The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.

When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.

“He’s in trouble,” the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.

And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers.

But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

Some former Apple executives say there is an unresolved tension within the company: executives want to improve conditions within factories, but that dedication falters when it conflicts with crucial supplier relationships or the fast delivery of new products. Tuesday, Apple reported one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. Its sales would have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.

Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

“If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.

—

Gu Huini contributed research.

Also Wednesday, a New Zealand judge denied Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload founder, bail following his arrest last week on American accusations of copyright infringement.

The prosecutor’s office spokeswoman, Marieke van der Molen, declined to release the name of the latest man arrested in line with Dutch privacy rules, but a United States Justice Department official identified him as software programmer Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and a resident of both Turkey and Estonia.

Ms. Van der Molen said the suspect was arrested last Friday and appeared on Monday before a judge, who ordered him detained for 60 days pending an American extradition request.

Judge David McNaughton in Auckland denied Mr. Dotcom bail pending a hearing Feb. 22 on his possible extradition to face trial in the United States, saying Mr. Dotcom poses a flight risk. Mr. Dotcom, 38, insisted he was innocent and posed no flight risk.

New Zealand police arrested three other Megaupload employees last week on American accusations that they facilitated millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content, costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. Judge McNaughton was expected to make bail rulings on the three later this week or early next week.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

—

David Barboza, Peter Lattman and Catherine Rampell contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Caving to a massive campaign by Internet services and their millions of users, Congress indefinitely postponed legislation Friday to stop online piracy of movies and music costing U.S. companies billions of dollars every year. Critics said the bills would result in censorship and stifle Internet innovation.

The demise, at least for the time being, of the anti-piracy bills was a clear victory for Silicon Valley over Hollywood, which has campaigned for a tougher response to online piracy. The legislation also would cover the counterfeiting of drugs and car parts.

Congress’ qualms underscored how Internet users can use their collective might to block those who want to change the system.

The battle over the future of the Internet also played out on a different front Thursday when a loose affiliation of hackers known as “Anonymous” shut down Justice Department websites for several hours and hacked the site of the Motion Picture Association of America after federal officials issued an indictment against Megaupload.com, one of the world’s biggest file-sharing sites.

The site of the Hong Kong-based company was shut down, and the founder and three employees were arrested in New Zealand on U.S. accusations that they facilitated millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content, costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. New Zealand police raided homes and businesses linked to the founder, Kim Dotcom, on Friday and seized guns, millions of dollars and nearly $5 million in luxury cars, officials there said.

In the U.S., momentum against the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, known popularly as PIPA and SOPA, grew quickly on Wednesday when the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and other Web giants staged a one-day blackout and Google organized a petition drive that attracted more than 7 million participants.

That day alone, at least six senators who had co-sponsored the Senate legislation reversed their positions. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, in statements at the time and again on Friday, stressed that more consensus-building was needed before the legislation would be ready for a vote.

On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was postponing a test vote set for Tuesday “in light of recent events.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, followed suit, saying consideration of a similar House bill would be postponed “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

With opposition mounting, it was unlikely that Reid would have received the 60 votes needed to advance the legislation to the Senate floor.

The two bills would allow the Justice Department, and copyright holders, to seek court orders against foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. The legislation would bar online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as credit card companies from doing business with an alleged violator. They also would forbid search engines from linking to such sites.

The chief Senate sponsor, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., cited estimates that copyright piracy costs the American economy more than $50 billion annually and that global sales of counterfeit goods via the Internet reached $135 billion in 2010. He and Smith insist that their bills target only foreign criminals and that there is nothing in them to require websites, Internet service providers, search engines or others to monitor their networks.

That didn’t satisfy critics who said the legislation could force Internet companies to pre-screen user comments or videos, burden new and smaller websites with huge litigation costs and impede new investments.

The White House, while not taking a specific stand on the bills, last week said it would “not support any legislation that reduces freedom of expression … or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” On Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said online piracy is an issue that has to be addressed, “but everybody has to be in on it for it to work and get through Congress.”

The scuttling, for now, of PIPA and SOPA frustrates what might have been one of the few opportunities to move significant legislation in an election year where the two parties have little motivation to cooperate.

Until recently “you would have thought this bill was teed up,” with backing from key Senate leaders and support from powerful interest groups, said Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who cosponsored the original bill but quickly dropped his backing on the grounds the bill could undermine innovation and Internet freedom.

