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AP – Facebook is partnering with Washington state to combat a type of spam called “clickjacking” that is plaguing the social networking site, company and state officials announced Thursday.

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Reuters – A New Zealand court granted bail on Thursday to two associates of the founder of online file-sharing website Megaupload, accused of being involved in a scheme that allegedly made more than $175 million from Internet piracy and illegal file sharing.

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Reuters – Lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked Google Inc on Thursday to provide answers about recent changes to the search engine’s privacy policy.

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Reuters – CNN may lag behind most of its competitors in the television ratings department, but digital is another story.

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AP – Poland on Thursday signed an international copyright agreement, sparking more demonstrations by Internet users who have protested for days over fear it will lead to online censorship.

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Mashable – SOPA and PIPA are stalled (or dead) in the halls of the U.S. Congress. Yet, there may be a bigger, perhaps more dangerous threat to Internet freedoms on the way, called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. At least that’s how U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R. – Calif., sees it, telling an audience, “As a member of Congress, it’s more dangerous than SOPA. It’s not coming to me for a vote. It purports that it does not change existing laws. But once implemented, it creates a whole new enforcement system and will virtually tie the hands of Congress to undo it.”

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AP – The founder of Wikipedia hailed the online encyclopedia’s role in helping halt U.S. legislation aimed at cracking down on Internet piracy, saying the proposed bills needed to be stopped because they were flawed.

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Reuters – Netflix Inc won back Wall Street’s affections on Thursday after adding more U.S. subscribers than expected in the fourth quarter, a rebound that prompted analyst upgrades and the company’s biggest one-day stock jump in two years.

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AP – Israel is often referred to as “Startup Nation,” thanks to its long history of high-tech breakthroughs produced by scrappy little companies. But in one critical area, the speed of Internet connections, Israel has fallen behind other tech-savvy countries.

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Mashable – The 2012 Republican primary’s first vote was not cast in New Hampshire, as most Americans would assume. An Okaloosa County, Fla., resident living in Thailand got that privilege in December, thanks to a new technology called LiveBallot.
LiveBallot, a new platform for accessing ballots built on the Windows Azure operating system, allows American citizens living abroad to access their official ballots from the cloud, 45 days before a state primary or national election.

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Mashable – When you die, your social media presence lives on. But should it? Lawmakers and lawyers are tackling the question of what should happen to your digital life after death.
The Uniform Law Commission recently approved a study committee on fiduciary power and authority to access digital property and online accounts during incapacity and after death. Uniform laws are created when there is little current legislation for states to follow.

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Reuters – Online recruitment firm Monster Worldwide Inc forecast a weak start to the year and said it will cut jobs, as it does not expect the global job market to improve drastically in the near term.

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Mashable – We haven’t heard much from Ferris Bueller since 1986, but apparently he’s taken some time off to do a Super Bowl ad.

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Appolicious – There are hundreds if not thousands of high-quality music applications available to download on smartphones and tablet devices. From apps that stream Internet radio stations, to music detection and discovery tools, to concert video services, there is no shortage of apps that rock (and appeal to other genres). Also note that while some apps aren’t built specifically for iPads and Android tablets, they run perfectly well on the larger screens and if anything have better audio capabilities.

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Reuters – Google Inc, which revolutionized Internet searches with an easy-to-use website, has itself become an increasingly tricky business to grasp.

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Reuters – David Ko, Zynga’s chief mobile officer, has one of the most important and pressure-filled at the online gaming company — he’s charged with figuring out ways to get people to play Zynga’s games on tablets and smartphones.

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AP – An untold number of U.K. residents may have unwittingly broadcast their numbers to sites across the Web while browsing the Internet with their cellphones during the past two weeks.

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Mashable – European Internet users may be getting better control over information posted online, thanks to some proposed sweeping reforms lawmakers proposed Wednesday designed to protect digital privacy.
The suggested law calls for a “right to be forgotten” and a “right to data portability.” The former would require Internet companies such as Facebook and Google to completely wipe all of a user’s info from their servers if such a request was made. The latter demands users be allowed to easily transfer data from one online service to another, a currently difficult task.

