A Classic in the “No! They Would Never Do That!” Department. He himself admits it’s not going anywhere, so beyond political points for himself locally, what is the purpose of this sort of bill? To keep people talking about it as if it were a viable, reasonable option to ’keep the children safe’ or whatever the logic is behind it:

Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.
The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.
Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.
If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.
Representative Couch says he filed the bill in hopes of cutting down on online bullying. He says that has especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district.

You know our rule here at Corrente: if a Republican is trying to legislate something out of existence, it’s because they are doing it in secret. Or not so secret; I bet his ex-boyfriend threatened to out him and Couch is too dumb to have actually gotten a real name out of him before the Drama began. When will Republicans learn that Hell hath no Fury like a twink left unpaid? Never, I suppose.  Read more 

Won’t happen anytime soon. Why? Because there are more high ranking, trannie/gay/metrosexual/perv Republicans who worry about such a law than any large gathering of liberals and progressives could ever produce.

We’re not ashamed of what we do, who we are, who we love. They are. There have been many times in history when pr0n has safeguarded freedom; this is one of them. The domestic use of the FISA laws is your guide; they spy because they expect to find us doing what they are, and they can’t imagine life without hatred, fear and perversion. And they despise us not only because we can, but because we are/do.

“Phat” is a great word, you can use it in so many fun ways, even little kids can say it (that’s actually really cute when it happens). Many fine things are Phat: blunts, cars, clothes, people’s backsides. But what comes to your mind when I say heavy?

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance goddess don’t you just want to barf? when have they ever ’improved’ service? by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.
Dudley said he did not know what the pricing tiers would be nor the download limits. He said the heavy users were likely using the network to download large amounts of video, most likely in high definition.

I was just looking at some photos of two people that we talk about here all the time. And I thought, “no, those are too good.” But perhaps I was wrong, and they really did suggest what I thought they were suggesting. Time will tell. Either way, “hi res” and “heavy” downloading serve more purposes than just getting instant copies of “The Green Door.”

“Heavy” is one of those evil corporate terms and we should squash it now.  Read more 

I am not a techie and I have no idea if this is a good or bad idea. Your thoughts? From the Globe:

“The Whois database is in fact the best, most well-recognized tool that we have to be able to track down who in fact you are doing business with,” said Bohannon, the trade group’s general counsel, adding that alternatives such as issuing subpoenas to service providers take more time and cost money.

Nonetheless, some privacy advocates are proposing scrapping the system entirely because they can’t agree with the people who use the system on how to give domain name owners more options when they register — such as designating third-party agents. Privacy advocates say individuals shouldn’t have to reveal personal information simply to have a Web site.  Read more 

Cold.

Time Inc. began laying off more than 250 people today at its top magazines, including its most profitable title, People, which said it was shutting down its Washington, Miami and Chicago bureaus entirely.

Time and Sports Illustrated also expected staff layoffs.
Related
As Time Inc. Cuts Jobs, One Writer on Britney May Have to Do (Jan. 15, 2007)
Employees in those bureaus said they were “shell-shocked,” as the news was delivered by speakerphone from New York by Larry Hackett, People’s managing editor.  Read more 

“Many of our safety features are built around age and it’s important that people honestly reflect their accurate age while on our site,” Nigam said in a statement.

Hahahahahahaha!

I have a friend, who is finally doing well again financially, after taking a severe hit during the dotcom bust. He fixes people’s computers, and helps with both software and hardware problems. He jokes with me that “so long as people are lazy and stupid” he’ll make money. Sadly, I think he’ll be a rich man before he has to find another line of work.  Read more 

Here is some interesting advice about how candidates can and should use the Web and blogs. Seems like fairly good advice and the right way to understand what blogging can and cannot do for your campaign.  Read more 

3quarks brings us the sad tale of another loss for the French. This time, it seems ils tout seul le font when it comes to search engines.

The war waged by French president Jacques Chirac against “Anglo-Saxon” cultural imperialism suffered a blow today when the Germans announced they were pulling out of a rival European search engine to Google.

Earlier this year Mr Chirac announced a series of ambitious technological projects designed to challenge the global dominance of the US. They included Quaero, a Franco-German search engine whose name is Latin for “I search”, but which was swiftly dubbed “Ask Chirac”.

Today German officials confirmed they were abandoning the €400m (£270m) project. Senior officials in Germany’s economics and technology ministry said they had decided to dump Quaero because they had been sceptical it would ever be able to challenge the might of Google and Yahoo!  Read more 

This comment, to which I responded, inspires me to request that readers chime in on this question: how do you use Wikipedia? This is an important question to me because I’ve watched Wiki become a constant source of information around the blogosphere, and I’m not totally happy about it.

For those who don’t know, Wiki is a website in which one can find information about an incredibly large number of topics, ranging from theories about the gold standard to ancient religion to growing zucchini. What is fun about it: anyone can write, edit, or reedit a post.  Read more 

So Universal is now herding the sheep toward the gate. In a move that has proved questionable, Universal has signed a deal with YouTube for distribution of content while simultaneously launching an attack against its competitors – oligarchs of the world unite!  Read more 

Kudos to the good folks making this happen, assuming it goes through it’s a nice reminder that sometimes our leaders really can be pressured into doing the right thing. Our work here on the political intertubes is made easier when our government cooperates with the open source concepts of governing, and frankly, if I were a Republican I’d want the Democratic data out there just as much as I’m sure the reverse is true. But I’m also impressed with getting credit, I guess the Hill considers blogs are influential as some established public interest groups. That’s interesting.

 Read more 

Wow. Anyone want to help me make sense of this? It’s pretty…amazing.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people  Read more 

It’s pretty well out in the open now. The United States Government wants to know every single bit of information that goes in and out of your computer when it’s connected to the Internet. Is that clear enough? Do you want that to happen? Can you be persuaded or browbeaten into believing that if they JUST use this information for some “good reason” like stopping kiddie porn, or preventing terrorism, that (a) well then that’s okay; that good cause is so important it’s worth giving up a little of my privacy for, and besides, I don’t do kiddie porn or terrorism so what do I have to worry about? or that (b) they will in fact only use this information for that purpose?

If you persuade yourself to believe either of the above, you’re an idiot. Go away, we do not want you as a reader. You are the enemy, you are one of Them. Fuck off, eat shit and die.  Read more 

From the SaveTheInternet website:

rom Blue Meme, May 26, 2006

A U.S. House of Representatives committee has approved a bill that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or impairing their customers’ access to Web content offered by competitors.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 20-13 to approve the bill, called the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act. Bill sponsor James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the chairman of the committee, was joined by a handful of Republicans and most of the committee’s Democrats in supporting the bill.  Read more