The man set to take the helm of MI6 in the UK in November is doing some rapid damage control after it was discovered that his wife had posted practically every detail of their lives for all to see on Facebook.

Lady Shelley Sawers, wife of Sir John Sawers, made available copious details of their liveshaunts and habits including the location of one of their homes, favorite vacation spots, and information about friends and family- including the whereabouts of their parents and children. Her privacy controls were set so loosely that anyone in the London network could freely access her page. On the day her husband’s new position was announced, she is said to have posted scores of pictures of the family on vacation holiday.

Charmingly, friends and family congratulated Lady Sawers and her husband on the appointment, referring to Sawers as “Uncle C”- his MI6 codename. Although the Daily Mail says all traces of her Facebook fail have since been removed from the internet, the internet has a pretty long memory. And understandably, officials have commented indicating that the breach “verges on the reckless.”

Edward Davy, the Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman is quoted in the Daily Mail as saying:

‘The Prime Minister should immediately commission an internal inquiry as to whether this has breached the security of the incoming head of MI6 too seriously to allow him to take up the post.’

A MP is quoted in the article regarding the possible consequences of the security breach:

‘Sir John Sawers is in a very sensitive position and by revealing this sort of material his family have left him open to criticism and blackmail.

‘As a long-serving diplomat and ambassador, his whole family have been involved in his line of business for decades. I would have hoped they would have been much more sensitive to potential security compromises like this.’

Uh, perhaps… most of my friends have their profiles locked down tight because they don’t want to get blackmailed, too. They’re schoolteachers.

[Image: Daily Mail]

AOL has shut CompuServe, the first major commercial online service in the United States.

The company had its origins in 1969 and started offering limited dial-in services in the mid-1970’s. The year it first offered “online services” was 1979, and by the by the mid-1980s CompuServe was one of the largest information and networking services companies in existence, and it was the largest consumer information service in the world.

CompuServe remained popular as a stand alone service until the mid-1990’s, when the rise of the World Wide Web and widespread internet access slowly killed its core business. An attempt in 1995 to offer users internet access along with CompuServe services failed by 1997, despite the company being the first to offer fixed rate monthly access for the service. Having been owned by H&R Block since the early 80’s, Compuserve changed hands several times until eventually ending up at AOL by the end of the 1990’s.

At AOL, CompuServe became nothing more than a not well loved subsidiary (AOL having been CompuServe’s biggest competitor for many years), until finally all but fading away.

Basex notes that CompuServe users will be able to use their existing CompuServe Classic (as the service was renamed) addresses at no charge via a new e-mail system, but the software that the service was built on, along with all the features supported by that software has been shut down.

If journalists don’t write about it does that mean that news doesn’t happen and if they do does that mean they have some sort of copyright over the reporting of that news?

For as long as there has been a news industry what is considered important enough to take up so-called valuable space on a printed collection of paper or take up valuable airtime has been limited to a select few. It is the people in editorial boardroom or producer’s offices who decide what they think we need to see or read each day. The majority of the time it is the news that is most likely aimed to promote our most visceral responses – hence the popularity of “bad news” being the good news.

It’s good news for the news gatekeepers because it is almost guaranteed to bring in the most readers or viewers. The worst the disaster, the juicier the scandal, or the more heart-wrenching the story, the better. Sure we every once in a while go through our angst ridden worrying that the news is too negative and that there isn’t enough good news. The problem is good news isn’t profitable news and what is important to the news industry is the stuff that keeps the shareholders happy and the management bonuses flowing.

As Jeff Jarvis points out today

The realization of that myth – the myth of necessity – hit me head-on when I read an unselfconsciously narcissistic feature in The New York Times this week about the room where the 4 p.m. news meeting is held. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has likened that meeting to a “religious ceremony.” The Times feature certainly acted as if it were taking us inside the Pope’s chapel: “The table was formidable: oval and elegant, with curves of gleaming wood. The editors no less so: 11 men and 7 women with the power to decide what was important in the world.”

Behold the hubris of that: They decide what is important. Because we can’t. That’s what it says. That’s what they believe.

I was trained to accept that myth: that journalists decide what’s important, that it’s a skill with which they are imbued: news judgment. I worked hard to gain and exercise that judgment. The myth further holds that no judgment of importance is more important than The Times’; that’s why, every night, it sends out to the rest of newspaperdom its choices. News isn’t news until it’s reported and it’s not important until The Times says so.

Our supply of news is dictated to us minute by minute, day by day. That doesn’t mean though that it is the only news out there. An incredible amount of new worthy things are going on everyday – from the bad to the good. Just because the large majority of it doesn’t make it through the editorial “money” filter doesn’t change the fact that those events or information isn’t news.

