The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

oh hell no!

Bush wants Google search data

Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth justified charging content companies by saying they are using the telco's network without paying for it.

"Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover," he said in a telephone interview.

WTF? Bellsouth's users are requesting the content. The content providers are already paying for their outgoing bandwidth. Smith wants to charge content providers for the bandwidth their content uses inside someone else's network!. This is ridiculous.

He suggested that Apple Computer might be asked to pay a nickel or a dime to insure the complete and rapid transmission of a song via the Internet, which is being used for more and more content-intensive purposes.

Smith: Thats a nice looking music store you have there. Nice and pretty. Be a shame someone reduced your traffic to a trickle wouldn't it? Now I'm not saying that will happen, I'm just saying you should pay us to keep an eye on it for you. Real neighborly like.

Smith basically saying there are a lot of interesting and popular services on the Internet. So popular that BellSouth's users want them. These services do require larger amounts of bandwidth than say web browsing. Because BellSouth doesn't want their users to go to another ISP, BellSouth won't block access to the services. Instead, they will just charge the owners of the interesting services. If you don't pay your service might not function properly on BellSouth's network.

This is so fucking silly.

BellSouth wants new Net fees

Apple's shares yesterday closed at $80.86 on the day CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first-ever Macintosh computers based on Intel microprocessors.

Astute Register readers will immediately recognise that number: the 8086 was, of course, Intel's first 16-bit, x86 processor. It shipped in 1978, the year after Apple was founded. It contained 29,000 transistors and clocked a massive 5MHz. That's 5MHz, not G5MHz, of course.

That cool, like the guy who wagered $1337 on Jepardy. However the 8086 operated at 4.77Mhz, not 5Mhz.

Apple stock price: $80.86

Decius wrote:
MySpace gets into the competitive censorship game and quickly learns that they very much do not have control of the thing they just bought.

I am reminded of a line from Alien Resurrection, "You think you can tame them?"

I enjoyed this turn of events because it should me the so-called "new media" can resist crap that "old media" companies can pull. Murdoch and crew views MySpace as they view TV. It has content which maybe they don't directly create. The content attracts an audience. They sell advertising space to present to that audience. They take demographic samples of our audience to better sell our ads.

However, Fox and other TV studios *always* control the content of the content, because they want to tone and trim the type of audience they have. If content is objectional, old media simply edits or even removes the content. See the "Ellen" "Roseanne" "Family Guy" "Playmakers" and any number of other events as an example of this practice.

But with MySpace, the audience is the content creators. They revolved when the studios tried to pull their traditional shenanigans. I would make the argument that MySpace is an excellent microcosm of what the Internet should have been: a lot of bitchy teens with nothing of substance to read; a bunch of intellectually questionable folk who claim to be geniuses; some interesting tidbits here and there; some shady stuff most parents would not want their kids exposed to; some downright illegal things.

The difference between MySpace.com and the larger Internet is that with MySpace.com the ratio of content creators to content consumers is many orders of magnitude greater. This has some interesting and cascading side effects:

1-MySpace reacts to censorship threats much more effectively than the Internet. Because instead of reading some obscure article that says that Kazakhstan is censoring political humor, you personally find your words were removed from a website. Companies can less afford to censor their social networks than DNS registars. The Kazakhstan registry makes peanuts off your site and cares nothing about your traffic. News Corps loves your site and because even if only you visit it, they are serving ads to you.

2-MySpace will have more "scenes," "niche markets," and "sub-genres" than the larger Internet because more of the users will say "[issue] isn't being address and its easy for me to fix that." Further, the censorship protection (while not bulletproof) enables people to truly express their interests without revealing their idenities (WHOIS info enforced by law is scary).

3-MySpace's low barriers of entry for participation and feature set means it will attract more users that traditional web publishing. Maybe people will branch off, but creating and publishing to a Blog is much harder than creating and writing to MySpace. Userbase snowballs so more users continue to join. Again, (some) censorship protections.

4-MySpace is a better representation of Tim Berners-Lee's original World Wide Web than the WWW is because of the content creators to content consumers ratio. Granted the world-edittable features aren't their yet, those can be added for "friends" and other MySpace specific issues.

MySpace: A better WWW than the WWW.

Suddenly, everybody can (and, really, must) advertise on TV, because it'll be so specific...and so dynamic. If you start shopping for a new WiFi access point in the morning, Google will know, and that night when you watch Two and a Half Men, your ads will be from D-Link, Linksys and Belkin. And, further, they'll know that an intelligent buyer lives at your IP, so your ads won't show you a hot model demonstrating how they're plug-and-play, but will instead feature a quick recommendation from the SveaSoft guy about which AP's the best one for hotrodding.

This can be taken two ways: one is technical, one is quite funny.

The humor of Cringley

If a company running a country code top-level domain refuses to agree to hand over any information or data held by it to the government, either legally, illegally or extra-legally, secretly or not, the government can simply replace the company with a government-run agency. If it refuses to shut down a website, or to redirect it elsewhere, the government can simply replace it with a government-run agency.

It is a nuclear option, but neverthless a nuclear option that didn't exist prior to July. It will also never have to be used - the threat of its use will see any company wanting to keep hold of its livelihood agree to government demands.

Of course this would never happen. Except it has already. Within months of the government-run "Association of Kazakh IT Companies" getting control of Kazakhstan's internet domain, it shut down the website of British comic Sacha Baron Cohen (best known as Ali G). The site at www.borat.kz featured another of Cohen's comic creations, Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist. It was removed from the Internet.