Moran said the “uprising” of so many people with similar concerns was a “major turnaround, and in my experience it is something that has happened very rarely.”

Moran said PIPA and SOPA now have “such a black eye” that it will be difficult to amend them. Reid, however, said that there had been progress in recent talks among the various stakeholders and “there is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved.”

Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer protection and privacy advocacy group, said Google and Facebook and their supporters “have delivered a powerful blow to the Hollywood lobby.” He predicted a compromise that doesn’t include what many see as overreaching provisions in the current legislation.

“It’s been framed as an Internet freedom issue, but at the end of the day it will be decided on the narrow interests of the old and new media companies,” he said. The big questions involve who should or shouldn’t pay – or be paid – for Internet content.

Leahy said he respected Reid’s decision to postpone the vote but lamented the Senate’s unwillingness to debate his bill.

“The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem,” Leahy said. Criminals in China, Russia and other countries “who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided” it was not worth taking up the bill, he said.

In the House, Smith said he had “heard from the critics” and resolved that it was “clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.” Smith had planned on holding further committee votes on his bill next month.

The bill’s opponents were relieved it was put on hold.

Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, commended Congress for “recognizing the serious collateral damage this bill could inflict on the Internet.”

The group represents Internet and technology companies including Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com. Erickson said they would work with Congress “to address the problem of piracy without compromising innovation and free expression.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has joined Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Moran in proposing an alternative anti-piracy bill, credited opponents with forcing lawmakers “to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation.”

But the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, warned, “As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves.” The MPAA, which represents such companies as Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., is a leading advocate for the anti-piracy legislation.

CLEVELAND (AP) – It’s courtroom drama crossed with “Sesame Street,” as a television station barred from using cameras during a high-profile corruption trial covers the highlights with a nightly puppet show. It stars a talking squirrel “reporter” who provides the play-by-play in an exaggerated, “you won’t believe this” tone.

“It’s a satirical look at the trial and, again, I think we have it appropriately placed at the end of the newscast,” WOIO news director Dan Salamone said Thursday.

He said the puppets are in addition to the station’s regular coverage of the Akron federal trial of ex-Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, the longtime Democratic power broker in Cleveland

“It’s not intended in any way to replace any of the serious coverage of the trial,” Salamone said.

Dimora, a former county Democratic chairman in Cleveland, has pleaded not guilty to bribery and racketeering. He also faces another trial on a second indictment.

With cameras barred from court, the news media has relied on artist sketches of the proceedings inside and daily video of Dimora walking into court with his wife and his defense team.

The station uses the puppets repeating testimony and performing as witnesses, reporters and jurors to detail the case, which began last week and is expected to last three months. The trial has been a daily staple of front-page coverage in The Plain Dealer newspaper and often leads TV newscasts in town.

According to Salamone, the puppets are meant to lampoon the sometimes-steamy testimony, including details of a topless hot tub excursion in Las Vegas and taped phone calls with off-color and often unprintable comments.

The station is awaiting the arrival of an updated puppet that looks like the newly clean-shaven Dimora. For now, the station has been showing the back of a puppet’s head that doesn’t resemble Dimora, Salamone said.

And if Dimora grows his familiar salt-and-pepper beard back? “We’ve asked for some accessories in the event that he might decide to regrow his beard,” Salamone said.

The puppets perform near the end of the late newscasts on WOIO and its sister station, WUAB. The stations started using them on Tuesday.

At that point in the newscast, Salamone said, “People are accustomed to seeing a lighter story, what is often called a ‘kicker’ story.”

Salamone said viewers are in for another lookalike puppet debut when Dimora’s longtime friend and political ally, former Cuyahoga County Auditor Frank Russo, testifies for the prosecution. Russo has pleaded guilty to taking bribes and hopes his cooperation will trim his nearly 22-year sentence.

Karl Idsvoog, of Kent State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said Thursday that the puppet show didn’t work. “Why would anyone approve that to go on the air because it was dull and boring,” he said.

Sarah Skidmore, AP

Wikipedia will black out the English language version of its website Wednesday to protest anti-piracy legislation under consideration in Congress, the foundation behind the popular community-based online encyclopedia said in a statement Monday night.