The news isn’t about the reporting of it. It isn’t about the people writing about it. News is about the event, the happening, the information. It is about the people who were involved with the event. It is about the people who made the happening happen. It is about the people who created the information.

What the new media, blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook (to a lesser degree) did was to allow the people responsible for creating the news to be the ones that distributed the news. Or as Dave Winer put it - “The new world pays the source, indirectly, and obviates the middleman”. No longer is our flow of news being dictated to us by the select few and what they think is important. We are getting to make those decisions now.

However being entrenched as our sole providers of what is important in the world isn’t something that the news industry will give up without a fight. Rather than try and find their way in a new world of news and information distribution that doesn’t flow through their gates, the industry is trying to bend and manipulate this new media into their way of doing business.

The news industry of the past is locked into the believing that if they aren’t the ones reporting the ‘news’ then it doesn’t exist. It is because of this belief that they then turn around and try and claim ownership of the ‘news’. Because they are the ones that paid someone to write about something that happened the industry figures that they have an ownership – a copyright – over it all even right down to barring online linking to that news or information.

In their effort to bend this new media way of getting our news the only thing the news industry is doing is hastening the breaking of their stranglehold on the distribution of the news. They still have all the same abilities to reports the news and the people who are a part of that news. All they are losing is the exclusive rights to distribute it – as they should.

News isn’t distribution and who controls it, news is what is happening in and around our lives except now we are the ones who can distribute it – as it should be.

Atari has released the source code of over 15 games developed and sold for the Atari 7800.

Games released include Dig Dug or Centipede or Robotron, although notably you’ll need a 7800 emulator to run any of them.

According to Programmerfish, Atari said the purpose of the release is to give potential developers insight into the Atari’s gaming platform so they may possibly build upon the 7800 series. Why people would want to build upon the 7800 in 2009 I don’t know, but I still like the sound of it.

Downloads available at Programmerfish here.

If you are a gamer and you want to score yourself some great games over the next week, and holiday weekend, then you need to head over to Valve’s game store and start prepping your download folder for incoming.

Starting of the specials we have the complete 2K Huge Game Pack which includes the following

• Bioshock
• CivCity: Rome
• Civilization IV: Warlords
• Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
• Freedom Force
• Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich
• Prey
• Railroad Tycoon 3
• Railroad Tycoon II Platinum
• Shattered Union
• Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization
• Sid Meier’s Pirates
• Sid Meier’s Railroads
• X-COM: Apocalypse
• X-COM: Enforcer
• X-COM: Interceptor
• X-COM: Terror from the Deep
• X-COM: UFO Defense

Now if you were to buy all those games separately you’d be looking at forking over $229 but if you buy the complete pack you can get them all for $59.99. Not only that but if you really hurry their giving another 10% off until July 7th.

On top of all of that goodness there is an even better deal that is only on for the weekend. For those of you that really like the good old FPS type games (with maybe a bit of RPG thrown in) the Steam store has Fallout 3 on a half-price special. So instead of forking over $49.99 you only need to dip into your wallet for $24.99

For those of you that are maybe a little more sports oriented there’s a special running until July 10th that will let you pick up Virtua Tennis 2009 and save yourself 10% on the store price.

So what are you still doing here .. git … it’s the weekend … it’s gamer time .. git.

Score one for bricks and mortar shopping.

Seattle based authorize.net was offline for hours this morning following a fire at a data center at Seattle’s Fisher’s Plaza. Reportedly many companies were affected, but authorize.net is the only one responsible for millions of online transactions daily. The fire apparently triggered sprinkler systems, as fires often do, and brought down many machines that haven’t been offline “in years.”

To keep customers informed of the status of repairs and accessibility, the company wisely set up a Twitter account. A series of dramatic tweets were ushered in by this first one at 11AM EST:

#authorizenet We are down due to a fire at our primary data center in Seattle. We are working to restore services, but no ETA at this time.

Around noon, the company updated:

#authorizenet I understand transaction processing is back up with the exception of Global processing. We are working to bring that up ASAP.

Although the company has provided information about the current status of transaction processing, questions remain about transactions posted during the outage:

#authorizenet Lots of questions re: post downtime e.g. transactions without auth code. Will post comm with answers once I have them.

Teams hope to restore power to the building by 1:30PM PST. This is the second major epic fail outage at Fisher Plaza in the past year.

The only real extended use of a laptop that I have had is with the one I bought for my wife recently so they have never been high on my priority list of things to get. However some of these concept laptops would be really cool to own if they ever made it past the rendering stage.

