TV News Ignores Iranian Election Protests

I’ve been following the Iranian post-election protests and riots via social networking sites like YouTube, Twitter and others. Last night while the streets of Tehran were filled with people chanting “Death to the Dictator!” after a clear case of election tampering, CNN was running a fluff piece about whether or not Obama is more popular than effective. Los Angeles based TV news programs talked about illegal aliens working at a car wash, a newsworthy discovery on par with finding tools in a hardware store. FoxNews ran a story about a peeved Sarah Palin. A continuous scan through all available satellite TV news channels revealed similar drivel, with nothing of substance about Iran.

I find this disconcerting given Iran’s important role in the Middle East, their efforts to become a nuclear power and their influence on international policy. Iran is one of the world’s most powerful theocracies and their government has more or less been an enemy of the United States for decades. When their people protested a rigged election, did battle with police and chanted “We want freedom!” in the streets they were mostly ignored by American news networks. This lack of coverage is even more disappointing now that the Iranian election protests have spilled over into large American and European cities.

I realize that there are logistic difficulties in placing reporters inside of a nation that is hostile to foreign press, but this didn’t entirely stop the BBC. Their reporters managed to capture video footage of the protests and were even briefly arrested while reporting on this story. They managed to get enough footage out of the country that Iran has since been actively jamming the BBC communications satellite.

CNN is a very active user of the Twitter microblogging service and used to seem savvy about social media. They were one of the first Twitter users to achieve over a million followers and at one point had 45 official twitter accounts. Why did they not improve their coverage after being twittered with thousands of requests for this? At the very least they could have put a political analyst in front of the camera to discuss what was happening. For many hours, the 2nd most popular trending topic on Twitter.com was #IranElection and the 3rd most popular was #CNNFail. I am surprised that an event of global significance combined with this much social media outrage wasn’t enough to motivate them to cover the story.

The more that I use the internet, the less use I have for main stream media and entertainment. I found dozens of videos on YouTube covering the Iranian riots while they were actually happening. There were hundreds of photographs of the riots on web sites like Flickr. I even found live clandestine coverage on twitter purportedly from a protesting Iranian student as police assaulted a university. I’m beginning to think that traditional news media outlets no longer have much to offer. They are slow, unwieldy and subject to the bias of advertisers and network executives. Television news networks often worry so much about ratings that they focus on entertainment as often as information. "News" stories about “American Idol”, “24” and Obama going on a date with his wife get nearly as much coverage as events of global significance. Once upon a time they may have cared about facts and integrity, but stories like the Dan Rather incident have shown us that their slowness is not caused by diligent fact checking.

If traditional media networks do not find a way to more effectively leverage emerging internet technologies they will soon find themselves without viewers and sponsors.

UPDATE:
CNN's coverage has improved today and they even acknowledged the criticism they have been receiving from the internet/Twitter. Ironically, #CNNFail is still in the top ten list of trending topics on Twitter, and comments there indicate twitterers are either too busy watching the internet to notice CNN's improved coverage or are still angry that it took them so long to start covering this issue.

Enjoying My Amazon Kindle

(image not actual size)

I got an Amazon Kindle about 8 months ago and I love it as much now as I did then. I can't believe how many books I read now (5+ novels per months plus various other things). I keep it within reach nearly all day long. The built in memory holds roughly 200 books so no matter what mood I'm in I always have something on hand that suits me. The e-ink technology is MUCH easier on the eyes than a computer screen (no flicker and no back light), and the adjustable font size is great for when you are desperately trying to finish an engrossing chapter at 2AM while you can barely keep your burning eyes open.

