Big news from Capitol Hill in Washington DC today: House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa has said that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has been "shelved" in the House of Representatives, meaning it has been put on indefinite hold until a consensus about the act can be reached. Sadly, SOPA's counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) will still be pushed forward, meaning we must remain vigilant. Despite all of this, Wikipedia has announced it will join the blackout coming Wednesday.

It has been 6 years since we last mentioned Shed Skin, a restricted-Python to C++ compiler (Python 2.4-2.6). In the meantime, development has continued at a rapid pace. Shed Skin has taken part in the GSOC and GHOP projects. It is now able to generate extension modules, which can be used in larger Python programs. Its type inference engine has become orders of magnitude faster. One of the Shed Skin example programs, a work-in-progress C64 emulator is now compiled in under a minute on a fast PC. In total there are 64 non-trivial example programs. As may be expected from a static compiler, performance is better than when using PyPy in many cases. Though of course we have to mention that PyPy is much less restricted, and also improving at a rapid pace.

"Three weeks ago the 23-year-old UK-based administrator of a TV show and movie links site was arrested by police. The site, referred to only as TVShack, could be one of three domains of which two are already controlled by the US government after their seizure as part of Operation in Our Sites. Following his detention in the UK's largest prison, the admin is now fighting his extradition to the U.S. with the help of Gary McKinnon's lawyer." His site only linked; it did not host. The most damning point is that he was found not guilty under UK law. So, does this mean The Netherlands can request extradition of, say, Rick Santorum for his blatant anti-homosexual remarks, which are illegal under Dutch law? That would be fun.

The Obama administration has responded to two petitions regarding SOPA, but in true political fashion, the response is 838 words of absolutely nothing at all. Here's a link, but don't complain to me about losing 10 minutes of your life reading this empty drivel. How about taking a stand for once, eh?

And so the war on general computing continues. Were you looking forward to ARM laptops and maybe even desktops now that Windows 8 will also be released for ARM? I personally was, because I'd much rather have a thin, but fast and economical machine than a beastly Intel PC. Sadly, it turns out that all our fears regarding UEFI's Secure Boot feature were justified: Microsoft prohibits OEMs from allowing you to install anything other than Windows 8 on ARM devices (the Software Freedom Law Center has more).

Pretty interesting. "Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) is our biggest redesign yet - both for users and developers. We've enhanced the UI framework with new interactions and styles that will let you create Android apps that are simpler and more beautiful than ever before. To help you in that mission, we're introducing Android Design: the place to learn about principles, building blocks, and patterns for creating world-class Android user interfaces. Whether you're a UI professional or a developer playing that role, these docs show you how to make good design decisions, big and small."

And yet another major Android vendor will pay protection money to Microsoft. "Microsoft and LG Electronics have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for LG's tablets, mobile phones and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome OS Platform. The contents of the agreement have not been disclosed." You know your technology sector is terminally ill when this sort of bullshit is considered normal.

"Last weekend Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wrote a column in the Salt Lake City Tribune supporting the pending SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills. In his article Shurtleff argues that the bills are a necessity if the US is to 'stop Internet thieves and profiteers'. An interesting take, but not very credible, as the Attorney Generally who may soon have the power to seize domains, simply passed off MPAA-penned propaganda as his own words." Unbelievable.

The latest blog entry from Steven Sinofsky about Windows 8 describes the Storage Spaces functionality . From the blog entry it seems Windows 8 is getting something ZFS-like. The Storage Spaces can be created in the command line via Powershell, or in the Control Panel for the ones that prefer a more mouse-friendly interface.

The last few weeks there's been a considerable amount of chatter on the web about whether or not a news website, blog, or some hybrid thereof, needs comments. Since we are working on the next version of OSNews, which means I've been thinking about things like this a lot, I figured I'd pen down my thoughts on comments.

Two years hence, Oracle's stewardship of Java continues to raise user and vendor ire, this time due to modularization, licensing, and security concerns. 'Plans for version 8 of Java Platform Standard Edition, which is due next year, call for inclusion of Project Jigsaw to add modular capabilities to Java. But some organizations are concerned with how Oracle's plans might conflict with the OSGi module system already geared to Java. In the licensing arena, Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu Linux, says Oracle is no longer letting Linux distributors redistribute Oracle's own commercial Java, causing difficulties for the company. Meanwhile, security vendor F-Secure views Java as security hindrance.'

The news I've seen coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show this year isn't particularly breathtaking or awe-inspiring. Phones, tablets, faster, thinner, yes, yes, we've all been here before. There is one piece of news, however, that stands out from the crowd. The best-selling TV maker in the US, Vizio, is entering the PC market. Stunning designs for both laptop and all-in-one - and buried deep within the press release lies the creamy nougaty centre that makes me want to buy one even more: a Windows 7 install optimised by Microsoft, free of crapware.

On Tuesday 10th January, Donald Ervin Knuth, the American computing pioneer and author of the classic The Art of Computer Programming, celebrates his 74th birthday. Four years ago, Knuth set aside a couple of days to record, in great depth, the story of his life and work for posterity. You can watch the recording here.

In an enlightening article about the origin of the venerable vi text editor, Bill Joy reminds us that its quirks and qualities are all about the computing reality back in the 1970s: "you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade."