In the wake of a leak of an international trade agreement on online file-sharing and copyright violation , U.S. House representatives are introducing legislation to curtail the greatest of American freedoms: the illegal download. Let’s not kid ourselves, dear readers. P2P’s best use cases all revolve around the liberation of data, software, music, movies, and other copyrighted and rather expensive content. You may direct your angry emails to Rep. Edolphus Towns (NY-Dem.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Sponsor Towns is sponsoring the Federal Secure File-Sharing Act . Click the link and read it. At the outset, the bill proposes the banning of P2P software use for government employees and contractors “and for other purposes.” The bill mandates the long-term examination of “each open-network peer-to-peer file sharing software program” that might currently be in use by government and law enforcement personnel. Towns cited the exposure of sensitive information via such networks as the reason for the bill. He cited the following leaks as proof of the need for stricter P2P regulations: Schematics for the President’s helicopter, Marine One. Financial data on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Location of a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family. Specifics of a House Ethics Committee document containing a list of ongoing investigations . But let us be realistic: Copyright claims, Creative Commons concerns, and IP violations are the molten core at the center of any legislation on P2P networks. And based on recent internationally agreed-upon efforts to uphold the claims and wishes of copyright holders, the U.S. government seems to be introducing yet more legislation to restrict piracy. Are P2P networks truly responsible for such serious security breaches? Or are these claims merely politically motivated scapegoats for government to crack down on user behaviors – behaviors that may need more examination than legal discipline? Most importantly, if this bill is made law, will it act as a precedent for stricter policing and eventual shutdown of P2P networks altogether? Or are we reactionary skeptics who need to calm down and quietly resume our download of our Hello, Dolly torrent files? Choose your own adventure in the comments. Discuss

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Let My P2P Go: Uncle Sam Eyes File Sharing Again

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick’s dreaded brain chip for controlling computers and mobile devices may be closer than even he suspected. Intel researchers in Pittsburgh told journalists today that brain implants are harnessing human brain waves to surf the Internet, manipulate documents, and much more. And just as we told you two years ago, the lucky recipients of these implants will be willing volunteers, not government-controlled guinea pigs. Some of us are now researching cheap flights to Pittsburgh. Sponsor Just think of how far we’ve come since the early days of portable tech. “If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time,” said Intel research VP Andrew Chien, “they would have said, ‘I don’t want that. I don’t need that.’ Now you can’t get them to stop.” Indeed, mobility, transparency, and accessibility are all the terms of the hour; and their advocates are popular laureates. The forefront of the user interface has revolved around concepts such as intuition, organics, and biology. Gesture technology is removing one barrier that lies between human-to-machine communication; think about that the next time you twirl your iPhone around like an Etch-A-Sketch. Isn’t removing the need for physical contact the next rational step? Chien tells us that, although there are many challenges yet to solve, the day of brain-controlled computing isn’t so far off. Dean Pomerleau works for Intel on matters of cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, computer vision, robotics, man-machine interfaces, brain processing of semantic information, and various brain-scanning technologies, such as fMRI, MEG, EEG and ECoG. He and his cohorts are solving the mechanisms of brain waves. While there’s no doubt the use cases are fascinating, Pomerleau also brushes off user concerns about implants, saying, “Eventually people may be willing to be more committed… to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts.” This is the precise line of thinking that Kirkpatrick debates so heatedly – perhaps as much now as he did in his editorial almost two years ago. Are concerns around user privacy abated since then? Hardly, with Facebook and location-based-tech developers struggling to maintain balance for their users and constant struggles and inquisitions over corporate storage of user data. Has the issue of information overload lessened? If it had, would so many startups be staking their claim on the issue of firehose filtration? And is mobile tech obsolete enough to require even more portable access to the apps we love and – dare I say it? – need? Are end users ready for brain implants? You tell us. Discuss

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The Brain Chip Cometh, & It Cometh from Intel

In his keynote this morning, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff continued his critique on software companies for their lack of development and sense of entitlement. And not surprisingly, the full-on pitch continued for cloud computing with a parade of executives showing the applications they developed on Force.com . About 19,000 people attended Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com event. Partners lined up to get on stage. David Girouard of Google showed a map with all their customers around the globe. He recounted a story with Eric Schmidt, who was astounded by the frustrations that CIO’s expressed about the architecture they inherited. An Accenture executive said that cloud computing is here to stay. He showed the company’s applications on Force.com . The Black Crowes performed last night. The pitch is fever high. Sponsor What does this all say about the market? Is this an event that marks the point where cloud computing goes mainstream? Have we reached the apex of cloud computing hype? I asked the question on Twitter: Gartner sees the hype this way: Regardless, this has been a monumental week for cloud computing. The long established software companies have now lined up with their offering. Microsoft launched Azure . Salesforce.com unveiled Salesforce Chatter , Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2. IBM announced a cloud analytics platform that leverages Cognos, its business intelligence suite. The more established companies carry the benefit of long established customer channels. IBM and Microsoft fit into this camp. Additionally, Microsoft appears to get it. The Azure platform integrates some open-source components. These companies face their own challenges as much internally as from the customer world. But their presence also means that cloud computing is close to being accepted in the enterprise mainstream. Salesforce.com is a more interesting animal. Benioff is a very aggressive CEO. Business Week is calling him ” The King of the Cloud.” He is never shy to lampoon the established software companies in the market. He calls out his competitors like Sugar CRM , which is fighting right back with its own campaign: Behind The Smokescreen , a play on Benioff’s new book: “Behind The Cloud.” Benioff has to show off his partners. He never misses an opportunity to tell you how many customers he has. In a way, he has to play this role. He has the big players running. He has to keep them running, on the defensive, so he can move in with Chatter across the enterprise. That’s the trick right now for Benioff. Moving as fast as he possibly can to gain that permanent traction. The hype is peaking. It’s a different game for the entire market. It’s a race now to win the mainstream. Discuss

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Cloud Computing: Where to Next?

