Why not?

Two Buzzblog readers -- including one with an impressive historical standing in the matter -- have recommended that we do so, which by my reckoning constitutes a groundswell of grassroots support for the idea.

The need for such a name was first identified -- by me, I might point out -- in this post about a Circuit City executive who lost her mind and ordered removed from store shelves all copies of Mad Magazine that featured a biting parody of the chain. Once the purge memo was made public, it was noted in one forum that The Streisand Effect was now in play; i.e. the observation that any attempt to minimize or suppress dissemination of unwelcome news in the Internet age is likely to backfire by creating its own far greater wave of public and press attention. (See "Massachusetts transit officials vs. MIT" for the most recent example.)

Amazingly, I had never having heard of The Streisand Effect -- "new one on me," I wrote. Moreover, I speculated that reader ridicule was sure to follow such an admission and asked if there was a word for not knowing one of these Internet memes, as there certainly should be because these days they sprout up like Internet memes.

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The creator of the British comedy "The IT Crowd" -- scheduled to cross the pond for airing on U.S. TV -- wants your help giving the show its geeky authenticity. Writes Graham Linehan: "How would you like to help in designing the look of series 3? Specifically, you’d be helping us choose the stuff that litters the main set. I’m talking about posters, comics, fanzines, T-shirts… anything you’ve seen in the last few months that you think is pretty cool or captures the spirit of the show or a particular character."

Well, maybe you're not familiar with the characters yet, but that shouldn't deter you too much.

I did it yesterday. Not that I was trying, mind you -- honestly, I wasn't. I did, however, predict it would happen, so I'm going to take this opportunity to gloat about that.

Granted, I have seen this kind of thing before on Google News and have written about it, as have others. This is the first example involving one of my own posts, though.

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Don't believe anything you've read over the weekend about Massachusetts transit officials suing MIT and three of its students to keep the latter from "revealing" already-well-know

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As I type this we're a bit over 12 hours from blastoff for a new season of Mythbusters, set for 9 tonight. We'll have to wait three more weeks, however, for what will be one of the myth-busting gang's most eagerly awaited episodes: puncturing the fairy tale that the moon landings were faked, as in filmed in a studio.

When I first heard that the famous and mighty Mythbusters were going to take on this particular piece of tired hokum on Aug. 27, I frankly thought it beneath them ... as in way, way beneath them. After all, believing that the moon landings were faked is akin to believing that the government has for 50 years successfully suppressed physical evidence of alien beings visiting Earth -- and regular readers know what I think about that fantastic voyage into the world of the impossible.

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Bill Cheswick -- best known for writing "Firewalls and Internet Security" in 1994 and his earlier work at Bell Labs -- doesn't want to let commercial blogging software within hacking distance of his hardened Web server. A self-described Apple fanboy, Cheswick does want to host his own blogs, however, one about his job as lead member of the technical staff at AT&T Research and another about personal stuff, "if I can tell the difference."

We became acquainted last fall when I needled him in a post headlined, "Hello, you have reached my iPhone." (More about the iPhone below.) Yesterday Cheswick sent me an e-mail drawing my attention to his new project, which carries this greeting: "Welcome to ... a test blog publication from iWeb.  This could be very handy, if I can get it working securely."

Seems he has done so, according this new post of his and our correspondence:

The issue is this: Most blog software is based on PHP, and most compromised BSD machines are compromised by PHP.  It has a dangerous design, and is dangerous to use.   I wish to sponsor this software on machines I care about, running Web servers I want to continue to trust. ... My (our) needs are simple: off-line text creation, copy to the Web page, RSS feeds available, no comments or other external write capabilities needed.

You can read more about how he got what he wanted in the July 4 entry of his online diary.

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Seems the "we report, you decide" bunch didn't bother to do any of the former before airing a segment about KFC opening a franchise in Fallujah. Talking Points Memo found a bone to pick with that side order of propaganda, namely that it isn't true.

We'll just add this to the list of unanswered questions about FOX, including why the network hates America, little girls, Truman the pug, Paul Begala and the Constitution.

Trust me, I'll connect the dots.

Someone at Circuit City sees a too-true-to-be-really-funny Mad Magazine parody of their beleaguered company and dashes off an e-mail demanding that all copies of the periodical be purged from the chain's shelves.

(Major update, 2 p.m.: Circuit City apologizes, vows to put magazines back on shelves and teach employees to lighten up. Full response below.)

I already know that you're thinking two things?

"Mad Magazine still publishes?"

"And they sell it at Circuit City?"

The unequivocal answer to the first question is yes. I hesitate on the second only because comments on this item from The Consumerist raise an eyebrow or two on that point and my e-mail to Circuit City public relations has yet to yield a reply. However, the Circuit City e-mail cited by The Consumerist does have the ring of authenticity (absent any confirmation). It reads:

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Here at the brand-spanking-new headquarters of Network World, Inc., the sign in this photo is an office wag's idea of a joke this morning: My employer is not charging us $2 for water; in fact, we're among the pampered portion of the workforce that gets free coffee.

However, if you happen to be flying on US Airways today, the joke's on you.

The Wall Street Journal's Nikki Waller writes:  

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The good news is that this time Verizon did not start the blaze, unlike on so many other occasions that we have chronicled here in excruciating detail.

The bad news, at least for the burned-out-of-house-and-home in-laws of Network World columnist James Gaskin, is that this is a telephone company that continues to have trouble grasping the finer points of smoke and flame.

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It's no secret that a lot of people take their Scrabulous seriously, but this seems a bit extreme ... as well as a lot like cutting off your game to spite Hasbro. (Update: See first comment for correction/clarification.)

The news is just now bursting out all over what he famously called "a series of tubes," so it looks as though U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted on federal corruption charges.