The website will go dark for 24 hours in an unprecedented move that brings added muscle to a growing base of critics of the legislation. Wikipedia is considered one of the Internet’s most popular websites, with millions of visitors daily.

“If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States,” the Wikimedia foundation said.

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act under consideration in the Senate are designed to crack down on sales of pirated U.S. products overseas.

Supporters include the film and music industry, which often sees its products sold illegally. They say the legislation is needed to protect intellectual property and jobs.

Critics say the legislation could hurt the technology industry and infringe on free-speech rights. Among their concerns are provisions that would weaken cyber-security for companies and hinder domain access rights.

The most controversial provision is in the House bill, which would have enabled federal authorities to “blacklist” sites that are alleged to distribute pirated content. That would essentially cut off portions of the Internet to all U.S. users. But congressional leaders appear to be backing off this provision.

Tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay, AOL and others have spoken out against the legislation and said it threatens the industry’s livelihood. Several online communities such as Reddit, Boing Boing and others have announced plans to go dark in protest as well.

The Obama administration also raised concerns about the legislation over the weekend and said it will work with Congress on legislation to help battle piracy and counterfeiting while defending free expression, privacy, security and innovation in the Internet.

Wikipedia’s decision to go dark brings the issue into a much brighter spotlight. A group of Wikipedia users have discussed for more than a month whether it should react to the legislation.

Over the past few days, a group of more than 1,800 volunteers who work on the site and other users considered several forms of online protest, including banner ads and a global blackout of the site, the foundation said. Ultimately, the group supported the decision to black out the English version of the site.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia who first announced the move on his Twitter account Monday, said the bills are a threat to the free, open, and secure web.

“The whole thing is just a poorly designed mess,” Wales said in an email to The Associated Press.

Wikipedia is also requesting that readers contact members of Congress about the bill during the blackout.

“I am personally asking everyone who cares about freedom and openness on the Internet to contact their Senators and Representative,” Wales said. “One of the things we have learned recently during the Arab spring events is that the Internet is a powerfully effective tool for the public to organize and have their voices heard.”

Wikipedia will shut down access from midnight Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday night until midnight Wednesday.

This is the first time Wikipedia’s English version has gone dark. Its Italian site came down once briefly in protest to an Internet censorship bill put forward by the Berlusconi government; the bill did not advance.

“Wikipedia is about being open,” said Jay Walsh, spokesman for the Wikimedia foundation. “We are not about shutting down and protesting. It’s not a muscle that is normally flexed.”

___

Skidmore reported from Portland, Ore.

By Amy Chozick

The hacking group Anonymous posted online the personal details of Jeffrey L. Bewkes, left, the chairman of Time Warner, and also leaked information about the family of Sumner M. Redstone, right, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation.
The online activist group known as Anonymous, which has targeted opponents of the Occupy Wall Street movement and businesses that stopped providing services to WikiLeaks, has set its sights on a new adversary: media executives.

In protest of antipiracy legislation currently being considered by Congress, the group has posted online documents that reveal personal information about Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, and Sumner M. Redstone, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation. Those companies, like almost every major company in the media and entertainment industry, have championed the Stop Online Piracy Act, the House of Representatives bill, known as SOPA, and its related Senate bill, called Protect I.P.

The documents, culled from various databases, included Mr. Bewkes’s home addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged users to bombard the company and its executives with e-mails, faxes and phone calls. Mr. Bewkes has received intimidating phone calls and a barrage of e-mails, according to supporters of the legislation who have knowledge about the matter but are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The documents also included the corporate contact information for a range of companies including NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company.

A Disney spokeswoman said neither the company nor its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, had received threats. Time Warner declined to comment. The file that was posted regarding Mr. Redstone has details about his family, home and career but does not include private contact information. A Viacom spokeswoman declined to comment.

Anonymous, a loosely organized collective of so-called hacktivists, has called its effort “Operation Hiroshima.” It began on Jan. 1, when the group dropped a trove of documents on Web sites that facilitate anonymous publishing, like Pastebin.com and Scribd.com. The documents included information about media executives and government figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and data on corporations and government entities that the group opposes.

“They should feel threatened,” said Barrett Brown, a Dallas-based online activist who has worked with Anonymous, referring to backers of the antipiracy legislation. “The idea is to put pressure on the politicians and companies supporting it.”