Although it costs around $350, it has already more than paid for itself. Here's how: There are countless multitudes of free legal ebooks readily available on the internet. I'm not talking about stealing, file sharing or piracy, but legitimate honest to goodness free books. Since ebooks are quite small (roughly 1MB each), they can be downloaded almost instantly and transfered to the Kindle via USB. Sites like ManyBooks.net actually let you download free books in Kindle format. Other sites such as Baen Free Library give away legal free ebooks from popular science fiction authors. Some popular current authors such as Cory Doctorow give away ebooks free in hopes that it will gain them a larger following and thus a larger customer base. I quite literally have THOUSANDS of free books that will take me forever to read, which means I'm now spending much less money feeding my reading habit. If you want current books and don't mind spending around $10 for them, you can use the built in free EVDO wireless internet connection to download them from Amazon directly to the Kindle device without any need for a computer. The original purchase prices comes with unlimited free EVDO internet access so you can download books and surf the web nearly anywhere in the U.S. where you can receive a cell phone signal. The e-ink is a bit slow to refresh and the browser is primative, but sites like Amazon.com and WikiPedia look pretty good. I've used my Kindle to read and post to Twitter.com, access Google Maps to find my approximate location on a map and find nearby restaurants and businesses. I admit, the web browser leaves a lot to be desired but you can use it as much as you like for free, something that's pretty nice as a side benefit to a full featured ebook reader. Here are some of my favorite things about the kindle:

• Not much bigger than a mass market paperback yet it can hold hundreds of books and offers access to the internet
• Battery lasts a long time (more than a week when I have the EVDO modem turned off)
• Great for traveling as I no longer have to fill my carryon luggage with heavy bulky books
• All content on the device is searchable, which makes it easy to look up facts and find favorite passages
• You can use the built in keyboard to take notes and mark up your favorite texts
• It's a great way to read popular fiction without filling your real book shelves with one-time reads that don't add particular value or distinction to your home library
  

Here are my few complaints about the kindle:

• Would like a higher contrast screen. Current screen is good, but white background is not pristine white and is a more like the off-white paper used for newspapers
  
• It should really come with a better case that offers a bit more protection and security
• Would like a smaller "next page" button so that it is not as easy to accidentally advance to the next page
• Would like a more robust web browser (I know, it's an ebook reader and not an iPhone, but I think with a minimal effort they could have made the browser much better)

Other features that people might like to know about:

• It has a head phone jack and volume controls for listening to mp3 files or even audio books
• It has an email address that only accepts mail from addresses you designate, so you can send txt files, word docs, pdfs and kindle files directly to your device

I know this probably will just look like an ad to most folks, as I am admittedly an Amazon.com affiliate. Nevertheless I thought I share this review with everyone in the hope that others will enjoy it much as I do and find themselves reading more. In this media saturated world where everyone has multiple TV's, computers, iPods and other forms of entertainment, it's all too easy to give up reading. This device makes it so convenient that people who own will find themselves reading more, which means that they will get more mental stimulation than most other forms of passive entertainment.

Lest Darkness Fall Online Store

I have recently created an online store (see title link) that will help you find books, movies and more about the topics found on this blog. It's a great way for people to find liberty oriented items. Customers can rest easy knowing that all transactions will be handled through Amazon.com.

As an added bonus, Amazon will give me a small commission on all sales purchased through this store, so in addition to getting quality goods you will also be supporting this web log. If you don't see what your are looking for in my store, click on the "Powered by Amazon.com" link in the lower right hand corner of the store and I will still receive a small referral fee for any purchases you make on Amazon.

Thank you for your support!

Possible Federal Ban On Radar Detectors

According to i-go-cars.com:

The legislation, sponsored by Senator Steve Oelrich of Gainesville, Florida, would make using a radar detector a secondary traffic infraction, which means you could be ticketed were [you] pulled over for another offense and found to be using a radar detector.

I understand that many people think that this is a safety issue, but I'm against any such ban. I don't own a radar detector and am not a pedal-to-the-metal sort of driver, so my objection to the ban is not about making it easier for me to speed.

I object because it amounts to denying a private citizen the right to own a device that passively receives and alerts them to a signal that is being beamed at them for the purposes of surveillance. If somebody (in this case the police) is bouncing a laser or radio wave at you for the purposes of measuring and recording your actions, you should be entitled to own a gadget that informs you that you are being targeted. If it ever becomes illegal to have such devices, it paves they way to make it illegal to own other tools that could detect more egregious intrusions upon your privacy.

Imagine if someone, such as a pervert neighbor, was using an infrared illuminator to see into your darkened bedroom through an open window. Or, imagine if an unscrupulous hotel maid plants a wireless camera in a room in order to record what happens in bed. It is technologically possible to create devices to warn you of these sorts of intrusions upon your privacy. If it is OK to federally ban a radar/laser detector, why would it not be equally OK to ban other spy-detection devices? The fundamental concept behind the detection technology is the same.

