Another day, another threat to internet freedom. According to International Business Times, beloved Texas Representative Lamar Smith is the author of a new bill that includes extreme surveillance provisions, and a name that will make opponents sound like criminals: H.R. 1981 (bump that last digit up three times for a more fitting title), or the 'Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.'

The new name has outraged many opponents of SOPA and other bills that could bring more government control to the internet, like PIPA and ACTA. It's hard to imagine the whole world turning out against a bill with the words 'protect' and 'children' in the title, regardless of the actual contents of the bill.

In the words of Business Insider's David Seaman, it's “just a B.S. name so that politicians in the House and Senate are strong-armed into voting for it, even though it contains utterly insane 1984-style Big Brother surveillance provisions.” Ouch.

Read the full story HERE!

In Syria's cyberwar, the regime's supporters have deployed a new weapon against opposition activists -- computer viruses that spy on them, according to an IT specialist from a Syrian opposition group and a former international aid worker whose computer was infected.

A U.S.-based antivirus software maker, which analyzed one of the viruses at CNN's request, said that it was recently written for a specific cyberespionage campaign and that it passes information it robs from computers to a server at a government-owned telecommunications company in Syria.

Supporters of dictator Bashar al-Assad first steal the identities of opposition activists, then impersonate them in online chats, said software engineer Dlshad Othman. They gain the trust of other users, pass out Trojan horse viruses and encourage people to open them.

CNN has the details HERE!

The authorities said Friday they have seized $50 million in Megaupload-related assets and added additional charges in one of the United States' largest criminal copyright infringement prosecutions.

Megaupload, the popular file-sharing site, was shuttered last month and its top officials indicted by the Justice Department, just days after online protests scuttled a Congressional proposal to make changes to the internet to reduce online copyright infringement.

Seven individuals connected to the Hong Kong-based site were indicted on a variety of charges, including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Five of the members of what the authorities called a five-year-old "racketeering conspiracy" have been arrested in New Zealand, where they are being held pending extradition to the United States.

Read the full story HERE!

Litigation between IBM and disgraced UNIX vendor SCO is set to be reactivated, Groklaw reports. The lawsuits, which were subject to an automatic stay imposed by the bankruptcy court, will now go forward and finally be brought to a close.

SCO is infamous for launching a misguided legal assault on the Linux operating system. The company claimed that IBM misappropriated code from UNIX and integrated it into the open source Linux kernel. SCO never managed to support this claim with evidence and the company's own internal code audits suggest that the allegation is baseless. The real roadblock that SCO faced, however, was the fact that they don't even own the UNIX copyrights.

The IBM litigation was put on hold pending the outcome of a dispute over the ownership of the System V UNIX copyrights between SCO and Novell, the rightful owner.

Read the Groklaw report HERE!