Canvas Laptop Concept - designed by Kyle Cherry

Vaio Zoom

Compenion Laptop concept

HP Concept Laptop

Frog Concept Design

top graphic is the Fujitisu Turn Table Concept Laptop – hat tip to Technology.am

The details are still sketchy but an unidentified man has fired at least one shot at the Apple Store in Clarendon, Arlington Virginia, just shortly after the store open this morning. Witness at the scene report hearing a loud bang coming from the back room which was followed by a woman’s screams. A thin-framed, black male believed to be in his twenties and wearing a fake beard was seen fleeing from the rear of the store.

ABC and FOX news are confirming the story and the woman was the victim of a botched robbery.

hat tip to AppleInsider

Charges against Lori Drew, the mother who drove Missouri teenager Megan Meier to suicide on MySpace in 2007 have been dismissed.

Drew was found guilty of three counts of accessing a computer without authorization in November 2008 over tricking Meier, a rival of her daughter, into a fake relationship with a fictitious boy on MySpace. Drew broke the relationship off and mocked Meier, an action that drove the teen to end her life.

In dismissing the charges, U.S. District Judge George H. Wu said that he was concerned that if Drew was found guilty of violating the terms of service in using MySpace, anyone who violated the terms could be convicted of a crime.

The result is a blow to prosecutors who were desperate to charge Drew with anything following the public outrage the story generated. For the rest of us though, the decision is a good one. Turning a Terms of Service breach into a Federal Crime could have opened a pandora’s box of prosecutions for even trivial matters (potentially using a presumed identity could have become a crime), a view held by a range of groups on both sides of the political fence including the EFF and Heritage Foundation.

Like the iPhone, but for guys… get it?

Better than the lame pun name, below is a Spike TV Guys’ Choice Awards iPhone commercial parody for the “GiPhone.” I don’t want to spoil the joke, but most of the apps involve boobs in one way or another. I could stare at that rack all day, and I’m a chick. Jeez.

Want to be the really cool geek on the block with incredible Jedi-like mental powers?

Well now you can thanks to Uncle Milton Industries’ new toy called The Force Trainer that is hitting the market this month. The game uses a wireless headset which reads your brainwave activity and then converts it in actual physical action. Apparently if you focus well enough you can make the ping-pong looking ball, or as the company calls it – the training sphere, rise in the tower.

"When you concentrate, it activates the training remote," says Frank Adler of toymaker Uncle Milton Industries, which is creating the Trainer. "There is a flow of air that will move the (ball). You can actually feel like you are in a zone."

Star Wars sound effects and audio clips emitted from the base unit "cue you in to progress to the next level (from Padawan to Jedi) or when to move the sphere up or down to keep challenging yourself," Adler says.

Source: USA Today :: Toy trains ‘Star Wars’ fans to use The Force

Here’s a video demonstration courtesy of the New York Post

Last week I wrote here about the new series of online ads that Microsoft was running for Internet Explorer 8 and truth be told I thought they were all funny as hell, and yes even the one where the wife shows her disgust for her husbands browsing habits. Then last night as I was prepping for this week’s Cynical Bastards podcast I was double checking the videos only to find that the “puking ad” had been pulled.

This fact was confirmed by cnet News

The truth is that Microsoft wasn’t 100 percent happy with vom-com.

"We make a point of listening to our customers," a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail Thursday morning. "We created the OMGIGP video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it."

I’m sorry but sure the ad maybe should have had some kind of warning (“weak stomach people with no sense of ha-ha need not watch”) but I don’t think the ad needed to be pulled. It was funny as hell and sure I may have a whacked sense of humor but come on folks lighten up for crying out loud.

While the ad may have been pulled from the ‘official’ channels it still lives on YouTube so for those of you who thought it was funny here ya go. The rest of you who didn’t go watch television or something and make sure you definitely don’t watch this one or you might curl into a fetal ball.

Warning: weak stomach panty waists should not watch this as you might not see any humor

You don’t even have to spell stuff!

Those of us who grew up in an era where even Commodore 64s and Ataris were somewhat rareish may remember board games. Monopoly was particularly good at keeping you out of your parents’ hair for a good 48-36 hours, your developing faith in humanity decreasing steadily by witnessing widespread corruption and embezzlement during bathroom trips and always having to be the effing thimble. (Confession: I actually kind of liked being the thimble.)

Battleship was more for one-on-one play, a guessing game that involved trying to work out your opponent’s ship positioning. The game sadly lacked tequila and Jack Daniels. Until now.

