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The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee approved making illegal streaming of commercial videos and television shows over the Internet a felony in most cases and will now go to the full Senate for consideration, according toThe Hollywood Reporter. The Commercial Felony Streaming Act (S. 978) eliminates the loophole that differentiates illegal streaming from illegal downloading, considering both as “financially devastating for the industry.” “Stealing is stealing, regardless of the means in which the product is being received,” says IFTA President Jean Prewitt....

Democratic Senators Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin are pushing to have the crypto-currencyBitcoinoutlawed,Reuters reports. The pair has written to Attorney General Eric Holder and the DEA’s Michele Leonhart pointing out the connection between Silk Road, a site for trading illicit drugs, and the hard-to-trace Bitcoin. Though the Senators seem more interested in closing Silk Road itself, the letter also mentions Tor, the anonymizing network. Both of these technologies, with legitimate uses as well as illegitimate, could come under heavy fire from the U....

I don’t know about you, but the term ‘cyberspace’ brings to mind a time when AOL stuffed free trial CDs into PC magazine sleeves and Netscape Navigator was pretty neat, really. The U.S. government today outlined its strategy for ‘cyberspace’. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising. Governments are meant to be, of course, twenty years behind everyone else. But despite the nostalgic flashback, its interesting to note that the government’s strategy is based on principles of freedom of expression, innovation and economic growth, according toSecretary of State Hillary Clinton....

TheDubai School of Governmenthavs released its second issue on Arab Social Media, shedding light on some much needed statistics when it comes to Arab users on Twitter. The latest study looks at the impact of Facebook and Twitter on civil movements in the region. Egypt’s penetration level on Facebook is very low, with only just 5% of the population on Facebook, which adds an interesting dimension to the debated role of Facebook in the country’s uprising....

Dubai based ads network Dubizzle.com expands to 14 countries in the Middle East in a rapid expansion they’ve been pursuing for the past 4 months, which took them from covering the Arab gulf states to 14 countries throughout the region in 3 languages. The very popular classified network added French to their list of languages to accommodate the cultural variance in North Western Arab countries (aka Maghreb Al Arabi) where French is the second language to most, and first language to some....