Why? The president of the organisation said it was so the comic "can't bad-mouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name". If you want an example of government-owned and run censorship on the internet, you'll be hard pushed to find a clearer example.

My heads been under a rock the past few months. I knew some TLD shit was going down, but didn't really know what it was about until now. Damn!

ICANN and ccTDLs: For great justice?

I was reading an incredibly boring requirements document at work today about an upcoming product of ours. Buried in the middle of this documents was a list of project assumptions:

2.1 PROJECT ASSUMPTIONS

Assumption 1 - A flood doesn't come and wipe us all away
Assumption 2 - Microsoft actually ships Visual Studio 2005 on time

Those were the only assumptions!

Take a look at the ten images below. Some of them are photographs
of real objects or scenes, others are created by computer graphics
(CG) artists. Test your ability to tell which among the array of
images are real, and which are CG. If you want a closer look, click
the image to see a larger view of the picture. Once you've decided
what's what, click either CG or REAL to begin the tally of your
score. Work through each of the ten images. When you've finished,
you'll be prompted to get your score.

I actually get 10/10 my first try out and 4/4 on the bonus round my first time. I thought I'd share my insight.

Answers are here:
http://www.alias.com/eng/etc/fake_or_foto/about.html

The trick is to not look at the main parts of the picture because the 3D guys tried to make that look good. They spent less time on everything else.

#1: Black Car - FAKE - Look at the 4 windows in the top center of the screen. Look at the sky to the left of that. Look at the brick work on the building to the right. The license plate also looks funny to me

#2: Coffee cup - FAKE - Right out the gate its got a 3D modeling company name the cup. Look at the upper rim of the cup: Too much glint and glare. Look at the cup and saucer. Do you have cups that reflects that clearly?

#3: Corkscrew - REAL - There are some inperfections in the corkscrew before the threads start. The light and shadow seem to match. The reflective nature of the silver is realistic. Took an educated guess.

#4: Diamonds - FAKE - Having looked at a *lot* of diamonds of late, I know these look nothing like real diamonds. They all are reflecting the same shades and colors. Plus a bunch of diamonds sounds like an overused 3D graphics demo.

#5: Nut and Bolt - REAL - The focusing/unfocusing looked real. CGI normally messes that up. The slight scratches on the top of the nut and end of the bolt looked real.

#6: Egg beaters - FAKE - The wires all go from grey to black in the smae place. The counter is clearly fake.

#7: Car Hood - REAL - See, this is how the hood of #1 should have looked. The lines of the clouds were not crisp like some 3D guy would make them. The license plate look very real. I reasoned if it was CGI it would look better. Made an educated guess.

#8: Wooden Monkeys - FAKE - All thet wood grain is parallel with the length of the arms and legs. The lines are too sharp to be real, especially on the face. There are no dents in the "wood" anywhere. Hands are too circular to be real. Lighting and lines around mouth are pretty bad.

#9: Glass beads - REAL - Lighting is correct. Doesn't try to do any crazy reflecting or shading. Shape of beads and reflective nature seemed correct. If these was 3D they would have tried to make them shiny, and you would end up with somethin... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

RE: Fake or Foto?

A CNN/USA Today Gallup poll conducted over the weekend found his approval rating stood at 41 percent, while more than half, or 56 percent, disapprove of how the president is handling his job. A majority, or 52 percent, say it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq, and 61 percent say they disapprove of how he is handling Iraq specifically. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

But my words, like silent raindrops fell.

Poll: Iraq speeches, election don't help Bush

There is a stupid notion going around that the news media would be better off if anyone and everyone got to make a contribution to it. Blogs and podcasts are examples of this and reader-generated electronic "newspapers" are beginning to spring up. People who should know better see this as democratizing the flow of news and information...

I have been concerned about this new, online "citizen journalism" becoming the source of more disinformation than truth, a concern that actually extends to most of the Internet.

Some people in the media are absolutely giddy about the opportunity to pile a complete and total indictment of the entire Internet on top of this incident. Oh my god! People can express their own views without control from the 4th estate! How will we ever know what is true anymore?!

Check out the headline on this article:

For all its wonders, the world-changing effects of the digital civilization contains a slimy, anarchic undercurrent of democracy run amok.

There is so much that is broken about the perspectives being offered around this incident:

The idea that Wikipedia and encyclopedias are the same kinds of things and their value should be judged by the same criteria.
The idea that Wikipedia must either be 100% reliable or completely useless for any purpose.
The idea that people are not capable of critical thinking and should not be responsible for doing it.
The idea that the alleged connection to the Kennedy Assasination would have been viewed as credible by anyone who isn't nuts.
The idea that internet anonymity is a bad thing.
The idea that "supporting freedom of speech" is compatible with "demanding accountability." (Haven't you people ever heard of the Federalist Papers?!)
The idea that the highly reliable totally awesome 4th estate should be the arbiter of the truth, when in their articles about this VERY incident they have repeatedly twisted this guy's voluntary resignation from his job (which he had to do because of the pressure THEY would put on his employer if he hadn't) so that it appears as if he was fired. "Man looses job over wikipedia prank..."

The biggest problem here is the idea that a national press campaign and the threat of lawsuits are a reasonable way of dealing with a problem on a publically editable wiki! This notion is so irrational that one suspects John Seigenthaler of taking advantage of the opportunity because he wanted to launch a broder attack on the Internet. You gunna sue me for suggesting that, John? Go ahead. Make my fucking day.

Internet Backlash