Ukrainian authorities have shut down a popular file-sharing website saying it violates copyright laws, officials said Wednesday. Interior Ministry Spokesman Volodymyr Polishchuk said that Ex.ua was closed Tuesday after complaints from Microsoft, Adobe and other companies. The ministry said it has confiscated 200 servers that were used...

A botnet capable of delivering almost four billion spam messages per day has been confirmed resurrected—more than four months after Microsoft celebrated its untimely demise. Researchers with Kaspersky Lab reported on Tuesday that Kelihos, a peer-to-peer botnet that also goes by the name Hlux, continues to spew spam in a variety of languages....

The Swedish Supreme Court will not hear an appeal from the founders of The Pirate Bay against prison sentences and fines imposed by the Swedish Court of Appeals, the court said on Wednesday. Over a year ago, the Court of Appeals sentenced Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundström to 10 months, eight months and four months of jail...

The founder of online file-sharing websiteMegaupload argued in a New Zealand court Monday he was innocent on charges of internet piracy and money laundering and said authorities were trying to portray the blackest picture of him. Kim Dotcom, a German national, also known as Kim Schmitz, argued for bail saying through his lawyer that...

Yielding to strong opposition from the high tech community, Senate and House leaders said Friday they will put off further action on legislation to combat online piracy. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was postponing a test vote set for Tuesday “in light of recent events.” Those events included a petition drive...

Hope you’re not shy, because there’s a good chance you’re being watched by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. According to a government document, the DHS has been monitoring social media as well as select blogs and message boards for more than a year. The “privacy compliance review” obtained by Reuters comes from last November, but apparently this surveillance has been ongoing since at least June 2010. According to the document, it’s designed to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture” with “data published via social media sites [used] solely to provide more accurate situational awareness, a more complete common operating pictures, and more timely information for decision makers.” In other words, the DHS is using the Internet to find out what’s happening, same as everyone else, but it certainly sounds more disturbing. The review explains that all information monitored is “publicly available,” with whatever’s harvested kept “for no more than five years.” Among the sites monitored are Facebook and MySpace, as well as “more than a dozen” sites that monitor Twitter activity and aggregate tweets and conversations on the micro-blogging service. Photo and video sharing sites are also present, with YouTube, Flickr and — even more surprisingly — Hulu all being monitored. Perhaps that last one’s just be an excuse to catch up on episodes of House. Outside of social media, websites monitored include the New York Times Lede Blog, the Drudge Report and Huffington Post, as well as two Wired blogs: Threat Level and Danger Room. WikiLeaks, Cryptome, JihadWatch and Informed Comment also make appearances on the list. The report sounds more worrisome in abstract than the details actually suggest; the idea of “big brother watching” is unsettling, but we already knew the government was doing this sort of thing, so is it really a surprise to learn it’s also paying attention to other parts of the publicly-available Internet, too?

A youth from the north was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of making online purchases to the tune of a few thousand shekels using credit-card information exposed on the Internet last week by a Saudi computer hacker.

According to police, an 18-year-old from a moshav near Tiberias, allegedly used four different credit card numbers to order a home cinema system, a Samsung Galaxy 2 cellular telephone and a tablet computer.

Northern District Fraud Division commander Superintendent Jihad Oueida said a complaint had been filed by Leumi Card after its security department had flagged down the orders coming in from several different card numbers that it knew had been exposed. According to Oueida, the youth has no criminal record “and comes from a totally normal family.”

Last week, a Saudi hacker succeeded in penetrating the One sports website and obtained, he claimed, personal details of several hundred thousand Israelis, along with, in some cases, their credit card numbers, and published them on the Internet for all to see.

Upon investigation, however, the credit card companies said that the files released by the hacker had contained the same information repeated several times. According to Isracard, only 14,000 numbers of active credit cards were exposed, and the companies succeeded in blocking them fairly quickly.

This past Thursday, 569 more credit card numbers, along with e-mail addresses and various passwords, were published online by a different hacker going by the nickname SRV.

Can you imagine a world without Google or Facebook? If plans to protest the potential passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) come to fruition, you won’t need to; those sites, along with many other well-known online destinations, will go temporarily offline as a taste of what we could expect from a post-SOPA Internet.

Companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Yahoo! and Wikipedia are said to be discussing a coordinated blackout of services to demonstrate the potential effect SOPA would have on the Internet, something already being called a “nuclear option” of protesting. The rumors surrounding the potential blackout were only strengthened by Markham Erickson, executive director of trade association NetCoalition, who told FoxNews that “a number of companies have had discussions about [blacking out services]” last week.

According to Erickson, the companies are well aware of how serious an act such a blackout would be:

This type of thing doesn’t happen because companies typically don’t want to put their users in that position. The difference is that these bills so fundamentally change the way the Internet works. People need to understand the effect this special-interest legislation will have on those who use the Internet.