The online effort underscores how heated the arguments have become over legislation that may seem like arcane government regulation. Media companies say the legislation, which has bipartisan support, will crack down on illicit downloads of movies, music and television, especially from overseas Web sites. SOPA would expand the ability of the government and private companies to hold Web sites responsible for content the companies believe infringes on their copyrights, allowing greater use of court orders and lawsuits that could ultimately shut down the sites.

The technology industry, including giants like Google and Yahoo, and advocates for Internet freedom say the bills would censor the Internet, stifle free speech and give the government too much power to regulate and shut down Web sites in the United States. Both sides have spent millions on lobbying in Washington. But at the grass-roots level, the issue has galvanized Internet activists, who lack lobbying power but have promoted the cause among the online community.

“You take our speech, you take our Internet, you take our Bill of Rights, you take our Constitution, we fight back,” said a monotone voice on a YouTube video posted by Anonymous before the Operation Hiroshima document drop.

Lawmakers and their aides have also been targets. A photograph of a 25-year-old aide for the House Judiciary Committee was superimposed into pornography by a group related to Anonymous, according to another aide who was briefed on security threats to lawmakers and their staffs. “Why can’t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?” this aide said.

The vast majority of SOPA opponents convey their views through legitimate means. Hundreds of Web sites have encouraged blackouts and boycotts to protest the legislation. According to BlackoutSOPA.org, nearly 12,000 users have changed their Twitter profile pictures to a “Stop SOPA” badge.

“The more outrage expressed on the Internet in the coming days, the better,” said Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm and an early investor in Twitter. He said he did not condone threats or “any kind of intimidation” by hackers.

Last month Scribd.com introduced a function that made the words on documents gradually fade away. As they did, a pop-up prompted users to contact their representatives. “Don’t let the Internet vanish before your eyes,” it read.

The tactics have succeeded in some cases. Initially a supporter, the Web hosting company Go Daddy reversed its position on SOPA after Wikipedia and thousands of other Web sites said they would withdraw their domains from the service. “Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Companies like Time Warner, which owns HBO, CNN and the Warner Brothers studio, and Viacom, which owns MTV and the Paramount studio, have experienced security teams, but they are not necessarily trained to handle anonymous online threats, said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer at Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software.

“It’s easy to get something taken off a Web site, but it’s impossible to erase things off the Internet,” he said.

Less than a week after the Operation Hiroshima documents were posted, a Twitter message linking to Mr. Bewkes’s home phone numbers and addresses, his annual income and his wife’s name and age had spread across the Internet. The message included #OpHiroshima, the shortened Twitter code for the effort.

The global activists in the nebulous collection known as Anonymous often use computer skills to support political causes. For example, Anonymous demanded a full Christmas dinner for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is in prison facing charges of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Last month, hackers associated with Anonymous published a trove of e-mail addresses and the personal information of subscribers of Stratfor, a security group based in Austin, Tex. Last year, a splinter group affiliated with Anonymous attacked the Sony Corporation, shutting down its PlayStation online network. The attack cost the company around $171 million, according to industry estimates. Movements like Anonymous often squabble among themselves, but SOPA is a uniquely unifying cause, said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University and an expert on hacking. To these activists, she said, “Internet freedom is not controversial.”

United States Representative Lamar Smith says online piracy is damaging the United States economy and putting American lives at risk. Foreign Web sites that distribute American-made entertainment and counterfeit products, like fake pharmaceuticals, are “stealing our profits, they’re stealing our jobs and they may be endangering the health of Americans,” said Mr. Smith, a Republican from San Antonio.

He introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act in October to tackle the problem, but the bill has received a cold reception in Mr. Smith’s home state.

Technology companies and business advocates in Texas agree that cyber crimes are a problem, but they contend that Mr. Smith’s bill would cause greater economic damage, particularly to Texas’ growing technology sector. And they say that online pirates could find ways to evade the law. Rackspace, Facebook and eBay, which have received economic incentives from the state to create jobs in Texas, are among the companies opposing the bill.

“In the name of policing the online theft of intellectual property, key lawmakers are pushing a cure that’s worse than the disease,” Lanham Napier, the chief executive of Rackspace, a Web hosting business, wrote on the company’s blog in December.

