The memory of Aaron Swartz remains strong more than a week after his tragic death, judging from the turnout at his memorial service in New York City tonight.

Around 900 people attended the service at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, which featured a selection of speakers close to Swartz. In addition to remembering his life and accomplishments, there was also a constant push towards political action — something that makes it clear Swartz’s legacy will live on for some time.

You can watch the entire service online at the Remember Aaron Swartz memorial site.

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the founder of corporate responsibility site SumofUs.org and Swartz’s partner, noted that the best tribute would be for “all of us to go out today and fight to make the world a better place.”

She pushed for five main goals for the audience: Making sure the Massachusetts U.S. attorneys office was held accountable for its tactics prosecuting Swartz; opening up all academic research to anyone in the world for free; making sure MIT vowed never to be part of a similar event; strengthen the criminal reform system; and help pass Aaron’s Law, which would limit the number of charges that can be brought against someone who violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

“Aaron believed there was no shame in failure,” Stinebricker-Kauffman said. “There is deep, deep shame in caring more about believing you’re changing the world than actually changing the world.”

Quinn Norton, an activist, technology writer, and former partner of Swartz’s, stressed that we should also remember him as “another human being with all the flaws and glories that we all have.” She noted that he could be petty and greedy, while also being loving and hopeful. “But in a culture that is ruled by fear, he taught and showed me that trying is more important than being afraid,” she said.

Other speakers included Roy Singham, chair of IT consulting group Thoughtworks (where Swartz was working before his death); executive director of Demand Progress David Segal; and renowned information design writer Edward Tufte.

Earlier today, Wikileaks claimed that Swartz was also a possible source. While the group says it can’t verify if Swartz indeed contributed leaked information, its mission certainly falls in line with Swartz’s drive for making information free and public.

Photo: Flickr/Daniel Sieradski

The statement (pasted below) comes after the intense backlash Go Daddy received yesterday from customers and Internet critics after it appeared on an official list of companies supporting SOPA. Not only did Go Daddy issue a statement on its new stance, but it’s also compulsively responding to any comments on Twitter referencing a Go Daddy boycott (screenshot here). It’s the same message, tweeted over a hundred times at this point.

For anyone who’s still in the dark about the proposed legislation,  SOPA gives both the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against websites associated with infringing, pirating and/or counterfeiting intellectual property. The implication of having the act pass is that it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content (such as a song, picture or video clip), the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business with companies like PayPal.

As one of the largest domain registrars, Go Daddy’s support of SOPA was extremely alarming to many people and companies with a strong presence on the Internet because it could make de-indexing domain names much easier.

Talk of a Go Daddy boycott began yesterday on community link-sharing site Reddit, and quickly grew to include several influential business leaders and media personalities. Among them were Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh and celebrity/investor Ashton Kutcher. The company’s change-of-heart was announced today around the same time Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Tweeted he would be transferring Wikipedia’s domains from Go Daddy in protest.

Go Daddy initially shrugged off the protests, issuing a nonchalant response to let people know it hasn’t negatively impacted its business — which was the equivalent of shaking the hell out of a giant beehive and not expecting to get stung. Boycott participators responded by publishing step-by-step tutorials for transferring a bulk of domains to a new registrar, complete with recommendations to competitors.

It also started a Scumbag Go Daddy meme, which will probably never go away despite the company’s new stance on SOPA. It’ll be interesting to see if people still decide to take their business away from Go Daddy.

Check out the full statement from Go Daddy pasted below:

Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.

“As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy,” said Adelman.

In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.

“Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future,” Jones said.

The attack was supposed to be part of a protest against anti-piracy legislation proposed in Congress called the “PROTECT IP” act — or “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property.” The hacktivist group said that the bill would allow the U.S. Government to force search engines and internet service providers to censor websites they do not like by saying it could cause copyright infringement. It wouldn’t be the first time Anonymous has taken up a political cause as the group attacked Visa and Bank of America for trying to cut off Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s website is still humming and shows no sign of slowing down. The site loaded in a few seconds around the time the attack took place and it still only takes just a few seconds to load as of 11 p.m. pacific time. It looks like Anonymous was not able to rally enough of an attacking force to bring the site offline with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack using a program called the “low-orbit ion cannon.”

The “attack” wasn’t necessarily a failure — but it just shows how divisive and amorphous hacktivist group Anonymous can be. While a number of online activists frequently claim leadership over the hacking group and release missives and press releases, it can be difficult to rally the online hackers toward a cause. It’s usually politically motivated, like when the hacktivist group brought attacked Sony after the company tried to sue a hacker for “jailbreaking” a PlayStation 3 console.

Anonymous is a murky name sweepingly applied to hackers who frequent online forums like 4chan and other news aggregators that have undertaken some of the larger political causes. But because it isn’t an official organization, it’s hard to place any faces or names to the hacktivist group and it can, at times, be a very loose organization. There are also a few reports that hackers within the quasi-group Anonymous are starting to attack each other over how the PlayStation Network attacks and responses were handled.

Sony laid indirect blame for its online gaming network, the PlayStation Network (PSN), downtime on Anonymous, which typically rallies a group of loosely connected hackers under moral or political banners to take down large companies. The company said its defenses were weakened while it was fending off DDoS attacks from Anonymous, giving hackers an opportunity to break in. Anonymous has denied that it was involved in breaking into and bringing down the PSN.