Via Gizmodo comes this gorgeous  ”bar game” version of the rainy day pasttime, Enigma. The game folds neatly up into a carry case that looks like what people used to use to transport LPs. Want!

[Image: Mauricio Harion]

Want to be on Twitter but don’t have the time or social media skills to find followers on your own? If that is the case then a new service from Australian social media marketing company uSocial might just be up your alley. For a fee the company will search through Twitter and suggest to people who match your needs that they follow you.

Currently uSocial says they have a 150 customers who have signed up and paid anywhere from the starting fee of $87.00 for a block of a 1,000 Twitter users up to an undisclosed amount for a block of 100,000 people.

Leon Hill, chief executive of uSocial, said the company finds potential followers by searching Twitter and working out what individual users are interested in. It also profiles where people are so it can more closely match users with those they might want to follow.

USocial then sends messages to potential followers telling them about the new Twitter user they might want to follow.

"It’s up to the user to follow them or not," said Mr Hill. He added that uSocial continues to look for followers until the specified number had signed up.

Source: BBC :: Twitter followers ‘can be bought’

I’m sorry, but this is just a tad too scummy for me. If you are that inept at being able to find people on Twitter who might want to follow you then it’s time to pack it in. I don’t care if you are a company or an individual – using a service like uSocial only show me that you don’t understand social media in the least and will get you blocked.

Chip Reid and Helen Thomas gave White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs a four-minute chunk of grief over trying to “control the press” in a way Thomas said was worse than even Richard Nixon.

Thomas, who has been covering White House press briefings I think since Taft was in office, has had a bit of internet fame due to her part in Stephen Colbert’s epicly awesome GWB send-up during the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2006. If you recall, Thomas chased a terrified Colbert around in his fantasy of being the White House Press Secretary, badgering Colbert about the reasons behind invading Iraq.

Thomas proved that her biting critique showed no partisan leanings yesterday when she and Reid laid into Gibbs for ridiculous executive branch policies that actually use social media to limit and “tightly control” the content of Townhall meetings and press briefings. The debate begins when Gibbs insists that Reid submit questions via Facebook and Twitter to be answered “tomorrow” rather than just opening the forum to on-the-spot questions.

Gibbs plays dopey, telling Reid to “get on his e-mail address” while Reid tries to explain how refusal to answer questions isn’t open or transparent. Gibbs giggles throughout the exchange in a way that makes you want to slap him, and really only proves the two annoyed reporters right by dancing around answering questions.

Two minutes in Thomas brings it, saying, ”I’m amazed… I’m amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency,” and cites a pattern of “controlling the press.” She tells Gibbs that the Obama administration’s “formal engagements are prepackaged,” and says that “calling reporters the night before, telling them they’re going to be called on- that’s shocking.” When asked if she sent in a question, she goes all grandma-don’t-play-that by snapping, “I don’t have to email it- I can tell you right now!”

Indeed, the exchange raises some interesting questions about the role of social networking and new media in the Obama administration. With all the Obama love being spread thickly and freely around the blogosphere, we kind of took it for granted that this presidency would use the technologies we all embrace- Facebook, Twitter, e-mail- to advance communication between press and the executive branch, or even your average dude and the White House. I’ll go a step further- we were lead to believe that. Obama sends me Facebook updates more than my best friend.

But is the Obama administration now using our “friend status” to filter valid questions and create an illusion of rapport with the press and by extension, the people? Bill Maher called Obama out early on for mocking the most popular question at one of the first Townhall meetings he had as president. In the meeting, Obama laughed at “the internet” for wanting to know if he had plans to consider legalizing and taxing marijuana to create jobs and create some desperately needed capital. Maher fumed:

“For Obama to mock, ‘I don’t know what’s going on the Internet,’ well excuse me…the Internet is America now. That sounded like John McCain.”

Well yeah, I want to know to- do they not know what’s going on on “the internet” or do they not care?

Abandon your MySpace account for Facebook? You might just be a racist.

At a keynote speech during New York’s Democracy forum at Lincoln Center, Danah Boyd spoke of the racial disparity and possible reasons for mass abandonment of MySpace for the “more cultured” and “less cheesy” social networking site Facebook. Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, stated:

“We might as well face an uncomfortable reality … what happened was modern day ‘white flight’.”

Boyd also observed that:

“The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us. It should scare the hell out of us.”

Referring to MySpace as the “ghetto of the digital landscape,” Boyd indicated that MySpace users are more likely to be “brown or black” and espouse a different set of ideals in conflict with those espoused by the teens she surveyed over four years. She said that patterns in migration across social networking sites echoed those of a white exodus from cities in the past. Boyd also said that teens who use Facebook are more likely to condescend their MySpace-favoring peers.

“Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell you MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious… like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks and jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop. And Macs are more cultured than PCs.”

Teens aren’t even the worst culprits when it comes to socio-economic social media judgment passing. The New York Observer cites a quote from Michael Wolff in an interview with BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine in December 2008:

“If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.”

Boyd’s research indicated that the class divisions were likely to only worsen over time, as the media continues to portay MySpace as a seedy stomping ground for pedophiles and Facebook as a “utopian savior.” She contends:

“There’s a cultural wall between users. If there’s no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.”

[Image: Flickr]

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block, the guys behind AOL blog Engadget (Rojas also founded Gizmodo) have launched Gdgt…which is not surprisingly pronounced Gadget.

Gdgt isn’t what you’d expect from the talented pair though, because it’s not a blog. Indeed, the reason I’m writing this post now and not 6 hours ago is because I’m not sure either. Block and Rojas are pitching it as a social network for people who like gadgets, but it’s not at all like Facebook or similar sites. The closest description I can find is forum with some social elements.

The launch of the site has gained a huge amount of attention online, even taking Gdgt down at one stage, so it should start with strong prospects. However its success will come mostly off the back of Rojas and Block’s rightly deserved reputations and not anything the site offers. The problem with Gdgt is that in trying to be different, the site is really very similar to existing sites through its borrowed elements. The question then becomes one of social appeal: can the community be the selling point given you get the same doses of gadget loving elsewhere? If I was betting I’d say yes, but only because Peter Rojas and Ryan Block are running the show. Anyone else and I’d say this was not going to end well.

The explanation video (they needed one to explain the site) as follows:

Miracles do happen: Google has finally added the ability to drag and drop emails into folders/ labels some five years after launching the service.

The drag and drop feature means that Gmail has come into the 21st 20th century by offering a feature many all its competitors offer. Being Google though the feature isn’t a straight forward as it seems, as emails can only be dragged from the left hand side.

Google also announced that labels have been moved from a separate box to the inbox/ sent menu list. Most label’s will also now be automatically hidden, with only commonly used labels appearing.

Be it five years too late, the announcement is great news for Gmail fans.

I realize that there are guys out there who love nothing better than to do all kinds of things to their trucks to make the da boss but I think this might be overdoing it just a tad.

Chris Lentz has been wanting to do this since he was a kid. The idea of hooking up a jet engine to a pick-up truck though seems to be a little on the extreme side if you ask me. But then Chris didn’t ask me and as a result he is the proud owner of a Ford F-150 with a Czech built Motorlet M-701 turbojet bolted to its bed.

To install the jet in the truck, Lentz fabricated a sturdy mounting stand, a twenty-gallon kerosene tank, and a control console from aluminum and stainless steel. His decorative touches include a red, white, and blue nose cone and a 2700 HP badge (not divulged is the 516-mph velocity needed to achieve that power level).

To light the burner, the pilot advances a red fuel lever and a blue throttle control while operating a two-stage electric starter. There are snapping sounds as ignitors fire in the combustion chambers followed by a muffled explosion and a whine not unlike a 737 taxiing past the lowered tailgate. Viewing the procedure from the rear of the truck reveals a bright orange ball of flame accompanying the muffled explosion upon ignition. With the jet idling at 3500 rpm and during full-throttle acceleration, there are waves of heat but no external flames.

Source: Automobile Mag :: Jet-Powered 2005 Ford F-150 STX

And just so you don’t think I’m making this up here’s a short video of the truck.

hat tip to Geekologie

I realize that this news will really only apply to a small segment of readers, those one’s not swimming in the Google kool-aid at least, but when it comes to Bing one of the that has become a bit of a consumer hit is its homepage photos. The photos change everyday but now they’ll be changing in more countries with pictures of those countries.

Starting next month these additional countries will include: Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and the UK. these countries will have customized photos with their own hotspots of mouse over information. Now sticking with the homepage photos for a second one of the really neat things that has come out of these homepage photos is Bing fans have begun collecting them in order to share all the ones that have been displayed so far.

The best project so far is the one that Long Zheng has put together over at the Bing Image Archive which is where you can find all the background images presented in a calendar format that you can scroll through to see what image was shown on what day.

Now on to the contest.

The Bing team is launching their first photo submission via Facebook. The theme is summer travel and the winner will have their photo displayed on the Bing homepage on Monday, August 3rd. If interested head over to the Bing contest on Facebook and check out the rules and such. Good luck.

hat tip to LiveSide