Existing United States laws — used by copyright holders and law enforcement authorities to remove copyrighted or illegal content from the Internet — do not apply to foreign Web sites that operate outside the jurisdiction of American courts. To effectually shut down a foreign site engaging in illegal activity, the Stop Online Piracy Act, known as SOPA, would allow a court to order domestic companies to cut financial ties and block American customers’ access to the site.

The bill has bipartisan support from a majority of the House Judiciary Committee, for which Mr. Smith is chairman, and is likely to pass out of committee when Congress reconvenes late this month. Mr. Smith said there was no language in the bill that would harm American businesses.

“Unless Rackspace is a foreign Web site primarily dedicated to illegal activity, it’s not going to affect them or Facebook or any of the others,” he said.

The technology industry strongly disagrees.

Ed Black, the chief executive of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said the bill would fundamentally change technology companies’ relationships with customers.

“The harm is it ruins the business models for companies,” Mr. Black said. “We don’t want companies in a free society to act as secret police.”

If the current bill passes, a plaintiff could obtain a court order without giving the defendant notice.

A foreign Web site accused of breaking United States law would have 48 hours to request an appeal of the court’s decision. If it does not appeal, American companies would have five days to obey the court order or face liability for enabling illegal activity.

Google and Yahoo would be required to remove hyperlinks to the accused Web site in search results, PayPal and Visa would have to stop payment transactions on the site, and Google AdWords would have to discontinue advertisements. (All of those companies oppose the bill.)

Internet service providers and companies like Rackspace would be required to block American users from accessing the Web site, or, as Mr. Napier put it in his blog post, “censor their customers with little in the way of due process.”

Rackspace estimates that a quarter of the business it conducts with its more than 160,000 customers is overseas. Its headquarters is in an area of San Antonio just outside Mr. Smith’s district, though he represents many of the 2,300 employees who work there.

Despite the outcry, Mr. Smith stands behind the bill, which he said would protect Texans against intellectual property theft. Mr. Smith also pointed to Austin as a “ripe target” because of its thriving music and film industries.

“There is an imbalance in the degree to which intellectual property rights are protected online,” said Chris Castle, a lawyer who represents musicians in Austin and supports SOPA.

baaronson@texastribune.org

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He said Texans would benefit from a more clearly defined set of property rights, because the bill would encourage investment in legitimate Internet businesses that can profit from legally distributing artists’ work. SOPA would force American companies and individuals to take responsibility for promoting criminal activity.

The bill faces opposition from fellow conservatives in Mr. Smith’s home state and elsewhere. Gov. Rick Perry does not support the bill, nor does the conservative business advocacy group Americans for Job Security.

The measure would force technology companies to divert resources they could spend on innovation, job growth and marketing for “compliance with this new regulatory regime,” said Stephen DeMaura, the president of Americans for Job Security. The extra spending on legal counsel would hurt hundreds of technology companies in Texas, he added, and especially harm start-ups and small businesses.

Organizations and people opposed to SOPA say the bill would “nuke” high-tech companies in Mr. Smith’s district, and they accuse Mr. Smith of representing the interests of the entertainment industry over his constituents.

According to Opensecrets.org, which is run by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics, the majority of Mr. Smith’s campaign financing, $59,300 in this year’s election cycle, has come from the entertainment industry.

But Opensecrets also reports that Mr. Smith has received $392,995 from the entertainment industry and $387,440 from the technology industry since 1998 — a small difference over all.

The technology industry remains convinced that its views were under-represented at a committee hearing on the bill and that pirates would find ways to evade the measure’s provisions. Federal lawmakers are trying to move the bill quickly, Mr. Black said, without conducting extensive economic studies or consulting technical experts on cybersecurity.

“You would at least hope that there would be an attempt to hear out all stakeholders,” Mr. Black said, “so there could be a consensus of understanding where there’s common ground and where there are different views to try to bend.”

baaronson@texastribune.org

A few companies want to replace the crude vibration motors in today’s phones and tablets with something that provides a much wider range of sensations, allowing you to feel the rumble of a Harley or the reverberation of a shotgun blast. The new technology can even let you feel the outlines of a button on the screen.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show, the gigantic gadget conclave in Las Vegas this week, a company called Artificial Muscle Inc. demonstrated how it can make mobile devices shake and rattle with great realism, employing a technology that uses plastics that function like muscles.

