Moore said she would like to see laws increase the penalties for sex traffickers and also secure greater funding to help rehabilitate victims. She has been working with the Department of Homeland Security on the issue and that she and Kutcher are currently working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking too, according to this Politico story.

Moore and Kutcher are working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking and she wants to see increased penalties for offenders and more funding for victims. And, according to Politico, they’re enlisting social media to help the cause too:

The actress said she is also helping to put together a task force called the DNA (short for Demi and Ashton) Trafficking Tech Task Force which will include “some of the brightest minds of Silicon Valley” –from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Craigslist” — to help with the issue.

“Technology has enabled the problem, but technology can be used to solve the problem,” she said in the interview. “For those abusers and predators online, they better watch out. We’re looking to expose the anonymity by which they are taking comfort.”

The DNA Foundation (@DNAFoundation) launched Jan. 25.

The organisers of the Paris exhibition — titled “Action 1″ — viewed thousands of internet videos from Iran before making a selection to present at a gallery on one of Paris’s busiest shopping streets, the rue de Rivoli.

Banks of television sets there show dramatic video of young people throwing stones at security forces, riot police carrying out savage beatings and scenes of blazing tyres and cars.

One bank made up of nine screens shows the same troubled street scene shot from various angles — street level, rooftops, apartment windows. Often the voice of the person filming can be heard.

“Come away from the window… He (a policeman) is loading his gun,” says a woman’s voice in Farsi, the most widely spoken language in Iran, in one of the videos to which the exhibition organisers have added French subtitles. . . .

The political potential of the mobile phone video is soon to get a further artistic and cultural examination at another Paris-funded cultural organisation, the Forum des Images.

Next month it will host the latest edition of its annual ground-breaking mobile phone film festival “Pocket Films.”

This year it looks at the “place the (mobile phone) camera has taken in countries where democracy cannot have its voice heard, such as Burma (Myanmar) or Iran,” festival coordinator Benoit Labourdette told AFP.

According to the BBC, his first tweet translated to: “Hey how’s it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I’m off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!”

In addition:

A close aide, Public Works Minister Diosdado Cabello, announced . . .  that Chavez supporters planned to “storm” social networking sites.

“The opposition thinks it owns the social networking sites – they think Twitter and Facebook belong to them,” he said.

“We’re fighting and there are seven million of us who will have Twitter,” he declared, referring to the membership claimed by Mr Chavez’s United Socialist Party.

Chavez has close to 200,000 followers, and he has, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, invited Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Bolivian President Evo Morales to join as well:

“The potential this has … it’s not capitalist, it’s not socialist, it depends on how it is used,” he said after posting two messages on his page @chavezcadanga.

//

“I invite Evo and Fidel,” Chavez said. “Evo – are you on Twitter? Let’s invite Evo to Twitter,” Chavez said during a visit to a cattle ranch with Bolivia’s president.

Both Morales and Castro are close allies of Chavez and the three men are Latin America’s most vocal critics of what they call the U.S. empire. . . .

Many Venezuelans laughed when Chavez announced he would join Twitter, wondering how their famously verbose leader, who speaks almost daily for hours on end, will keep to the service’s 140-character limit.

Chavez’s page name includes “candanga,” which translates locally as a rebellious or strong-willed person.

The letter was sent last month by privacy and data protection officials from  Germany, Canada, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In addition to concerns about Google Buzz, the company’s latest foray into social networking, the officials also criticize Google Street View, which features pictures taken by cameras mounted on cars.

According to this AP story:

The officials complained that Google launched [Google Street View] in various countries without “due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms.”

“In that instance, you addressed privacy concerns related to such matters as the retention of unblurred facial images only after the fact, and there is continued concern about the adequacy of the information you provide before the images are captured,” officials said in their letter, posted on the Web site of Canada’s privacy commissioner.

Google said it has “discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to today’s letter.”

“Of course we do not get everything 100 percent right – that is why we acted so quickly on Buzz following the user feedback we received,” the company said in a statement, adding that it tries very hard to be upfront about what data it collects from users and how it uses the information. . . .

The officials called on Google to create default settings that protect users’ privacy and to ensure that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use.

“We recognize that Google is not the only online company with a history of introducing services without due regard for the privacy of its users,” the letter says. “As a leader in the online world, we hope that your company will set an example for others to follow.”

The New York Times has more on Twitter’s donation of its archives to the United States’ oldest federal cultural institution:

TWITTER users now broadcast about 55 million Tweets a day. In just four years, about 10 billion of these brief messages have accumulated.

Not a few are pure drivel. But, taken together, they are likely to be of considerable value to future historians. They contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before.

“Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,” said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, “Digital History.” What’s more, he said, “Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.”

The Library of Congress isn’t the only institution getting the tweets, though it’s the most scholarly.

The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, “We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.” The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called “qualified researchers.”

BUT the library’ s restrictions on access will not matter. Mr. Macgillivray at Twitter said his company would be turning over copies of its public archive to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, too. These companies already receive instantaneously the stream of current Twitter messages. When the archive of older Tweets is added to their data storehouses, they will have a complete, constantly updated, set, and users won’t encounter a six-month embargo.

