The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 by Representative Lamar Smith [R-TX] and 12 initial co-sponsors. This bill is intended to help U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders fight online piracy of intellectual property.

President Barack Obama is calling for a 6-year $53 billion spending plan for high-speed rail. The initial $8 billion will be spent on a budge plan that the President is releasing on Monday. If Congress approves of the President’s plan, then the money would go towards developing trains that could go as high as 250MPH.

The new Congress will be live broadcasting their first meeting on Facebook. The announcement was made by incoming House Speaker John Boehner (pictured above). The live-stream will be at noon on tomorrow. To view the meeting, go to the “Pledge to America” Facebook page (www.facebook.com/pledgetoamerica) to see the GOP-controlled House. [CNN]

In the evening of March 21, 2010 – history was made.  The health care bill was passed by the House of Representatives with a vote of 219-212.  All of the 178 Republicans voted against it along with 34 Democrats.  The bill passed the Senate this past December.  The next step is that the bill will be passed to Obama to sign into law.  Below are homepage screenshots of 16 major political websites as of right now (clicking the image enlarges them). It is interesting to see the reactions:

1. The Huffington Post

2. CNN

3. Drudge Report

Over one third of Congress members are using Twitter according to a report by the Los Angeles Times. Many of the members of Congress spent time on Twitter during President Obama’s first major televised speeches too. Over 200 of 535 members are on Twitter and most of them are Congress representatives. There are a less number of Senators on the micro-blogging service. There also seems to be a larger number of Republican representation than Democratic. TweetCongress.org does a good job of maintaining the list, stream, hash tags, photos, videos, and analytics of Congress members that use Twitter. I highly recommend checking them out too. [LAT]

LimeWire has sent a response (PDF from Wired.com) to Congress where he explains the steps that the P2P company is taking to prevent document sharing.  This will prevent users from sharing government documents or inadvertently sharing tax return letters.

LimeWire had to add extra safeguards due to Congress re-opening an investigation against the company.  Information regarding President Barack Obama’s helicopter “Marine One,” along with medical records and tax return information had leaked over the a P2P network recently.

“LimeWire 5 by default does not share documents even if a user purposely attempts to do so,” stated Gorton. “LimeWire will not allow it. In fact, LimeWire 5 [released in December] goes so far as to automatically un-share documents that a user may have shared using a 4.x version of LimeWire.”

A response was demanded from Gorton by The House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  This is because Marine One data was downloaded by an IP address in Iran.  Older versions of LimeWire by default asked if you would like to share folders containing audio, video, documents, and software.

[via Wired]