Law enforcement agencies sometimes use microphones, wire-taps, hidden cameras, FLIR, infrared optics and other technology to gather evidence. As better spying technology becomes available, both law enforcement and private citizens will use it. It would be much easier for them to use technological spy tools on people if it was impossible for anyone to obtain devices to detect such spying. Banning radar and laser detectors is a legal step in the wrong direction as it creates a precedent for banning other types of passive detection equipment to warn people that they are being spied upon. It is wrong to deny law abiding citizens (and even criminal suspects since they haven't yet been convicted of anything) a legal means to detect when their privacy is being invaded.

Our right to privacy is more important than the convenience of law enforcement agencies. We have already seen countless cases of people using hidden cameras to photograph up girls' skirts, spy on locker room showers, dressing rooms, and more. As new technology becomes available, perverts and snoops will use it and people should not be barred the use of detection equipment just so that it is easier for the police to gather evidence.

Libertarian Blog Aggregator

The title link is to an RSS aggregate feed that will give you the most recent articles from a collection of Libertarian blogs.

If you'd like to see who made the feed and why, visit them at Zebbyfeeds.

If all goes well, I hope to have this blog added to their feed.


For those less tech savvy folks out there:
Most blogs have a "Subscribe to this page" sort of link, such as those in the "Subscribe to Lest Darkness Fall" section on the left of this page. This lets people with simple feed-reader programs or online services automatically monitor a blog for changes and retrieve newly published articles from that page. Such tools let you view all of the newly published material from all of the sites that you are subscribed to from a single location, much like how you view all of your email messages from various people by opening a single program or viewing a single web page. This saves you from having to visit each of your favorite sites just to see if they contain any new content.

It this technology interests you, consider using a free online service such as Bloglines, or use the "Live Bookmark" feature built into the Mozilla Firefox web browser. My Yahoo, Google Reader, My AOL and various other well known free web service providers also offer similar functionality.

All Labels Currently Used In This Blog

I have labeled nearly all of my previous posts. Here is a complete list of all labels currently in use for this blog. Click on any of the links below to see articles related to that topic. Note that many posts were assigned multiple labels, so there will be some overlap between categories. The number after each label/link is the number of articles that currently exist within each category.

• Books (3)
• Crime (43)
• Drugs and Medicine (6)
• Education (10)
• Food and Beverage (3)
• Guns/Weapons (55)
• Hero (31)
• History (5)
• Humor (6)
• Immigration (35)
• Law (30)
• Miscellaneous (17)
• Movies/Television (5)
• Politics (37)
• Privacy (16)
• Quotations (7)
• Reviews (15)
• Security (28)
• Self Defense (39)
• Technology (19)

Using Labels to Find What You Like

I recently began using blogger's new "labels" feature to classify my recent articles and make it easier for you to find stories that appeal to you. Here's how it works:

Each time I create a post, I add one or more "labels" that describes that nature of the article. These labels then appear as hyperlinks at the bottom of the story. If you see a label that interests you, click on it and you will be taken to a page that contains nothing but articles that I have written related to that particular topic.

This article, for example, is about the technology of labels. Thus, at the end of it you will see a "Labels:" header followed by a hyperlinked word "Technology". If you click on that link, you will get a page that contains all of the articles I have written related to technology.

Once I finish labeling all of my previous posts, I will post another entry listing every label that I have used so that you can see what topics I most have written about and find the articles that are most likely to appeal to you.

Fun Flash Shooting Game

The title link is to a silly, simple and fun shooing game. In short, you appear in a room and zombie/robot things try to get you. You kill them by shooting, and the faster you kill them, the more power ups you get. If you kill a bunch of them within a very short window of time, you get several power-ups. Weapons include pistol, uzi, shotgun, grenades, deployable barrels full of explosives, deployable walls and more.

Watch out for the red guys as they will shoot fireballs at you as soon as they have a clear shot. Also, be sure to grab the red boxes when you kill off a red guy as they contain more weapons and ammo.

Enjoy.

Jon Stewart on Ted Stevens and the Internet

The title link is to a clip on YouTube.com of Jon Stewart mocking Ted Stevens and government ignorance of the internet. I thought it would be a fun way to wrap up this series on government and technology. (I found the link for this file on the IPAC blog, a non-partisan organization dedicated to preserving information freedom through balanced information policy.)

