] That pocketknife you surrendered to airport security
] screeners might now be tucked away in someone else's
] pocket -- someone who bought it on EBay.

Bureaucrats get EBay fever / State sells penknives confiscated at airports at online auction

] Three weeks ago, in a stunning raid, Russian hackers
] seized control of the servers that support one of the
] Internet's largest online gaming operations, demanding a
] ransom. It was a real-life, high-tech version of the
] movie Ocean's Eleven. By the time the ransom was paid,
] one key server -- the one containing all operational data
] for 120 Internet gaming sites and a long list of
] consulting clients -- seemed to be stripped of its data.
]
] At stake were all the operational records of a gambling
] empire. "We didn't even have the names of customers,"
] says Juan Bonilla, executive vice-president of Grafix
] Softech F.A. of San Juan, Costa Rica. "We lost
] everything." To make matters worse, little, if any, of
] the data had been backed up off-site. Grafix Softech was
] losing an estimated US$75,000 a day in profits, and the
] incident left it open to lawsuits from customers whose
] businesses relied on Grafix Softech's services. What
] could have been a major disaster became a bump in the
] corporate road. In an amazing feat of ingenuity, CBL Data
] Recovery Technologies Inc. of Markham, Ont., managed to
] recover all the lost data. It was a close call, admits
] Bill Margeson, president of CBL

Backups are really keen.

Russian hackers raid largest online gaming operation

] According to the patent, "a search engine modifies the
] relevance rankings for a set of documents based on the
] interconnectivity of the documents in the set. A document
] with a high interconnectivity with other documents in the
] initial set of relevant documents indicates that the
] document has 'support' in the set, and the document's new
] ranking will increase. In this manner, the search engine
] re-ranks the initial set of ranked documents to thereby
] refine the initial rankings."

Um.. More on this later.

Google lands Web search patent | CNET News.com

] Witness to centuries of bloodshed, the ancient walls of
] Jerusalem's Old City saw only white Tuesday as
] Palestinians and Israelis traded snowballs instead of
] stones and bullets.

Yahoo! News - Snowballs Replace Bullets as Snow Hits Holy Land

] (AP) Federal authorities charged 55 people Monday with
] trafficking in illegal drug paraphernalia from coast to
] coast, using both traditional stores and the Internet.
]
] A federal grand jury in western Pennsylvania handed up
] indictments against 27 people as part of "Operation Pipe
] Dreams," an investigation stretching from Pittsburgh to
] Phoenix to southern California, Attorney General John
] Ashcroft said.

CBS News | Feds Smoke Out Paraphernalia Peddlers | February 24, 2003 15:30:54

] "By doing this we were taking a couple of baby steps down
] the road of what some have called the semantic Web -- a
] Web ... where computers can understand, at some level,
] the meaning and context of a Web page or blog post," he
] explained in an e-mail.
]
] Cleveland said in addition to using RSS metadata, the
] company planned to add ways to factor in Web traffic
] statistics. "We would look not only at what was written,
] but what was viewed and how people got there," he said.
]
] Cleveland said the technology could allow Web surfers to
] find not just breaking news stories, but those highly
] ranked by the weblogging community. In addition, those
] stories could be accompanied by the best comments made by
] popular webloggers, or those writing in a certain
] language or from a particular country.
]
] "You could search for 'U.S. invades Iraq' and get instant
] worldwide reaction," Cleveland said. "And then you could
] search, sort, filter or group (those posts) using
] metadata. Here's what people in France are saying."

Wired News: Why Did Google Want Blogger?

* If deadly radiation knocks on your door, do not answer

Notice the little kid by the flag..

READY.GOV :: Helping America Prepare for Fiery Death

] About 30 naked women lay down in the snow in Central Park
] forming the words 'No Bush' in an event described as a
] 'nude political action photo shoot' in New York on
] February 7, 2003. The protesters are opposed to U.S.
] President George Bush's policies and possible U.S. led
] war against Iraq.

From sdodson

Reuters Photo - 'No Bush' nude protest

From Thrynn:
] A protest we can all agree on.

Ahh.. I'm glad you meme'd this. I saw this flash by on the news earlier this month when it happened. At the time, I made a mental node to find the AP pic they showed, and meme it.. Clearly, that mental note got lost.

AP Photo - 700 Nude Women Make 'No War' Sign on Hillside

] Two weeks ago it was revealed that Microsoft's MSN portal
] targeted Opera users, by purposely provided them with a
] broken page. As a reply to MSN's treatment of its users,
] Opera Software today released a very special Bork edition
] of its Opera 7 for Windows browser. The Bork edition
] behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing
] the MSN site will see the page transformed into the
] language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show:
] Bork, Bork, Bork!

Go Opera..

Opera Press Release: Opera releases