Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/dont-break-internet

vbench is a super-lightweight Python library for running a collection of performance benchmarks over the course of your source repository’s history. Since I’m a GitHub user, it only does git for now, but it could be generalized to support other VCSs. Basically, you define a benchmark.
http://wesmckinney.com/blog/?p=373