There’s a scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves’ character, Neo, gets the tar beaten out of him by Agent Smith. After an extremely intense fight that has him narrowly avoiding death by jumping out of the way of an oncoming train, he is tired and staggering away. The train stops and a refreshed Agent Smith steps off, ready to fight again. This is much like the fight that the people of the internet are faced with right now. Fighting SOPA in January, 2012, took a monumental effort that called in the combined efforts of juggernaut websites like Wikipedia and Reddit to defeat. It was a long, sustained battle…

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act has not drawn the same uproar that its SOPA predecessor received last year. It’s not because it’s any less dangerous to the privacy of those using the internet. It’s not that there’s any less information about it. CISPA is on a path to fly through Congress and onto the President’s desk without much of a cry because the US government learned from their mistakes the first time. This time, they did the two things they do best. The spun it and then they bargained their way into favor with the larger entities of the internet to get them to let this one slide…

Students, teachers, and researchers around the globe have used Wikipedia to extend their understanding on just about every subject of general interest known to humans. It isn’t just the academic types. Most people refer to Wikipedia on a regular basis to answer questions, in large part due to the fact that Google loves the site more than any other on the internet. It gets presented as the top result to more queries than anything else, even Google itself. Just how big is it? Today, it has over 25 million articles. Try to fit that into an encyclopedia. This and dozens of other amazing facts are available…

According to Wikipedia, “An unidentified flying object, often abbreviated UFO or U.F.O., is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object.” While many associate them with alien spacecraft or inter-dimensional vehicles, the majority of the ones that pop up on YouTube are either hoaxes or explainable events. Every month, we document the best videos from the previous month by posting the compilations by AnonymousFO. Somehow we missed the “year in review” video that they released last month, so to correct that, here’s what 2012 looked…

Rumors are rumors and Techcrunch has been known to push them forward without base or backing. With that said, the latest Reddit rumor that they are raising money would make sense. But we’re hearing now from a source that, a little over a year later, Reddit is raising money. And the company’s valuation has jumped to $400 million. If it’s true, this could mark the beginning of the end for the “front page of the internet”. The site is the most powerful private site in the world that really doesn’t make any money (and don’t point to Wikipedia as that would be ignorant to think they’re not making money)….

Technology has made it easier for our generation to stay connected to each other in a variety of ways. We can give thanks to the rise of social media which allows us to stay in contact with all of our friends at the click of a button. Spotify is a good example of a company that uses social media to its advantage to allow you to see the music that you’re friends are listening to in real-time. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="96" caption="(Photo credit: Wikipedia)"][/caption] In an effort to connect music and love, Spotify recently partnered with two match-making application companies…

It took Wikipedia less than a decade to take down its traditional predecessor, the Encyclopædia Britannica, a series that has helped scholars and students for nearly two and a half decades. While most consider this to be a natural transition with the rise of the digital age, some will always question whether crowdsourcing human knowledge is preferable to leaving it up to the experts. Regardless, it’s here and it’s the best resource available for the majority of subjects. With nearly 4 million articles written in English alone, it has a tremendous advantage in size. Many say that the scrutiny…

The Tea Party movement was intended for Americans to harken to the revolutions of the past when tyranny and taxation reigned over the colonies. The #OccupyWallStreet movement drew awareness to the tremendous gaps between the “haves” and the “have nots” with a call for a more sensible distribution of wealth. Both have supporters and detractors of equal passions. Neither was as purely American as what the SOPA/PIPA/OPEN blackouts planned for tomorrow represent. There is distinct gray surrounding the Tea Party and #OWS. Both galvanized parts of the population but the political questions being…

It became one of the top memes of 2010. And just like that, it’s gone. Wikipedia announced this morning that they had reached their goal of $16,000,000 to keep the site ad-free, more than double their results from a year ago. Perhaps more impressive is that they did it in less time than any of their previous fundraisers. As the world’s 5th largest website, Wikipedia is a darling for the search engines as the closest thing the Internet can produce to an Encyclopedia. Because of the sheer volume of accumulated world knowledge, the crowdsourced junction of data has become the “go to” for everyone from…

Depending on your level of geekism, editing Wikipedia is a lot of fun, and to those that do, the temptation to slip something funny under the radar can be great. As such, this news should not disinterest you: Wikipedia has announced that they’ll be unlocking all sorts of pages traditionally the targets of malicious edits. Instead, it will focus on severely tightening its editorial control in what it calls Pending Changes. Admittedly, I once changed the president of Burma to ‘M. Bison’, but that change lasted all of about 20 minutes. This new policy isn’t exactly trained on the casual prankster;…