Old-school bOING bOING contributors Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky posted their annual State of the World discussion on the good ol' Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. Sidle up for some fine brain tennis. Jon says:

The reality we're in today is reflected in responses I got when I asked my online social network what they thought we would cover (in this State of the World discussion).

Todd Wasserman of Mashable says "It's time to cut GoDaddy a Break." Marco Arment (creator of the fabulous Instapaper) disagrees:

Even if you're OK with their support of SOPA, their sexist and tasteless commercials, and their elephant-killing CEO, they're still a terrible registrar: their upselling is misleading, sneaky, and sleazy, their control panel is horrendously confusing, slow, and buggy (like the rest of their site), their DNS servers are unreliable and randomly ignore changes you make, their support is terrible, and they often block outbound transfers for no apparent reason.

Miller-McCune's Emily Badger:

When members of Congress earlier this month considered the Stop Online Piracy Act — better known to anyone who actually hangs out on the Internet as #SOPA — the most notable feature of the debate turned out to be the sheer ignorance of the elected officials discussing it.

TorrentFreak continues to crawl through YouHaveDownloaded, a database of IPs that have been logged by a BitTorrent-spying tool run by some folks in Russia. They've already revealed the downloading habits of the RIAA and DHS as well as the behavior detected at Nicholas Sarkozy's official residence, and now they're publishing stats on the US House of Representatives. — Read the rest

GoDaddy may have dropped its support for SOPA, but Jason Kottke points out that there are many other reasons to give it a wide berth. At Macworld, Glenn Fleishman (previously) posts a fat guide to the technical ins and outs of transferring domains, with special attention given to getting them out of one particular registrar. — Read the rest

At TechCrunch, Alexia Tsotsis counts more than 40 tech companies publicly opposed to SOPA.

It's time again for Boing Boing's guide the charities we support in our annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the comments below!

Electronic Frontier Foundation
The EFF's mission has never been more important: as laws like SOPA are rammed through Congress, as bloggers around the world are arrested and tortured with the collusion of American network-surveillance companies, and as the FBI's unconstitutional, warrantless use of surveillance technology like GPS bugs comes to light, EFF is poised to be center-stage in the fight for a free and open world with a free and open Internet. — Read the rest

How much has it cost the entertainment industry to convince Rep Lamar Smith to introduce and ram through SOPA, which will cost the American economy billions, which will nuke the games, microprocessor, search, and other high tech companies in his Texas district? — Read the rest

Update: Lovejoy lives! The comet had a near-encounter with the sun, but survived.

From Space.com: "A newly discovered comet is set to make a death dive into the sun's atmosphere today (Dec. 15), and scientists will have a ringside seat to watch its fiery demise." — Read the rest

Megaupload is still fuming that Universal Music Group made repeated false copyright claims to YouTube about a video that major recording artists made in support of the service, which the major labels have branded "rogue" and have cited in their fight to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act. — Read the rest

Yesterday, I blogged about the tribute raised to Megaupload by several famous recording artists, who objected to their labels' campaign against the service. Overnight, Universal Music filed a series of fraudulent copyright complaints against the song, prompting YouTube to repeatedly remove it, and to threaten to terminate the Megaupload YouTube account for incurring multiple piracy complaints. — Read the rest

There's never been a better time to donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading organization fighting to keep the world's Internet free and open. Never a better time because there's never been more threats facing the free Internet, from SOPA to illegal domain seizures to warrantless shutdown of Wikileaks. — Read the rest

Hillary Clinton's in The Hague, telling world leaders not to censor the Internet.

Mrs. Clinton, in her remarks, also cited efforts by countries to change the way the Internet — now largely self-regulated and globally interconnected — is governed. Although she did not name the countries, Russia, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan introduced a draft resolution at the United Nations this year that would allow greater government control over the Internet in individual countries.

Holmes sez, "Fight for the Future have a new way to stop the internet censorship bills: a Senate-dialing widget you can embed anywhere.

You enter a phone number and zipcode, it calls you back with talking points, and then connects you to your Senator. — Read the rest

The creators of the MAFIAAFire browser plugin (which allows you to reach websites whose DNS has been shut down without trial by the US State Department at the behest of entertainment conglomerates) have released a sequel: ThePirateBay Dancing, a plugin that anonymizes your connections to thepiratebay.org — Read the rest

Dorli Rainey, the elder woman in this iconic and shocking photograph shot by Seattlepi.com photographer Joshua Trujillo, says to Keith Olbermann during this interview: "I feel great. I feel so energized. It's so amazing the effect a little pepper spray can have on you." — Read the rest

Want to test your own ability to recognize faces? There's several online tests available through the Prosopagnosia Research Centers at Harvard and the UK's University College London. I got an 86%—better than average—on the Cambridge Memory Face Test. How about you? — Read the rest

One evening, while we were watching TV, a short video preview came on, announcing that the channel was going to show Jurassic Park over the coming weekend. As the preview played, my husband turned to me and said, "I didn't know Harrison Ford was in Jurassic Park." — Read the rest

The government of China is taking action against mobile phones pre-installed with malware that sneakily rack up user fees by triggering various fee-based mobile services.

The ministry is targeting what it called "money sucking" phones, which are installed with software that triggers fee-based mobile services without users' knowledge.

[Video Link] Researchers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis are working with children who have face blindness (prosopagnosia) to try to come up with ways to treat people who have difficulty recognizing and distinguishing between faces. According to the researchers in this video face blindness affects 1 to 2% of all children. — Read the rest