The company showed off an iPhone it had modified by placing one of its Vivitouch “motors” inside. The phone shook as it ran a simple ball-rolling game. The plastic muscle provided the feeling not just of the ball hitting the walls of a maze, but of the slight vibration it made while rolling freely across the floor.

When it was used for typing, the phone gave a buzzing sensation that confirmed each press of the virtual keys.

In another demonstration, a Vivitouch motor shook a modified Xbox controller to allow the user to feel what it’s like to hold a beating heart. In another instance, it let the user experience the signature rumble of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle starting up.

The vibration engines that go into today’s phones and game controllers consist of an electric motor that spins a metal weight. They take time to start up and are effective at only one frequency. That means they are unable to provide varying sensations. It’s pretty much the same rumble or buzz every time.

With Vivitouch motors, users will have “high-definition feel,” says Dirk Schapeter, CEO of Artificial Muscle.

The company is owned by German chemical giant Bayer AG and is a spinoff from SRI International. (Another technology from this California-based research institute was integrated into the iPhone last year: Siri, the virtual personal assistant that talks to you.)

Artificial Muscle’s motors contain strips of “muscle.” When an electric charge is applied over the strips, they expand and contract at a frequency that can be precisely controlled.

The first product to use Vivitouch came out in September. It’s the Mophie Pulse, a sleeve for the iPod Touch that’s intended to make games more lifelike.

The next step for the company is to get the motor built into phones. Schapeter says there will be a couple of those on the market this year, from companies he wouldn’t identify. He did not say how much the Vivitouch would cost.

Artificial Muscle isn’t the only company trying to cause a sensation. Senseg OY of Finland has an exotic way of turning electricity into feeling. By applying a (non-shocking) electric field through the screen of a tablet, it can provide resistance to the movement of the user’s finger. So a glossy, smooth screen can suddenly feel rough.

“The palette of effects that’s available is enormous,” says David Rice, vice president of marketing at Senseg.

The feature should be easy to add to tablets, since it consists solely of a chip and an additional coating on the screen, Rice says. The company is in talks with tablet makers. It might be included in products due late this year. He would not say how much it would add to the price.

The technology could help users “feel” a scroll bar, for instance, or the boundaries of an image. Each letter in a text message could register as a little “bump,” making it easier to select parts of the text.

Or the slingshot you pull back to fire an angry bird could register more and more resistance the farther you pull it back, Rice suggests.

“It’s little things. It’s not something that’s going to immediately blow you away,” Rice says. But if it becomes pervasive, it’ll be something “you’ll recognize when it’s gone.”

LAS VEGAS (AP) – The International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is all about the latest smartphones, tablet computers and other devices. But what about the old gadgets? Don’t they get any love?

Actually, one machine at the show is designed to help recycle gadgets, giving old phones a fitting end, or a better home.

Drop your phone into the EcoATM, and the machine will pay you what it believes the handset is worth. The cupboard-sized machine has a large touch screen and a big metal “mouth” where you can place your old phone or MP3 player. It takes pictures of the device to figure out what kind of shape it’s in. Then, you choose one of the machine’s many cables to connect your device. The machine will figure out if the device’s internals are working.

When its analysis is complete, it gives you a quote on the spot, based on what a network of hundreds of electronics-recycling companies are willing to pay for it. If you accept, it spits out cash. In a demonstration by EcoATM founder Bill Bowles, it said a Verizon iPhone 4 was worth $221.

An older phone might not be worth reselling, but the machine will take it anyway, and give you a dollar. The company will melt down the phone in an environmentally friendly fashion to extract the precious metals from it.

WHY IT’S HOT: It’s tough to recycle old electronics. Collection bins are few and far between, though some electronics stores accept items for recycling. You can sell newer phones on eBay, but it’s a bit of a hassle.

THE UPSHOT: A fast way to deal with old electronics that keeps your conscience clean and might give you a bit of extra money.

THE DOWNSIDE: The EcoATM’s quote probably won’t match what you can get for your item on eBay. On the other hand, you avoid eBay’s seller fees. You have to physically go to the ATM. It’s a big machine, about twice the size of a regular drugstore ATM. It has a lot of complicated moving parts, and could be prone to breakage.

AVAILABILITY: There are about fifty of them deployed right now, mostly in grocery stores and malls in California. The San Diego-based company behind the machine says it plans to have about 500 out at the end of this year, spreading eastward.