com is in the first group and HuffPost Politics is in the second.

• The social network Path apologized for automatically uploading contacts from users' phone address books.

• A new Google program pays users who allow their usage of Chrome and the websites they visit to be tracked and monitored for research purposes.

• In a Washington Post op-ed, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Board of Trustee Kat Walsh defend their efforts to oppose recent anti-piracy legislation:
  

  We are not interested in becoming full-time advocates; protests like the Wikipedia blackout are a last resort. Our core mission is to make knowledge freely available, and making the Web site inaccessible interrupts what we exist to do. The one-day blackout, though, was just a speed bump. Breaking the legal infrastructure that makes it possible to operate Wikipedia, and sites like ours, would be a much greater disruption.Two weeks ago we recognized a threat to that infrastructure and did something we’ve never done before: We acknowledged that our existence is itself political, and we spoke up to protect it. It turned out to be the largest Internet protest ever

• At Techdirt, Mike Masnick criticizes at length a New York Times op-ed by the head of the RIAA.

• After six days, the Boston Police have restored their primary website after it was hacked by individuals upset with the department's treatment of local occupiers.

• The Columbia Journalism School's New York World speaks with the authors of a new book that is highly critical of the NYPD's Comstat system.

• There's already Pet Owners for Obama, but could Bo be an election winner too? Animal Planet is launching a year-long "Decision 2012" campaign to have Americans elect their favorite pet, beginning on President's Day — dogs, cats or independents:

  Beginning February 20, Animal Planet wants you to visit animalplanet.com/decision2012 and nominate your pets to become breed representatives for their prospective parties in the species primaries. As the election gets underway, these representatives will have their qualifications questioned in the categories of cuteness, intelligence, agility, animal welfare and more. In this campaign, the videos and photos users upload to the site will serve as the propaganda to persuade Americans where to cast their votes in the search for the premiere pet.

• The Minnesota Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a case in which a student at the University of Minnesota was disciplined for Facebook comments that had upset donors.

• A Romanian man has been indicted for hacking into NASA computers.

• Eardex, a Cologne start-up, seeks to create a database of the cost of living worldwide.

• Fast Company takes a look at a new Interpol cybercrime innovation center scheduled to open in Singapore in 2014.

• The software workarounds required for unfiltered use of internet access in Iran have recently been failing, showing that the Iranian government has increased the effectiveness of its control over the Internet.

• Islamists are calling for the execution of a Saudi blogger who tweeted about the Prophet Muhammad.

• Chinese Internet users have been using the micro-blog Weibo to speak out against their government’s decision to veto the recent UN resolution denouncing the Syrian government.

• Malta is considering a nationwide wifi-network.

• A British blogger who had anonymously written about crime issues plans to sue the Times of London for hacking into his e-mail to expose his identity. At Britain's Leveson media inquiry, the man behind the political blog Guido Fawkes said he had been using foreign web hosts, including the United States, to avoid legal action against news and documents he published, such as a Merrill Lynch memo about a bank bailout.

• Regional cybercrime offices have been launched across the United Kingdom.

• The Brazilian government has been demanding that web hosting firms there shut down domain names that it deems inappropriate for references to pornography, according to Techdirt.

• The German Family Minister called for schools to educate on the risks of social networks beginning in fifth grade.

With Raphael Majma