Dan over at Riehl World View thinks Google will stumble due to non-existent customer service.

I agree that Google’s service is pretty bad, but their products are free. And sugesting that GMail only having 2.5% of the market share of email is a bad thing is, in my opinion, missing a key point. 2.5% of all email? In less than a year? Getting people to switch email addresses at this point in the evolution of the internet is actually a pretty big accomplishment. (Maybe that’s not what “the market” means, it may be referring to web mail). I suggest the reason is that all the junk mail is going to the old email accounts, inflating the numbers. :-)

Some of these alarm clocks are pretty cool. Why a post about alarm clocks? I have no idea, but the jig saw and the hide-n-seek ones were my personal favorites.

Interesting. “We have no idea how we did that” say the scientists.

Here are some options in search engines if you are getting disgusted with the tyranny lovers at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft…

AltaVista, Hotbot, Lycos, AllTheWeb, WiseNut, Vivisimo, Teoma, CNet, Gigablast, LookSmart, Ask Jeeves.

Some of these are better than others but why not give them a try. Maybe you have a favorite that you could let us know about.

For a roundup of search engines look here.

Congress is getting into the act now that Yahoo! has been exposed contributing to oppression and human rights violations…

“I don’t like any American company ratting out a citizen for speaking out against their government,” Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat and member of the House Human Rights Subcommittee, told Reuters on Thursday.

“This is the tip of the iceberg of a very oppressive regime that we have almost become accustomed to in America,” Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican and chairman of the House Human Rights Subcommittee, told Reuters.

The storm over Western media companies’ compliance with China’s policies comes before next week’s hearing by Smith’s committee where lawmakers from both parties are expected to grill representatives from Yahoo, Google Inc. , Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. .

“There are probably others (dissidents) that we need to find out about. We are going to make sure it doesn’t get swept under the rug,” Smith said.

And then Yahoo!, taking a page from the Democrat play book, is pleading ignorance…

Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said her company was unaware of the details of the latest case raised by Paris-based international rights group Reporters Without Borders. The group said Yahoo provided electronic records to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of writer Li Zhi in 2003.

But Congress isn’t buying it…

Smith said the hearings set for Feb. 15 will push Yahoo to reveal what information it provided to the Chinese government, the number of people involved and details on how Yahoo interacts with what he describes as the “secret police.”

And for you Yahoo! users, be advised that…

Yahoo’s engagement includes a $1 billion investment last year to acquire a 40 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.com, which now runs the company’s China operations.

Alibaba has moved all of its 2,000 Yahoo China servers from the United States to China, Alibaba’s CEO said last year.

So Yahoo! no longer has control of those servers and the information contained therein.

In a twist of irony it seems the Bush administration has been in a battle over getting records from Google in an effort to stop child pornography. Yet these same companies willingly give information to oppressive governments to help those governments destroy those who would speak out about oppression.

There has to be a warning in there somewhere. If these companies are willing to side with child pornographers and against human rights what does that tell you about the future; your future, our future? Is tyranny just around the corner with the assistance of the techno grubbing, fawning sympathizers? Will they actively suppress what they disagree with, aiding in crushing those that might speak out? Will they offer themselves as tools of the propaganda pushers, promoting lies for the sake of higher profits?

Let the buyer beware.

Update: Lots more at Democracy Project (H/T Captain’s Quarters)

In this amazing story, Yahoo has been directly implicated in the jailing and prosecution of two Chinese dissidents.

Captain’s Quarters has the scoop…

THE American internet company Yahoo! provided evidence to Chinese police that enabled them to imprison one of its users, according to allegations that came to light yesterday.
The disclosure marked the second time in months that the company had been accused of helping China to put someone in jail. Li Zhi, a civil servant, was imprisoned on charges of trying to subvert state power after he criticised corruption and tried to join the dissident China Democracy Party. …

Yahoo… shades of the SS?

And the Captain asks some good questions…

Have these corporate managers no shame at all? Do they feel proud of their success in China, knowing it comes at the expense of courageous people like Li Zhi and Shi Tao, among others about which we have not yet heard? How long will these companies and their major stockholders continue to sell out freedom and its foot soldiers in order to kiss up to the Chinese government?

Let’s see now… Google, Microsoft, and now Yahoo complicit in trying to suppress the freedom that allowed these companies to be so successful.

This is dangerous behaviour. Their attitude seems to be one of snuffing out the voice of the oppressed so they can line their already fat pockets. Like the so-called mainstream media, for some reason they don’t want the truth to get out; only their propaganda. I wonder who will be next to be snuffed out.

Who needs Yahoo anyway?!

Cellular News is reporting that Cingular has patented the emoticon. If it were April 1st I’d be even more skeptical.

The USA based mobile operator, Cingular Wireless has managed to get a patent on the concept of using emoticon on mobile phones. While the aim of the patent is to enable the displaying of MSN style graphics on handsets, they also managed to patent the delivery of text based emoticon - so presumably sending :) via an SMS - if selected via a dedicated or softkey, would be a breach of the patent in future.

Via RealTechNews.

And here are other emoticon related patents.

Where does a reasonable person concerned about privacy draw the line in convenience?

