Sir Mal Fet writes "In a very polemic move by the Spanish parliament, the infamous 'Sinde' law, already discussed here, was implemented on December 31st. Albeit modified from their original version, the law will allow the Spanish government to request ISPs to summary close a website due to copyright infringment (English translation). If the ISP refuses, then it's passed to court where a judge can order the website closed. It seems it's one good, one bad over there. The law is in public consult until March, and No Les Votes, a Spanish organization that opposes the law, has already started a campaign to boycott it (English translation)."

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AP - Brandon Weeden threw for 399 yards and three touchdowns to Justin Blackmon in their final collegiate game, leading No. 3 Oklahoma State to a 41-38 overtime win against Andrew Luck and No. 4 Stanford in a wildly entertaining Fiesta Bowl on Monday night.

Reuters - Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has rung in the New Year with a new Twitter account that includes praise for Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum and opinions on President Barack Obama's policies and the Steve Jobs biography.

Reuters - Iowa Republicans cast the first votes of the 2012 White House campaign on Tuesday, with Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul in a high-stakes battle to win the party's kick-off nominating contest.

AP - Authorities arrested a German man Monday in connection with dozens of suspected arson attacks that destroyed parked cars, scorched buildings and rattled much of the nation's second-largest city over the New Year's weekend.

Reuters - When top retailers post their December sales this week, Wall Street analysts are expecting them to report a healthy end to the holiday season, helped by discounts, improved consumer sentiment and tactics like extended hours and layaways.

AP - Republican Ron Paul, a leading contender in Iowa's presidential caucuses, said Monday on the eve of the leadoff 2012 vote that he does not envision himself in the White House.

hypnosec writes with an excerpt from an IT Pro Portal article: "A recent survey conducted by a UK based divorce website disclosed that 33 percent of behavior divorce petitions filed cite Facebook as a cause for filing for divorce in 2011. In 2009 this figure was 20 per cent. 5000 people were surveyed by Divorce-Online, the UK divorce website, during 2009 and 2011 covering Facebook as a means to check behavior of spouse with the opposite sex and spouses using the social networking platform to comment about their exes post the separation. Three reasons that came out on the top for listing Facebook in divorce petition were inappropriate messages sent to the opposite sex, posting nasty comments about exes, and friends on Facebook reporting about spouse's behavior."

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rick446 writes "I took some time to benchmark the global write lock improvements in MongoDB 2.0. From the article: 'MongoDB, as some of you may know, has a process-wide write lock... Per-database and per-collection locking is on the roadmap ..., but it's not here yet. What was announced in MongoDB version 2.0 was locking-with-yield. I was curious about the performance impact of the write lock and the improvement of lock-with-yield, so I decided to do a little benchmark, MongoDB 1.8 versus MongoDB 2.0.'"

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AP - Roger Andersen thought it was over.