The Egyptian government has restored Internet service to the country after an unprecedented nationwide Internet shutdown that lasted almost a week, the Internet security firm Renesys confirms.

The communications shutdown, which began on January 27, was meant to make it more difficult for protesters to organize. But it didn’t stop an estimated 250,000 citizens from gathering in Cairo yesterday to call for the end of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, which has lasted for three decades. Smaller protests also sprung up in other major Egyptian cities like Alexandria.

By restoring Internet access, the Egyptian government may be hoping to stabilize the turmoil the country is currently facing. Yesterday President Mubarak announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election later this year. But anti-Mubarak protesters are fed up and want him out of the country as soon as possible.

The government first blocked social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook on January 25 — services that have become increasingly important to activists over the last few years. During Iran’s protests in 2009, Twitter became one of the most widely used tools for protesters. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone responded to Egypt’s Internet block last week, declaring “The tweets must flow!” Google ended up launching a speak-to-tweet service last week to help Egyptians be heard (you can listen to recordings at the Speak2Tweet Twitter account).

Photo via Al Jazeera English

Billed as a social network for social causes and activism, the service aims to help people find and discover issues they care about with their friends, keep tabs on them through news and updates, and over time, help support their work and raise awareness. A nonprofit itself, Jumo is the latest example of broad efforts throughout the industry to bring the energy and innovation of venture-backed startups to the world of philanthropy.

Getting started with the service requires you to connect your Facebook account, after which you’re asked to select various issues, ranging from Arts and Culture to Education, Health, and Human Rights, and rate them according to your level of interest. Jumo then suggests charities and organizations to follow out of the 3,500 it has signed up for its initial launch.

Once set up is completed, the crux of the service is a Facebook-style “Top News” section on its homepage that contains latest activity from your followed issues and charities. Items in the news stream are supposed to be relevant to the your interests and help you keep updated with issues, charities, and people that you care about.

While Jumo has a well-executed user interface and is headed in the right direction, something I found peculiar about the social network is, ironically, a lack of social features. For example, even though accounts are connected to Facebook, there is no way to see which of my friends I can find on Jumo, other interesting people worth following, or invite others. I had to search for my Facebook friends, as well as founder Chris Hughes, to find and follow their profiles.

All this may not be an entirely bad thing considering that it leaves much of the site’s focus on the issues and charities themselves, but if Jumo plans on billing itself as a social network that helps users spread the word and raise awareness, it may not be a bad idea to make it easier to find likeminded souls.

Worth noting is Hughes’ intentional lack of focus on donations on the site. 

“We are not trying to build another donation platform. We are really focused on building a social network where you can find compelling projects and issues and connect with them in a way that will be lasting,” Hughes told the LA Times.

That may help differentiate Jumo from Causes, a similar application started by Sean Parker and Joe Green, two entrepreneurs with similarly close ties to Facebook’s founding circle, which has reached 119 million users over its four years of existence. It has a more overt focus on fundraising, with prominent “Donate Now” buttons and windows which pop up suggesting donations.

Jumo is based in New York and has raised $3.5 million from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, the Knight Foundation, and other individual backers.

“It’s always been our goal to reach the ‘weakest signals’ all over the world, such as the recent usage in Iran and Moldova,” when those countries were undergoing violent unrest and saw little local media coverage of protests, said Williams.

At the same time, however, Williams and cofounder Biz Stone, Twitter’s creative director, both took issue with a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell that posited “the revolution will not be tweeted.”

Stone agreed that in order to effect real, meaningful social change, “you need strong ties, such as real friends in the real world, and a real hierarchical, military-like structure … to really get things done.”

But he added that with a real-time exchange of information like Twitter, it would be “absurd to argue that those are not effective and helpful and complementary, to disseminating information.”

“It’s not going to be technology that will be the agent of change that changes the world — it will be actual people making actual change,” said Stone.

Williams and Stone were speaking at an INFORUM–Commonwealth Club event that focused on creating debate around civic issues. It was moderated by Businessweek tech writer Brad Stone.

As for taking on all autocracies at once, Twitter is apparently not quite ready to tackle China as a test case for free speech.

“We believe passionately in the free exchange of information across the world. We get the sense, however, that that is not exactly how the Chinese authorities see them. Hence, we are going to hold off for now,” said Williams, adding the company has no immediate plans to tackle the country’s restrictive speech policies. “China is big, but there are a lot of other places in the world where we want to focus.”

Williams touched only briefly on the news last week that he was stepping down as CEO of the company, handing the title over to former COO Dick Costolo. The move was a strategic one, said Williams, and designed to help the company keep growing in “the right directions.”

“I just realized that the demands for the CEO going forward would be much more about a typical CEO role” that would involve planning and organization, which “was a lot of the reason why I brought Dick on as COO last year.”

“I just thought Dick could do a better job than I can, while I can do a better job in products,” said Williams, who described himself as fundamentally a “products guy.”

Twitter has experienced booming growth since its founding in 2006, leaping from mere thousands of users in its first year to more than 160 million tweeting over 100 million a day. The privately held company has also seen its employee roster jump from dozens of employees at its start to over 300.