The idea of an Internet blackout should seem familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to the debate so far. In addition to a blackout already carried out by Mozilla, hacking group Anonymous proposed the same thing a couple of weeks ago, suggesting that sites replace their front pages with a statement protesting SOPA. That suggestion itself came a week after Jimmy Wales had asked Wikipedia users about the possibility of blacking out that site in protest of the bill.

As a way of drawing attention to the topic, it’s something that will definitely work. Just Google alone going dark would cause havoc online, but the idea of it happening at the same time as Facebook, Twitter et al. follow suit seems almost unimaginable.

The question then becomes how to translate the inevitable confusion and outrage from those who don’t know what SOPA is into activism. The key, I assume, lies in the execution of the blackout: Will the sites that voluntarily go down be entirely unavailable or will they follow the Anonymous-proposed model of replacing the front page with a statement explaining what is going on, why and how users can best become involved in the discussion? If the sites do go entirely dark, is the hope that the resulting outrage will be enough to fuel news stories about the reason behind the decision? And that users will not transfer their frustration to the sites themselves, as opposed to the bill they’re protesting?

The fact that Facebook and Twitter are both said to be considering taking part in the blackout is simultaneously heartening and worrying. The former because, well, they’re standing up for what they collectively believe in — and that’s a good thing. But the latter because the lack of availability for social media on the proposed blackout day feels like it’s giving up the best chance to harness the frustration and energy people will feel about the temporary loss of the Internet as they know it, and a great possibility to focus and direct that energy into productive activism against SOPA. Then again, it may take losing Facebook and Twitter to really drive home how dramatically SOPA could affect the Internet.

All of this may come to nothing, of course. The companies may decide not to black out their sites and find other ways to protest SOPA. That could be for the best; collectively closing down the most trafficked sites on the Internet to prove a point will certainly garner a lot of attention, but the effects it’ll have beyond that (and the reactions it’ll cause as a result) are difficult to predict and could easily end up causing a backlash against the sites responsible at a time when they least want it. But still … just try to imagine an Internet without Google, Facebook or Yahoo. Even for a day. Almost makes you want it to happen, just to make people realize how reliant we are on the Internet as we know it now, doesn’t it?

Israeli credit card companies say hackers claiming to be Saudis disclosed credit card information of thousands of Israelis on the Internet.

The companies, however, disputed the hackers’ claims that 400,000 credit-card holders were affected. Isarel’s central bank put the number at 15,000.

Visa CAL company spokeswoman Sagit Ofir says she cannot confirm Saudi hackers were responsible.

The Ynet news website says the hackers called the cyber attack a “gift to the world for the New Year” that they hoped “would hurt the Zionist pocket.”

Ynet says the information was removed from an Israeli sports website shortly after it appeared.

Credit card companies say the compromised cards have been blocked to Internet purchases and will be replaced soon. It’s unclear how the information was compromised.

Meetings, travel, Le Web and pitches from countless startups have left me exhausted. I have hardly slept for nearly a week. I am tired and a little irritated and in need of a pick-me-up. An espresso shot isn’t enough. What I need is a conversation that would sharpen my senses dulled by repetitiveness of ideas and marginality of ambition.

And in the nick of time (pun intended), enter Nick D’Aloisio — founder and for now chief executive officer of a London-based company, Summly. (Download the app) On paper, it is yet another start-up with yet another iPhoneapp. Summly essentially looks at the content of a web page and creates a quick summary of that web page, then formats it nicely for the iPhone screen.

It is solving the problem that many others are trying to solve — how to make sense of the web overrun by factory-produced, SEO-optimized diahrrea of words. Making sense of Googlesearch results has become the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette. Finding information has regressed, even as the web as progressed at neck-snapping speed.

Except D’Aloisio turns out to be a 16-year-old kid from Wimbledon, England who drops phrases like “heuristics” and “natural language processing.” After hanging out with his friends, he heads home to read papers about machine learning. We are sitting in the reception hall of the moderately priced Motel One, a stone’s throw from Berlin’s main train station. The weather outside is miserable — cold, gray and wet. D’Aloisio, who woke up at 4 a.m. is bouncing with energy and is busy telling me his story and his dreams. The more I listen, the more I am swept up by his enthusiasm.

In my life I have met many smart people — Jeff Bezos, Andy Bechtolsheim, Larry Page, Andy Grove, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla and Bret Taylor. D’Aloisio belongs with them, I am convinced. Not because he has started the next hot company — who can predict what will be hot? But instead, he is a self-taught polymath, who is so adept at learning from reading, listening and observing. He is an old-fashioned technologist who was born this way.

Nick O’ Time

Let me share his story. Nick’s dad is an investment banker and his mother’s a lawyer. He grew up in Perth, Australia, where he fell in love with rugby and cricket. The clear, big night skies made stargazing a fun activity and before you know it, he was learning everything about stars and galaxies and black holes. He was not even 5. At age 7, his family moved to London. A year later, he annoyed his parents into buying him a MacBook Pro.