The reason I wrote this series is that I believe we tech-savvy people have a duty to help protect our nation from ignorant politicians. We know how important technology is, and what a huge impact it can have on our lives. It is vital that we research the people that we vote for and make sure we aren't electing people who think of the telegraph as a new-fangled hi-tech device. If someone is running for office, we can’t afford to just vote for them because they've held that office since before we were born. If a representative makes an ass out of himself while giving a speech about technology (ex: Ted Stevens), write him a scathing letter and then vote him out of office (don't send email as he probably won't know how to use it). We can also help defend against technology-ignorant politicians by discussing major technological issues with other voters. Remember that people who don’t know much about technology are less likely to get their news online, so a conversation might be the only way they learn about important technology issues.

Technology and Government

As a follow up to the Ted Stevens post, I here are two more examples of what happens when ignorant government officials make technological decisions for our entire nation:

Example #1: File Sharing Technology
Peer-to-peer file sharing technology allows computer users all over the world to easily exchange files in a manner that is difficult to monitor, track or prevent. As a result, this technology is heavily used to illegally distribute and download music recordings, movies and other copyrighted material. This illegal activity, however, does not mean that file sharing technology is “bad” and that it has no legitimate uses. Peer-to-Peer technology is a fantastic way to distribute information over the internet without overloading a single server or network. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) doesn't care that this technology can be also be used for legally distributing files, and thus they launched a campaign to crush file sharing technology. Eventually this issue ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, and all nine justices unanimously decided that peer-to-peer companies like Grokster can be held liable for copyright piracy on their networks.

According to Justice Sourter:
"There is no evidence that either company (Grokster or StreamCast) made an effort to filter copyrighted material from users' downloads or otherwise impede the sharing of copyrighted files."

According to Donald Verrilli Jr., an entertainment industry lawyer:
"Copyright infringement is the only commercially significant use of file sharing"

In short, a group of very elderly Justices who have most likely never even used peer-to-peer technology and who don't understand its potential have declared open season on people who facilitate it's usage. Now, people who facilitate peer-to-peer networks are faced with the impossible and immoral task of censoring all traffic on their servers (which they would probably get sued for) or risk being sued out of business by the RIAA.

The ironic thing is that since this decision, the entertainment industry is now partnering with peer-to-peer companies such as BitTorrent and Guba.com to distribute their movies and content. Likewise, Apple has all but formally announced that their next operating system will include bit torrent technology to allow for easier distribution of patches and possibly even some files from iTunes. Thus, the very technology that has been under attack as being only useful to pirates is suddenly being embraced by the industries that have been trying to destroy it.

Example #2: RFIDs in Passports
The U.S. State Department plans to start issuing e-passports to Americans starting in August. This will entail embedding an RFID chip in passports that contains your identification information. This would allow devices to scan the passport from a short distance to retrieve this identity information, and will supposedly make for faster and more accurate processing at customs checkpoints. The problem is, this technology is NOT secure.

Hackers have already figured out how to create long range RFID scanners that can read this sort of information over long distances (i.e., from many yards away). They have also figured out how to change the information embedded into RFIDs, and even transmit a virus via RFIDs. And all of this before the first e-passport was even issued! Imagine what hackers will be able to do in 10 years by the time this first generation of e-passports expire? Will anti-American terrorists use this to identify targets for kidnapping? Will terrorists capture your identity from a distance, and then embed that identity into a chip on their own fake passport so that they can travel without the hassle of being arrested? All of these things will probably be possible in the near future. Google for RFID Hacking if you'd like to see some of the ways RFIDs have already been compromised by hackers.

Sen. Ted Stevens Clueless About Internet

The title link is to an .mp3 recording of comments made by U.S. Senator Ted Stevens. He is chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and was a big reason why the so called "Net Neutrality" bill was shot down. This sound bite is part of his 11 minute speech against the Net Neutrality clause. Please click on the title link and listen to the 2.5 minute clip before reading further.

This is a typical example of how people in our government are regulating areas of our lives that they know absolutely nothing about.

