This has generated a flurry of furious protest: thousands have taken to the streets in protest in Poland, nearly 250,000 people have signed a petition against the agreement, and a Member of the European Parliament has resigned his position as rapporteur to scrutinize the agreement, concluding that the entire review process is a "charade."...

Given the ongoing concerns, the big question now is whether much can be done....The dangers associated with ACTA are not limited to this particular agreement. The agreement opens the door to further secretive negotiations, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership, which contain extensive IP provisions that extend beyond ACTA. The SOPA battle was a big win for those concerned with balanced copyright and the open Internet, but it is by no means the end of the fight. - Michael Geist

For those still doubting this is on the Microsoft roadmap, I’ve got a new piece of evidence. A contact of mine provided me with a link to a Microsoft job posting for a software development engineer at Microsoft that calls for some serious Linux credentials....

Senior Software Development Engineer/Linux Virtualization
This position requires a proven track record in the open source community.

[PJ: Well, if the person taking the job starts with a proven track record in the open source community, he'll surely lose his cred if he goes to work for Microsoft, methinks. Microsoft needs to quit using patents to damage Android if it wants people with real open source cred to help them.] - Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet

The IPO is likely to have two or more active managers, people familiar with the matter said. Morgan Stanley rival Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is expected to play a significant role in the deal, according to people familiar with the matter. As a result, Goldman also would likely also snag significant fees. - WSJ

But to imagine that the millions of Internet users who took to the virtual streets over the last few months were simply responding to the clarion call of technology companies misses the real point–dangerously so.

Rather, it was the users who urged and sometimes pressured technology companies to oppose the bills, not the other way around. While the big companies eventually came on board, the push for them to do so came largely from activists using social networking and social news sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit, to build momentum and exert leverage, sometimes on the very companies whose tools they were using.

If there is a first mover in this creation story, it would start with the influential blog Techdirt and its founder Mike Masnick. When PIPA passed out of a Senate committee in May without any debate, Masnick started writing every day (sometimes many times a day) about the potential danger of the bill and the disingenuous process by which it was being railroaded through Congress....

In Washington, the accepted wisdom by year-end was that the technology industry had matured at last into a lobbying force commensurate with its size and pocketbook. But what everyone missed was that the users had opened a third front in this fight, and clearly the one that determined its outcome.

The bitroots movement wasn’t led by Google. It wasn’t led by anyone. Even to look for its leaders is to miss the point. Internet users didn’t lobby or buy their way into influence. They used the tools at their disposal—Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and the rest—to make their voices heard. They encouraged voluntary boycotts and blackouts, and organized awareness days. This was a revolt of, by and with social networks, turning the tools that organized them into groups in the first place into potent new weapons for political advocacy. The users had figured out how to hack politics. - Larry Downes, Tech Freedom

On shipments versus sales. While these numbers can be instructive, they can also be confusing: If you look at Strategy Analytics’ “shipments” numbers, they are the same as the “sales” numbers that companies like Apple and Nokia reported this week. Neil Mawston, executive director for Strategy Analytics’ global wireless practice, says vendors “tend to use those words interchangeably” even though one refers to actual devices in people’s hands, while the other is for devices that have been shipped to distributors, but not necessarily sold. “They can be open to interpretation,” he admitted. “A lot of companies use smoke and mirrors,” so Strategy Analytics uses other measures such as “channel checks” to measure shipments. - Ingrid Lunden, paidContent

After launching a failed hostile takeover of fellow non-operating entity Mosaid Technologies in August 2011, WiLAN’s wallet is $10 million Canadian dollars lighter . As such, if you are a patent licensing, non-operating entity in Canada, what better way to make up that loss than to sue another Canadian company that does produce products? Because “developing, protecting, and monetizing technology intellectual property … that’s the WiLAN Way.” - M*CAM

Elbaz’ goal in developing the repository: “You can’t access, let alone download, the Google or the Bing crawl data. So certainly we’re differentiated in being very open and transparent about what we’re crawling and actually making it available to developers,” he says. - SemanticWeb.com

"The project is really advanced and we hope to start the deployment the next spring, finishing it in December." said Teodomiro Cayetano López in the press release, referring to the Debian distribution that will be installed on all 40,000 computers.

The Extremadura administration's computers will receive the same Debian Linux OS used by the region's public health services and schools for about five years now, LinEx. - Softpedia