Somewhere on the continuum, a line has to be drawn.

Gold Bullion -> Notes Backed by Silver -> Fiat Cash -> Checks -> Credit Cards -> Debit Cards -> EZPass Cards -> Fingerprint Scanners -> Iris Scanners -> Subcutaneous Passive Chip Implants -> Subcutaneous Active Chip Implant.

Think it’s all sci-fi? Nope. Fingerprint scanners as a method of payment are coming to a Walmart, Target or Costco near you. And iris scanners are coming to a school near you. We’re pushing the end of the line here folks.

Where’s your personal line? And Why? Think about it, because at some point soon not deciding will be a de facto decision.

Wow, this is pretty slick.

MSR Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image.

Our host, Blogsome.com, had some downtime for an upgrade. Now I’ve got to catch up on the things I wanted to post for the last couple of days….

Like saying how cool this is.

No words can adequately describe quite how breathtakingly cool this i.Tech Virtual Keyboard is. Bluetooth enabled, it uses infrared to project a clear and crisp keyboard onto your desktop, and then transfers your keystrokes via wireless networking to your PDA, Pocket PC or smart phone - it sounds far too futuristic to be true. But it’s very much for real, and it’s awesome.

Or this, about how Ben Franklin valued secrecy.

Has President Bush exceeded his constitutional authority or acted illegally in authorizing wiretaps without a warrant on calls between American citizens in the United States and people abroad who are, or are suspected of having ties to, terrorists?

Benjamin Franklin (whose 300th birthday is today) would not have thought so. In 1776 he and his four colleagues on the Continental Congress’s foreign affairs committee (called the Committee of Secret Correspondence) unanimously agreed that they could not tell the Congress about the covert assistance France was giving the American Revolution, because it would be harmful to America if the information leaked, and “we find by fatal experience that Congress consists of too many members to keep secrets.”

While the Constitution was being ratified in 1787 John Jay (later the first chief justice) in Federalist No. 64 praised the Constitution for giving the president power “to manage the business of intelligence in such manner as prudence may suggest.” And of course Article II of the ratified Constitution gave the president the nation’s “Executive power” and states that “the President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

When in the early 1800s President Jefferson hired foreign mercenaries to invade Tripoli and free American hostages, he did not inform Congress in advance. In 1818, when a controversy arose over a diplomatic mission abroad, House Speaker Henry Clay told his colleagues that since the president had paid for the mission with his contingent fund it would not be “a proper subject for inquiry.”

So it is clear that the Constitution’s original intent was that the president had the authority to take undisclosed foreign actions to protect America.

Or this fascinating (and long) argument by liberal Jim Sleeper about conservatives, the decline of morality in the public square and a pornography double standard.

“CHANNEL SURFING WITH JESSICA, who’s 9, we stopped at an early evening rerun of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show — irreverent, we figured, but not wrong for her,” my friend Dave wrote me recently. “Came the bit about the gay male escort/model who’d mysteriously gotten White House press clearance torepresent a Republican-funded online ‘news’ service and lob the president softball questions. The show flashed a photo from the escort service’s website showing the man naked, spread-eagled, his genitals blurred. Jessie gasped. Her face clouded over and she looked our way but didn’t ask anything, and sometimes you just let things roll. We clutched hands silently, knowing damage had been done. I don’t want to beat up on Stewart; I’m a liberal. Maybe I should have used better judgment, but, man, my parents never had to think about jumping up and shielding my eyes when we watched Walter Cronkite.”

Why was the photo flashed? Was it news? Social commentary? Ratings lust? All of that, surely – even news of conservative sexual hypocrisy, of which there is no end. But “sex” itself is what sells: “People want it, so we are trying to provide it; the more X’s, the more popular,” an Adelphia Communications spokeswoman told the Boston Globe recently after the company, among its other dubious distinctions, became the first U.S. cable provider to offer triple-X rated pornography. What Dave’s family got wasn’t porn, exactly, but it forced him to think about how he’d explain to his 9-year-old that people sell their bodies – and that TV “sells” their doing it. That Dave faults his own judgment doesn’t quite make him fair game.

It certainly doesn’t explain what’s coming to us unbidden in roadside “Erotic Empire” billboards, bus-shelter underwear posters, fashion-cum-kiddie porn ads, commercials for erectile dysfunction cures, and the fetid currents wafting suddenly through our homes at prime-time. The Thing that’s exposing itself to us increasingly is more degrading than porn because it’s so unchosen, so public, and so purely commercial: The pornification of public spaces and narratives, an eros-burning equivalent of second-hand smoke, isn’t malevolent as much as it’s a mindless groping of our persons to goose profits and market share. Don’t call it free speech; these sensors are beyond censors. They aren’t bringing us artists’ art, activists’ politics, or fellow-citizens’ opinions, and the only social message in their leering come-ons is this: “Our company can bypass your brain and heart and go for your erogenous and other viscera on its way to your wallet. Nothing personal, by the way.”

Or the fact that college students don’t have any skilz.

Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

There. Got that out of my system. :-)

In case you didn’t know… your burned CDs can’t be counted on for more than a couple of years. Print those family photos and put them in a physical album!