Senator Stevens (recently famous for Alaska's $320 million dollar bridge to nowhere), was born over 80 years ago and lived nearly all of his life before the internet even became accessible to the average consumer. It would be very surprising if he knew much about the internet, and his rambling speech proves that he knows absolutely nothing about how it works. Nevertheless, he, and people like him, are deciding on what kinds of regulations should be placed on the internet. This will affect how much people pay to use the internet and what kind of content consumers are able to access. It could even effect what content providers survive.

I find this very frustrating. There is no shame in someone from his generation and cultural context not understanding the internet, but it is infuriating that someone who can't even grasp the fundamental concepts is a key player in regulating what has become the most vital communication system in the world. The internet delivers information and entertainment to and facilitates commerce for nearly a 1.5 BILLION people and should not be regulated by those who aren't even vaguely familiar with it.

Why can't these politicians get some help from their staffers, do some basic research and actually learn about an issue before they start making policy? Either their egos are so bloated that they don't realize the magnitude of their ignorance or they are utterly owned by lobbyists and corporations and just make up stuff to defend the positions they are paid to take. Why do voters even allow jerks like him to govern us? Is Ted Stevens really the best that Alaska has to offer as a senatorial candidate?

For those of you not familiar with the "Net Neutrality Issue", here's a quick summary:

AT&T and other Network Infrastructure owners have expressed a desire to charge additional money from web sites and services that you visit/use in exchange for not blocking your access to access them. For example, your ISP could tell someone like YouTube.com or Google.com to pay them extra money if they want to ensure that you and other users of that ISP/phone lines are able to view their content without undue slowness.

This is admittedly a biased oversimplification of the issue, but since most people who visit this site are fairly tech savvy, I don't want to spend too much time explaining all of the details of Network Neutrality in this post. If you'd like more information, try this Wikipedia link.

New Template Design

For those wondering why I haven't posted recently, it is because I have been teaching myself CSS so that I could re-design my blog template/layout. Roughly 90% of my visitors are using 1024 x 768dpi or higher resolutions, so I decided to make better use of this space. The main (center) column now automatically re-sizes based on the width of your browser window. If you maximize the window you should see more of each article without having to scroll.

I also added a new feature to the blog. In the lower right hand column you will see a new section entitled "Books I'm Currently Reading". Under that are the titles of my current reads, along with a very brief description of what they are about, a small picture of their covers and a link to buy the books from Amazon.com. In addition to helping my readers find new good books, these Amazon.com links will help support this blog as I will receive a small commission for the books and any other products you buy after clicking on these links. Thank you in advance to those of you who choose to support my efforts in this way.

Please leave me your comments about the new layout. In particular, if you are having any problems with this new layout, please let me know what internet browser and screen resolution you are using so I can try to resolve the issue. I have tested this layout in FireFox and Internet Explorer, and would especially like feedback from users of other browsers.

Category Menus on Right Sidebar

Blogger does not offer a built-in tool to let authors index their posts by category. This makes it difficult for visitors to find older articles written about specific subjects, as these articles end up buried on an archive page. To solve this issue, I have manually created category drop down menus.

Look on the right hand side of this page. See the section labeled "Posts By Category"? Under each category is a drop down menu containing a list of articles I have written within each category. Menu items appear with the most recent articles at the top, and the oldest articles at the bottom. Clicking on an item within the menu will take you to that article. Hopefully this will help new visitors find some of my older articles on the topics that they are most interested in.

As time permits, I will continue to add category menus for subjects that I have covered in numerous posts.

Laser Eye Surgery: I Can See!

Regular readers of this blog may be surprised by this deviation from my usual topics, but I am going to take this opportunity to share a personal experience with you in the hope that you might have a similarly positive experience.

For over a decade I needed glasses to see (contacts wouldn't work for me). I'd start my day by waking up in the morning, putting on my glasses, and then getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom. The glasses would come off for a shower, and then go back on before I left the bathroom and stay on for the rest of the day. Driving, watching TV and doing pretty much anything wasn't possible without my glasses. Snorkeling on vacation without glasses meant that the fishes and scenery were indistinct blobs. Nature watching with binoculars and spotting scopes was a juggling act that involved constantly putting my glasses on and off (for some reason I could never see well through other optics while wearing glasses).