Why? He wanted to learn how to replicate videos he saw on television. He figured out iMovie, Final Cut Pro and some Autodeskprograms. Of course, he couldn’t recreate the commercials he saw, but started getting close enough. In 2007, he got an iPhone and a year later when the App Store launched, he went out to learn the iOS SDK.

A couple of months later, he created an app, SoundStumblr — a geo-local music discovery app that allowed you to see what people were listening in your vicinity. Encouraged by that app, he came up with Facemood, an app that looked at your friend’s Facebook timeline and summarized what kind of mood they were in. Facemood was followed by TrimIt, an iOS app that was downloaded and used by 100,000 people. His logic for developing the app? Information overload.

“Seven months ago I got into Twitter and was getting a lot of URLs, but being on a slow phone network it would take 15 seconds to load up a page and I couldn’t view the content ahead of time,” he recalls. It was frustrating. The situation on Google is even worse. ”I don’t have enough time whilst on the go to click in and out of every article and story on the web,” he says. What he wanted was to figure out a way to skim-read its entire content before deciding to read through its entirety.

Sentiment is everything

D’Aloisio confesses that he is obsessed with sentiment analysis and each app is a step forward into his obsession with making sense of large data sets. He reads paper on natural language processing and machine learning in order to pick up the best techniques and learns from the masters. He uses iTunes University. And what he doesn’t know, he asks. He is not shy. He has emailed experts, without making them aware of his age or background.

The success of Trimit didn’t go unnoticed. A few press mentions caught the attention of Solina Chau, a key investor with Horizons, the private equity investment vehicle of of Li Ka-Shing, the Chinese billionaire and owner of the 3 Group. Their previous investments include Skype, Facebook and Spotify. She convinced Nick and his parents that it was time for him to take the next step and turn Trimit into a company. Of course, Horizons’  made the seed investment in what is now known as Summly, a service that allows webpages and news articles to be automatically compressed into succinct summaries.

Summly uses a text-summarizing algorithm that has been trained with sample pages from across the web and has trained itself to use optimized metrics when formulating a summary of any article or webpage. The service uses an ontological detection so that the “algorithm detects what kind of webpage has been entered into Summly e.g. a technology article, and applies our appropriate technology article summarizing metrics accordingly.” The algorithm’s preliminary evaluation showed that it outperformed other text summarizers by a factor of 40 percent, D’Aloisio claims. And it supposedly works across many different languages.

I have no idea of knowing whether his claims are accurate. Being on the road, I have not even had time to do my due diligence. All I know is that the early version of the app (that is going live sometime later today) works quite well. It allows me to get summaries of articles from publications like The Guardian. I get summaries of news items via News APIs of Google and Bing. Smart tagging allows me to discover more information. It just seems to work.

“This is the right time for us to be tackling this product,” he says. Nick points out that even Google knows that something needs to be done. It has launched Google Previews, but again it is not the ideal solution. “Google’s UI hasn’t kept up with the changing nature of the web and the Internet,” says D’Aloisio and is of the opinion that the click-centric web behavior is going to soon be a thing of the past. Whether it is video, text or photos, there will be a lot more automation in how the information is surfaced to us, Nick says, arguing that it is a journey that has only just begun. “I think of artificial intelligence as applied to everyday life,” he adds.

Best is yet to come

We walk over to the train station, looking for sustenance. There aren’t many options, so we settle on a German version of a diner. I have currywurst, Nick tucks into another kind of sausage. But we mostly talk about his “tech” life and how he reconciles it with his other life, one that of a student and a teenager. “I enjoy school and being with my friends, and I do indeed have to work hard at school,” Nick explains. “School is a lot of work.” He is learning Russian, Mandarin and a smattering of other languages. As our conversation progresses, Nick, being a little impatient points out that “It is the project that has got me here and not being a kid.” He doesn’t want to be seen as a kid with an app. Instead, it is an app with a kid behind it.

When I ask if he will get a CEO to help him out, D’Aloisio says of course, in time. For now he wants to focus his tiny little company on the product. He points out that most founders have a vision of the product and they can see it and when that vision isn’t brought to fruition, it causes irritation. It is one of the reasons he is still obsessive about controlling every aspect of the product. “I want to ensure it is my true vision,” he emphatically states.

From design to coding, D’Aloisio is obsessive about controlling the product — much like one of his idols, Steve Jobs. He is currently reading Jobs’ biography and we discuss it for a bit before both of us concluding, thank god for Macs. A minute later we are discussing typography and the importance of design and user experience. We talk cricket and how the current Australian team sucks. We talk some more about design and typography.

After a while we shake hands and part ways. As a parting comment I tell Nick that this might not be his last company for his quest to make sense of data is still a journey incomplete. He smiles, he says. “I know.” I will hazard a guess — the world and all of us who believe in technology will be hearing about the exploits of this young man for a very long time.

Download Summly for the iPhone App Store