From Reuters.

Forgetting computer passwords is an everyday source of frustration, but a solution may literally be at hand — in the form of computer chip implants.

With a wave of his hand, Amal Graafstra, a 29-year-old entrepreneur based in Vancouver, Canada, opens his front door. With another, he logs onto his computer.

Tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) computer chips inserted into Graafstra’s hands make it all possible.

…

The computer chips, which cost about $2, interact with a device installed in computers and other electronics. The chips are activated when they come within 3 inches of a so-called reader, which scans the data on the chips. The “reader” devices are available for as little as $50 (29 pounds).

Wired had a related article a couple of months back. Is this the technology that will be the biblical “mark of the beast”?

The RFID industry must pay attention to the concerns of those who believe RFID may become the Mark of the Beast, said Peter de Jager, an expert on the adoption of new technologies.

“You have to take the social context into account when implementing a technology,” said de Jager.

But some companies “are laughing in the face of the opposition, almost daring people to resist them,” said de Jager. “And you don’t do that to consumers.”

But retailers may not have much to fear, as long as Christians don’t have to pay more for their goods, said Tim Miller, professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas and chairman of the editorial board of the Religious Movements Homepage at the University of Virginia.

“There may be lots and lots of preaching,” said Miller, speaking of potential religious opposition to RFID tags. “But as long as the bargains are there, any boycott will not likely have much adverse effect.”

There was also an interesting article buried in this physical issue of Wired, but I can’t find it online. If you have a subscription Wired and save your old mags, go check it out.

Tim Berners-Lee, the guy that is credited as being the inventor of the world wide web, now has a blog. So far he’s got just two posts, but hey, it’s something. :-)

Akshay Patil, a Google employee who runs the blog Techwalla, has released a great little tool for Google Talk called PartyChat. It allows multiple users in one chat session! Finally!

Details here. Nice work Akshay.

Looks like Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has been editing his own biography on the site. 18 times.

For the last several months I’ve been meaning to write an article summarizing what I see as a historical cycle that has swung from everyone having a soapbox (early politics, pre-radio, pre-television), to a few big players having a megaphone (TV news producers, radio personalities), back to everyone having a soapbox with a megaphone via the web.

This phenomenon of everyone having a voice is having dramatic impacts on the culture, and since I still haven’t gotten around to writing about it, I am linking to the opening remarks by Doc Searls at Syndicate last week in SF, as he summarizes it well.

On one side is the Static Web of sites that we architect and build and construct, at locations with addresses. On the other is the Live Web of pages that we write or author and publish and syndicate, and which can be browsed or subscribed to.

…

Here’s the biggest fact about the live Web: individuals are in charge. The group we used to call consumers are now producers. The demand side is supplying itself. Dealing with that fact, and taking advantage of it, is the biggest challenge and opportunity for everybody who wants to succeed in the live Web.

Think about photography for a minute. Used to be we consumed film and processing and showed prints to a few friends and family members before they went in drawers or albums on shelves in our homes. Now we produce our own photography, publish it on Flickr or BuzzNet, tag it and share it with thousands or millions of people, in a form where it is interesting and useful and completely drives the whole photography business, far more, in the long run, than any brand, even Kodak, ever did.

So there is a new balance of power in the world, that we’re seeing first in the live Web. Now individuals are in charge of their own lives, their own livings, and the things they do in the world, many of which involve production of goods like we’ve never seen before.

That’s the new context.

(Via HorsePigCow)

For a really fascinating post on the future of the Internet, check out this lengthy discussion. (Via Mike)

UPDATE: Another related article from Macleans is here, discussing the revolution as it relates to media production.

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway “IT” scooter, has yet another invention on the table. Hopefully it will be a bit more successful, but it still makes you go “eeeew…”

he’s building a dirt cheap box that solves the problem [of unpotable drinking water] and that can be distributed all over the world. Said Kamen about how to make it work: “Just add water.” According to Kamen’s co-workers, the device even works with urine. “If it has water in it, we can get drinking water from it,” one of them said.

GMail finally has added an automatic responder feature (ie. out of office, or vacation responder) to their email. Now life is complete and I can go on vacation!

This has to be an elaborate marketing hoax.

Weblinkhosting.com, a web hosting company in New York is set to do what no hosting company has done before. That is to legally adopt a child under the name of the company. The child will live at the web hosting data center where he will be provided with food, clothing, shelter and love from the owner and employee’s.

And speaking of marketing gimics, this one is great.

Mayor Roberto Pereira da Silva’s proposal to the Town Council asks residents to “take good care of your health in order not to die” and warns that “infractors will be held responsible for their acts.”

The bill, which sets no penalty for passing away, is meant to protest a federal law that has barred a new or expanded cemetery in Biritiba Mirim, a town of 28,000 people 45 miles east of Sao Paulo.

Why would he do this? To protest the Brazillian equivalent of the EPA:

A 2003 decree by Brazil’s National Environment Council bars new or expanded cemeteries in so-called permanent preservation areas or in areas with high water tables. Environmental protection measures rule out cremation.

If you keep your cell phone on, the government might know the answer to that question.