All of this hassle is over, now. I had all laser LASIK surgery in both eyes about a month ago. My vision is now 20/15 without corrective lenses. I can see perfectly all of the time. My useable field of view is much larger, as I can turn my eyes to the side to see rather than my entire head (if you wear glasses, looking to the side with your eyes means trying to see an area outside of the focal point of your corrective lenses). When I got hot and sweaty, I don't need to constantly clean oil and moisture off of my glasses to see. When I open the dishwasher or step into a steamy room, my glasses aren't there to fog up. I can wear any kind of sunglasses instead of expensive yet unfashionable prescription lenses. My nose is no longer sore from the constant chaffing of nose pieces. I literally have people telling me things like "Wow, you look younger!", "Did you lose weight?", "You look good, what did you change?" and "I never noticed how nice your eyes are".

Now that the healing is mostly done, I look forward to seeing how this will affect my shooting. I could see well the day after the procedure, but it can take up to 3 months before I am 100% healed, so I didn’t want to risk gunshot residue and copper or lead dust getting into my eyes and thus haven’t shot since the surgery. While doing simple holster drills and dry firing (with snapcaps), I’ve noticed that target acquisition through open sights is much faster than it was with glasses.

The actual laser procedure was quick, painless and surprisingly bearable. The worst part about it was the "creepy" feeling I had about the thought of someone messing with my eyes, but there was neither pain nor even much discomfort. The only downside I have is some post procedural dryness that is easily managed with drops, but even that is rapidly subsiding.

If you are sick and tired of glasses, I suggest you look into having LASIK. Do your research and find a top notch doctor with the best equipment and the best procedural techniques. I paid about double what some of my friends did, and I had better results than people I know who went to discount doctors. I'll never know for sure if I just got lucky with the outcome and wasted the extra money, but I do believe that paying for one of best surgeons in North America contributed to these great results.

Fun Missile Command-Style Game

Here's a fun and free clone of the old Atari Missile Command Game from Total Motorcyle. It's surprisingly well done for a free online game. Enjoy!

Sonic Child/Teen Repellent

According to the New York Times, a Welsh inventor has created a device that repels young people:

The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

Too bad they don't make other variants of this device effective on people such as:

• Illegal Aliens

• Beggars

• Door-to-door sales people and flier distributors

Joking aside, I wonder what sort of legislation and law suits will be spawned by the deployment of such devices.

The article also mentioned the existence of another anti-teenager device that I had not heard of:

Mr. Stapleton, a security consultant whose experience in installing store alarms and the like alerted him to the gravity of the loitering problem, studied other teenage-repellents as part of his research. Some shops, for example, use "zit lamps," which drive teenagers away by casting a blue light onto their spotty skin, accentuating any whiteheads and other blemishes.

On one hand, I sympathize with business owners wanting to keep away rowdy teens and young trouble-makers. On the other, it seems woefully pacifistic to use such technology to repel human beings. Although it isn't the job of shopkeepers to parent wayward youths, I would think it is more beneficial to society if they warned away or reported troublemakers to the police (assuming the police bother to respond to such calls).

Teens are already somewhat made to feel like part of a criminal underworld in many areas, and this isn't a healthy societal attitude. I, for example, was a good, polite, well-dressed and hard-working teen, yet still occasionally felt unfairly discriminated against. I remember what it was like to not be allowed into a corner store without an adult (to prevent shoplifting by minors), or being chased off by the police for "loitering" while doing nothing more harmful than talking to a girlfriend in my car while legally parked at a public waterfront. Had I not been raised by good parents and had such anti-teen policies been backed by annoying sound/light technology, I might have been inclined to destroy the offending devices rather than let them get the better of me.

Essential Tools for Blogophiles

Firefox:
A much better web browser than Internet Explorer. Faster, more secure (no ActiveX support), tabbed browsing and a useful bookmark manager are a few of the more helpful features. People who read blogs and news sites will love being able to ctrl-click on links to open them in new tabs so that they can view them later without navigating away from the current page and without opening up a separate window.

Google News:
Offers collections of recently posted articles in a number of news categories from a wide range of sources. I suggest you customize/personalize the page as this lets you re-order the display of topics, add or remove topics and even create custom news categories of your own. I, for example, created a gun news category that shows me any recently published news stories containing the word "gun".