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Mashable – Megan Berry is Senior Marketing Manager for Klout, the standard for online influence. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and Brazen Careerist. You can follow her on Twitter as @meganberry.
Building a community around your startup can be one of the cheapest ways to create momentum for your product. A community is much more than a one-time marketing campaign, and can help you throughout your company’s life cycle if you take the time to grow it right.

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Mashable – I’m a woman who is too young to remember the Reagan administration, but Google has me pegged as a middle-aged man.
Given my habit of browsing technology websites, the search engine probably placed me in my father’s demographic a long time ago. But it didn’t break the news to me until Tuesday, when it rolled out a revamped privacy policy that drew my attention to my account.

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Reuters – Europe proposed strict new data privacy rules on Wednesday, putting greater responsibility on companies such as Facebook to protect users’ information, and threatening those who breach the code with hefty fines.

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Mashable – Authorities appear to be giving no quarter in their case against file-sharing website Megaupload. A New Zealand judge denied bail to the website’s founder, Kim Dotcom, on Wednesday. Authorities in the Netherlands also arrested a fifth suspect in the case.

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AP – The European Commission proposed sweeping reforms Wednesday to protect the confidentiality of personal data online including a “right to be forgotten,” which would let people have information about themselves deleted if there was no legitimate reason to retain it.

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REBEL Travel Corporation Enhances Its Suite of Comprehensive Content … Hotel News Resource … announced today that it has expanded its signature hospitality solutions suite, PropertyVIEW, to include interfaces for better optimized and enhanced listings on many top local search sites, maps, and mobile apps including Yahoo Local, Citysearch, … and more »

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Mashable – Politicians have been deploying digital tools in new and innovative ways this election season, and the media outlets and journalists covering them have been doing the same. Throughout the 2012 battle for the White House, media outlets have been designing web apps dedicated to political coverage, while individual journalists have been tweeting and uploading photos nonstop.
These digital media innovations are giving readers unprecedented access to the election. Many of these online features are interactive, contributing to a two-way conversation between journalists and readers and changing the political journalism ballgame.

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AP – Two years ago, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom joked in emails with his new neighbors in New Zealand about his bad-boy reputation before telling them his criminal past was behind him and he was coming to the country with good intentions.

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Mashable – Twitter announced languages read right to left would be coming to the Twitter Translation Center, beginning with Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu. Twitter will become fully available in those four languages later this spring, once volunteer translators have completed their work.
The company said in a blog post Wednesday it has made sure tweets and hashtags will work in right-to-left languages. It also says it’s “made changes behind the scenes to give right-to-left language speakers a localized user experience,” although it doesn’t specify the changes.

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Reuters – Kim Dotcom, the founder of file-sharing site Megaupload.com who faces a lengthy jail term in the United States if convicted of racketeering, money laundering and Internet piracy, seems to have a mischievous sense of humor.

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Reuters – Efforts by the United States to extradite the mastermind of an alleged Internet piracy scheme from New Zealand to face copyright infringement and money laundering charges are likely to be long and complex.

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AP – Yahoo slipped further behind in the online advertising race during the fourth quarter as the Internet company entered the fourth year of a revenue slump.

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Reuters – A New Zealand judge ordered the founder of online file-sharing site Megaupload.com to be held in custody for another month Wednesday, saying the suspected Internet pirate posed a significant flight risk.

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AP – Google announced a plan Tuesday to link user data across its email, video, social-networking and other services that it says will create a “beautifully simple and intuitive” user experience. But critics raised privacy concerns like those that helped kill the search giant’s Buzz social networking service.

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Reuters – Yahoo Inc Chief Executive Scott Thompson said reviving the company’s flagging display advertising business was his “highest priority,” even as he crafts a broader plan to bring the struggling Internet company back to fighting form.

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ABC News’ Diane Sawyer talks with Sheryl Sandberg about the site’s newest tool.