When Heroes actor Greg Grunberg tells you to download an iPhone application, you can’t help but listen. Best known as television’s mind controlling savant Matt Parkman, Grunberg demoed location-based coupon startup Yowza at today’s Under the Radar Mobility Conference. Grunberg’s iPhone app offers users deals from nearby stores, restaurants and gyms. Now that Foursquare has begun advertising location-based deals it’ll be interesting to see if there will be overlap between the two companies. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Grunberg to find out what’s keeping him out of the actor’s studio. Sponsor Photo Credit: Albert L. Ortega Discuss

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Yowza: A Video Interview with Heroes Actor Greg Grunberg

Twitter turned on its long-awaited Geolocation API today, meaning that users can opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. The significance of this is made clear by comparing it with last week’s release of 500 million time-stamped Twitter messages for analysis. “You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps,” Flip Kroner of data marketplace Infochimps told us, “and you’ve got a web app.” Today’s announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you’ve got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking – there’s a whole lot that’s possible. Sponsor Exposing location data is an opt-in feature for users, but 3rd party app developers are being told to “encourage your users to enable it by sending them to their settings page.” Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation – it doesn’t have to be one of those situations where “this will be cool once other people I know are using it.” With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google’s implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it’s more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data. These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field – so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks. Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see. “Party Over Here” Bot: Automated Geo-Replies Want to know when you’re near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy’s? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It’s not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you “check in” at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you’re interested in is near that location. How about a bot you can Tweet “@whereami” to and that @’s you back with a link or stats about the location you’re in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! How about a bot you can Tweet “@whereami” to and that @’s you back with a link or stats about the location you’re in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered. These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind. Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include… Imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop’s hottest online articles each day. Most Twitter search engines index not just the 140 characters in a message, but the text in links being shared as well. If you think people like being the Foursquare mayor of a popular coffee shop, imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop’s hottest online articles each day. Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who’ve Tweeted from the same place you’re in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what’s been on the reading list of each today? News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They’d be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on. Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics of the week? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm. Cop Watcher Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed. Inventory Forecast If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it. Politics & Marketing People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today’s health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on. Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That’s only a mater of time. Flu Trends+ Think Google’s use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool ? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there’s an increase in messages about being sick in your area? Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset. What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data? Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb – we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo’s distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com. Discuss

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What Twitter’s New Geolocation Makes Possible

The problem with most analytics platforms is that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Instead of looking for daily spikes in a traffic rating, it’s more important for us to know what trends are spiking over time. From there we can make decisions to improve our businesses. In an effort to make a more useful analytics dashboard, the makers of database tool Dabble DB created Trendly . Sponsor ReadWriteWeb last looked at Dabble DB when the company launched a social to-do list for Facebook . While the product played on all of Dabble’s strengths of data capture and collaboration tools, the tool lacked consumer sex appeal. With Trendly, the company is returning to it’s quant roots. Trendly allows users to track analytics with up to a three year history. Instead of showing you every dip and curve in the metrics of your site, for $5 dollars per month the company offers a better alternative. Users view highlighted site changes via a newsfeed and timeline. In what is clearly a different approach from the basic Google Analytics interface, Trendly offers color coded layers displayed alongside the newsfeed. Each layer represents the timeline of a single keyword and wider layers represent the keywords most searched. The service also allows users to click on keywords to bring up related word clusters and the percentage of search around each. Trendly also tracks referrals, content and ad campaigns. Once the service is set up, users can pull reports on content traffic analysis, AdWords conversions, search, referrals and direct traffic. Given Dabble’s track record in putting together great tracking and database systems, Trendly is certainly worth a try. To check out the site visit trendly.com . Discuss

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Dabble DB Launches Trendly Analytics Dashboard

Earlier this spring, Twitter announced it would soon be adding location-based information to tweets . Typical of what we like to think of as the company’s “mysterious charm,” the feature has been unveiled six months later with a brief post on the Twitter blog. The new geotagging capabilities can already be seen in certain third-party apps and might even come to the web interface sometime soon. Sponsor To activate the new hotness, Twitter users must go to their Settings pages and click “Enable Geotagging.” For obvious privacy reasons, the feature is not automatically enabled. Apps such as Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro, and many others are already supporting location-based data for tweets. “The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations,” writes Twitter platform/API man Ryan Sarver in the blog post. “Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community.” As are we! But we might hold out on enabling the geo-tastic feature just yet. We’ve still got a few stalkers to shake, and we’re waiting for the inevitable bugs to surface before we trust our favorite microblog with our favorite haunts, too. Discuss

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Twitter API Gets Geotagging; Web Geotagging Coming Soon?