This Reuters story has some stats the Chinese company’s rapid growth:

Baidu posted first-quarter net profit of 481 million renminbi, or $70.4 million, up from 181 million renminbi a year ago. Analysts expected profit of 366 million renminbi, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Baidu is, unsurprisingly, reluctant to credit its growth solely to Google’s departure:

“We saw marginal benefit from this so-called semi-exit of Google,” Robin Li, Baidu’s charismatic chief executive, said during a conference call to discuss his company’s results.

“We are certainly benefiting from this. But at the end of the day, the China search market is still in its very early stage,” Mr. Li said. “The performance of Baidu is largely driven by our own execution, not the competitive landscape change.”

“The Chinese, according to our records, have now established 60 Confucius centers here in the United States, but they are permitting only four of our centers to be built in China,” Mr. Lugar told Mrs. Clinton. “So I call this to your attention for some potential negotiations with [our] Chinese friends, as we try to extend this idea of diplomacy centers, which I think is important.”

Mr. Lugar suggested that the administration is resigned to the restrictions, noting that its 2011 budget request has asked for funds for just “eight to 10 American centers of public diplomacy” around the world, but “it’s not clear where those would be located.”

Mrs. Clinton responded that the administration is “raising the issue of reciprocity with Chinese officials,” though she made clear a change in the numbers is unlikely anytime soon.

“On the Confucius centers, the Chinese government provides each center with $1 million to launch, plus they cover operating expenses that exceed $200,000 per year,” she said. “We don’t have that kind of money in the budget, so we are limited in the numbers that we can do.”

It’s hard to directly equate the Confucius Centers in the United States with the public diplomacy centers the United States is trying to establish overseas. They’re similar in idea but are not identical:

“The U.S. centers are much more explicitly associated with the U.S. government, but on the other hand, they both have the same function, which is public diplomacy and outreach, and trying to present a version of the respective country,” said Dean Cheng, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Mr. Cheng said China’s concerns about prospective U.S. centers most likely have to do with human rights, which are part of Washington’s outreach around the world.

He also noted that it is almost impossible for Washington to find a Chinese university to partner with that is not at least partially controlled by the Chinese government, which is not a problem in the United States.

Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens. And increasingly, it is backing state-friendly clones of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all Western sites that have been blocked here for roughly a year.

The government’s strategy, according to Mr. Bandurski and others, is not just to block unflattering messages, but to overwhelm them with its own positive spin and rebuttals.

The government makes no apologies for what it calls “guiding public opinion.” Regulation is crucial, it says, to keep China from sliding into chaos and to preserve the party’s monopoly on power. . . .

In recent years, local and provincial officials have hired armies of low-paid commentators to monitor blogs and chat rooms for sensitive issues, then spin online comment in the government’s favor.

Mr. Xiao of Berkeley cites one example: Jiaozuo, a city southwest of Beijing, deployed 35 Internet commentators and 120 police officers to defuse online attacks on the local police after a traffic dispute. By flooding chat rooms with pro-police comments, the team turned the tone of online comment from negative to positive in just 20 minutes.

According to one official newspaper editor who refused to be named, propaganda authorities now calculate that confronted with a public controversy, local officials have a window of about two hours to block information and flood the Web with their own line before the reaction of citizens is beyond control.

The role of technology in bringing together the protesters has been crucial. The leaders of the protest movement have used community radio stations, mobile-phone messaging and the Internet to forge an identity for lower-income Thais and connect a vast constellation of people in villages and towns.

At times the protests in Bangkok could be described as flash mobs of the disaffected. Protesters, who wear trademark red shirts, have converged on government buildings, banks and military bases across the city guided by text messages.

“This would not have been possible 10 years ago,” said Ms. Thanida, who was returning from military barracks in Bangkok where protesters had demanded that soldiers leave the area. The military acquiesced. Like many protesters, she subscribes to D Station, a “red shirt” news service that gives updates and instructions to protesters. . . .

The protesters bewail the 2006 military coup that removed Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon turned prime minister who focused his policies on rural areas. And they question the fairness of a judicial system that removed two subsequent prime ministers who were allied with Mr. Thaksin.

To many outsiders, Mr. Thaksin’s role is puzzling: The notion that a billionaire is leading Thailand’s disaffected to rebellion verges on the absurd. It also infuriates the Bangkok elite, who see Mr. Thaksin’s role as largely self-serving. Mr. Thaksin, most analysts agree, was hardly a paragon of democratic values during his five years in power. He intimidated the media, stripped institutions like the anti-corruption commission of their independence and mixed his business interests with those of the government. . . .

It is significant that Mr. Thaksin made his fortunes in the telecommunications business. Even his critics concede that he was able to communicate with the rural poor and deliver results in ways that none of his predecessors had achieved. As prime minister, he gave lower-income Thais a taste of a better life, including cheap loans that allowed people to buy pickups and mobile phones, which inadvertently or not laid the groundwork for the current political movement.

The country’s Foreign Ministry published a statement on Saturday after fielding a question from the press about Google’s blog post, which was published on its online security blog on March 30.

“Such comments are groundless,” said Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nguyen Phuong Nga. “We have on many occasions clearly expounded our view on issues relating to access to and use of information and information technology, including the Internet. Vietnam law puts in place specific regulations against computer virus and malware as well as on information security and confidentiality.”

A Google security official, Neel Mehta, wrote that the company had discovered a type of malicious software that was disguised as Vietnamese keyboard language software. The software was used to spy on the owners of computers and to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks “against blogs containing messages of political dissent.”