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Reuters – Google Inc plans to unify its privacy policy and terms of service across its online offerings, including its flagship search, Gmail and Google+ products, to make them easier to use, but the move could attract greater scrutiny from anti-trust regulators.

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Reuters – Courreges, the futuristic fashion brand of the 1960s, is poised to bring its vinyl boots and A-line mini-dresses back into vogue, relaunching the French name online.

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Reuters – Not too long ago, Web coding was the rarified realm of computer geeks, but a new crop of entrepreneurs is making this valuable computer skill available to just about anyone with an inclination to learn.

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AP – Hundreds of people waged a street protest in Warsaw on Tuesday to protest the government’s plan to sign an international copyright treaty, while several popular websites also shut down for an hour over the issue.

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Appolicious – If you haven’t turned your Facebook profile over to the new Timeline setup the company has been slowly rolling out for about a month, your time has just about run out. Timeline is coming to your profile, be it online or on your iPhone or iPad.

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Mashable – The English version of Wikipedia currently boasts over 3,854,000 articles over more than 25 million pages. That’s an awful lot of content to navigate when you’re trying to find something specific.
Maybe you visit Wikipedia several times per week, but how much do you know about the world’s leading online encyclopedia? We spent some time exploring the site in order to offer you 10 useful tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the site. Learn how to change the way the main page looks, how to use special characters in searches, how to view page stats, etc.

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AP – iTunes’ Official Music Charts for the week ending Jan. 23, 2012:

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Mashable – The nominations for the 84th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning, and Twitter and other social networks are already reacting to the news and the surprising new Oscar nominees.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is aiming to tightly integrate the whole affair within the social and digital world. Today, Oscar.com is kicking off the first of five live digital specials looking at the awards and the social commentary taking place online.

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Mashable – The nominations for the 84th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning, and Twitter and other social networks are already reacting to the news and the surprising new Oscar nominees.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is aiming to tightly integrate the whole affair within the social and digital world. Today, Oscar.com is kicking off the first of five live digital specials looking at the awards and the social commentary taking place online.

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Mashable – If you were a Super Bowl viewer in 1984 who left the room during Apple’s famous “1984″ ad introducing the Mac, you would have soon discovered you made a massive mistake.
In those days before YouTube, if you missed a Super Bowl ad, you really missed it. That was especially true for Apple’s ad, which ran only once. In 2012, of course, it’s a different story. With about two weeks before the big game, some ads are already available online. As for the rest? Try not seeing them after the game.

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Mashable – If you were a Super Bowl viewer in 1984 who left the room during Apple’s famous “1984″ ad introducing the Mac, you would have soon discovered you made a massive mistake.
In those days before YouTube, if you missed a Super Bowl ad, you really missed it. That was especially true for Apple’s ad, which ran only once. In 2012, of course, it’s a different story. With about two weeks before the big game, some ads are already available online. As for the rest? Try not seeing them after the game.

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Appolicious – For all the effort Apple expends in regulating its iTunes App Store, it seems that questionable, malicious or copyright-infringing apps make it through to consumers a lot more often than one might think. The latest app to appear in the App Store that didn’t belong is a copy of the popular Camera+ app.

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Reuters – Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s online profile was larger-than-life, with fast women, faster cars and chartered planes, yet he lived like a virtual recluse in a sprawling, manicured estate on the outskirts of New Zealand’s biggest city, Auckland.

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Appolicious – It may be the middle of the school year, but this week’s top iPhone apps will get you back in the learning spirit thanks to some apps that are offering online courses and inexpensive digital textbooks. For those who checked out of school long ago, there are some good apps to help you relax and keep yourself entertained, too.

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Reuters – Loss-making European publisher Mecom is to slash costs, review assets and charge customers to access content online as it fights to revive a business hit by falling advertising sales and changing readership trends.

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Reuters – Playtech, the world’s biggest provider of online gaming software, is holding talks with a number of potential partners in the United States as it gears up for the possible re-opening of the potentially lucrative market, CEO Mor Weizer said.

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