BugMeNot.com:
It lets you quickly enter free news sites without the hassle of creating an account and providing personal information (or cleverly crafted misinformation). I suggest you click on the FAQ link and get the plug-in for your browser so you can just right-click on any login field and select "BugMeNot" to fill in a username and password from the BugMeNot.com database.

Technorati.com
A search engine specifically for blogs. Many of the mainstream search engines either exclude or do a poor job of indexing blogs. Technorati lets you search the blogosphere for topics that interest you, much as Google lets you search the web at large. Conveniently, it also shows you how many other sites link to each blog in the search results as a pseudo-measurement of how much popularity/authority they have. You can even search within any of the blogs in your search results to find specific posts that contain your key words.

Snopes.com
A web site to help you quickly check if a story, legend or email is a known Urban Legend. Before you get riled up about the latest "I can't believe that really happened!" story, search for it on Snopes to make sure it isn't a well known fake. It's both embarrassing and annoying to forward a story to your friends and family only to later find out that it was a myth.

Amazing Technology to Help the Blind See

AN ARTIFICIAL eye that could enable blind people to recognise the faces of their family was hailed as "revolutionary" and potentially "life-changing" yesterday.

The device uses a camera linked to a computer chip embedded in the eye to relay images to the brain.

To date, it has managed to produce only dots or rows of dots, but it is hoped further developments within the next five years will enable people to recognise doors and walls and ultimately learn to differentiate between familiar faces.

Stories like this really make me glad to be alive in a time of such incredible and rapidly developing technology. Imagine what a difference something like this can make in a person's quality of life if they have need of it.

Supreme Court Justices Ponder File Sharing

The title link is to an article on the U.S. Supreme court considering the case of MGM v. Grokster/Streamcast. Basically, content publishers want the government to shut down peer to peer file sharing. The Supreme Court is stuck with deciding whether or not peer to peer technology is "bad" because of how it facilitates the illegal distribution of copy righted material. Since this technology can be used to disseminate open source non-copyrighted files, it has legitimate uses and is not exclusively a tool for illegal piracy.

This case has the potential to change how our legal system views tools that can be put to both good and bad purposes. VCRs, cassette recorders, CD burners, DVD burners, photocopiers, printing presses, guns, knives, matches and all sorts of things can be used for both lawful and unlawful purposes. I fervently hope that they rule in favor of the file sharing technology, as I think it would be unconscionable to attempt to crush any technology or tool that has legitimate legal uses, even if it also has potentially illegal applications.

In support of the music industry (most likely the artists), the justices agreed that file-sharing services are hurting the industry and allowing users to violate copyright laws.

Cases like these really make me wish that the Supreme Court Justices were not able to sit on the bench for the rest of their lives. I find it hard to believe that all of the Justices can grasp the full potential of this technology, given that many of them lived most of their lives before personal computers and digital files existed.

I understand that these are bright legal minds considering issues of law, but I have my doubts that they are really qualified to judge technology that they are unlikely to have used and unlikely to consider a part of their contemporary culture. I truly hope that their lack of experience with this technology does not cause them to dismiss its positive value when they eventually rule on this case.

Transmitting Data via Human Skin

The title link is to a story announcing a new and very interesting technology called RedTacton that has the ability to transmit data at speeds of up to 2Mbps via human skin! For those not familiar with data transfer speeds, 2Mbps is about the average speed of a home user's broadband cable or DSL internet connection. The idea behind this is that people carrying electronic devices such as PDAs, cameras, MP3 players, etc. could be exchanged with another device by simply touching it.

And since data can pass from one body to another, you could also exchange electronic business cards by shaking hands, trade music files by dancing cheek to cheek, or swap phone numbers just by kissing.

I think this is actually a really good idea. It is fairly easy and convenient to touch a device or person to trade data, and if the files are small the contact need only take place for a second or three. Current wireless methods such as blue tooth, broadcast data in a radius around the device, often up to 20+ feet away. Broadcasting data over the air means others could intercept it, yet data transferred through your skin means you must be in close contact with the person sending the data. Already people have developed ways to broadcast advertisements to wireless devices, send viruses, steal data, etc. In theory this wouldn't be possible with skin based transmission unless that spammer ran through a crowded room touching as many people as possible, which would at least give you a chance to punch the person sending you unwanted junk mail.

I am really looking forward to seeing this technology develop.