Hasbro's lawsuit apparently got their attention over at Facebook, according to the New York Times, which provides Scrabulous addicts with a couple of alternatives that remain viable ... for now.

Avoiding taxes by squirreling away money offshore isn't as easy as it used to be, notes this report in Forbes, but the fact that it remains such a popular dodge can be blamed in part on -- you guessed it -- the Internet.

The top federal tax rate is half what it was 30 years ago. Shouldn't offshore accounts be on the decline? They probably would be but for the fact that the Internet and the globalization of business make these accounts so much more accessible. "It's not just the highest-net-worth people anymore," Hochman observes, pointing to the recent conviction of the owner of Buddy's Carpet in Cincinnati for a tax evasion scheme that involved insurance and offshore accounts in Nevis, the West Indies and elsewhere.

Buddy (not his real name) would seem to be looking at some jail time. The Web she's claimed another one.

This fellow on LiveScience does the best job I've seen of refuting that Pittsburg cancer specialist, in particular, and similar worrywarts, in general.   

Two apologies, actually.

First, I need to apologize to Buzzblog readers for writing on Thursday that Verizon deserved praise for standing up to animal rights activists who found offensive the company's new commercial for its LG Dare cell phone. That spot features a pair of chained, snarling junkyard dogs, pit bulls to be exact.

Praise? What could I have been thinking? How could I have been so blind as to not foresee the inevitable: that Verizon would surrender before the pixels on that post were dry. Following a reported torrent of complaints, the commercial -- which commits no greater sin than depicting junkyard dogs as junkyard dogs -- "is no longer on the schedule," according to a Verizon spokesman quoted in this story. (Translation: We caved.)

I'm sorry, Buzzblog readers. You have a right to expect better from me than to expect better from Verizon ... especially given the fact that I've made something of a fetish of chronicling Verizon foibles.

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This story is too horrific for words. A so-called "spam king," Eddie Davidson, escaped from prison earlier this week and now police say he killed his wife, young child and himself.

Just as it was only a matter of time before China's Internet population passed that of the United States, so too was it inevitable that Hasbro would eventually assemble the letters necessary to toss a lawsuit at the makers of Scrabulous. Facebook, as host to the wildly popular Scrabble rip-off, is caught in the crossfire. According to this story, Scrabulous junkies were still able to get their fix this morning. 

... before China's online population would exceed that of the United States. Seems that time has come.

There is an expectation these days that any famous video clip is but a YouTube search away. Not so.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the George Brett pine-tar incident. The tubes are clogged with stories and photographs recounting the event, which as any baseball fan knows captures a display of human anger that may never have been topped and may never be exceeded. I never tire of watching it ... and wanted to do so again this morning.

Couldn't find it on YouTube. Odd.

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I hadn't seen, or at least hadn't noticed, the TV commercial in question, but according to this blogger, Verizon has been taking heat over the company's use and portrayal of a couple of pit bulls to peddle its LG Dare cell phone. Verizon has apparently refused to cave to the pressure, a move that's unusual these days. Good for them.

The Bush Administration's run-amok censors at the FCC got their comeuppance this morning when a three-judge federal appeals court in Philadelphia tossed out a $550,000 fine levied against CBS for that infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that resulted in a glimpse of Janet Jackson's breast that lasted nowhere near as long as it's taken you read this indefensibly long sentence.  

"Like any agency, the FCC may change its policies without judicial second-guessing," the court said. "But it cannot change a well-established course of action without supplying notice of and a reasoned explanation for its policy departure."

The court could have said: "Are you kidding us? The indecency, if you want to call it that, lasted nine-sixteenths of one second. Now go find a better way to use our tax dollars."

Photo by Julie McNamara

I've really only wanted two things from our summer of lizard-sitting Scooter.

The first is that come September we're able to return this 5-year-old leopard gecko alive and healthy to Mrs. Farrell's incoming class of first graders at Center School.

The second is that he stands up on his hind legs and offers me a great deal on car insurance.

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So says Universal. Perhaps you've read of the case where Universal demanded that a YouTube video featuring a toddler dancing to a Prince song be taken down. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pressing to have that action declared frivolous, and, while it may seem so on the surface, the surface doesn't carry much weight in court. Turns out Universal may have a point, according to this story. Of course, you can have a point and still be both wrong and contemptible, as Universal has been from the start on this one.

Depends where you live, says this morning's New York Times. Many election officials are concerned that expected record turnouts will overwhelm polling places that are using unfamiliar voting machines. The good news? Fewer polling places are using unreliable and unauditable touch-screen machines in favor of paper ballots and optical scanners.

MessageLabs is out with a list of the states that receive the most spam ... and the security vendor offers up this cockamamie explanation for why these 10 are most targeted:

"The varying spam levels across states can be attributed to different socioeconomic factors and levels of security awareness in each state," blathers a MessageLabs expert. "The states that are experiencing higher spam levels may not place as high a priority on IT security overall or employees and businesses may be more willing to share their personal contact information in public domains."

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here are the 10 states in order of ascending spamminess ... and the real reasons they are junk e-mail magnets:

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Web site monitoring company Pingdom kept an eye on 13 of the top online news operations for six months to measure their availability perforances ... and the results are impressive, by and large. One site, Forbes, logged 100% uptime, although they still lose style points in my book for their silly use of "skip this welcome screen." 

The monstrous data breaches involving millions of records make all the headlines -- TJX, AOL, the VA. However, it's those whoppers combined with the rat-a-tat-tat of seemingly daily divulgences involving lesser-known entities and fewer victims that add up to a costly and so-far-uncontrolled societal headache.

Logging these incidents and assembling reliable research data about the problem has been a bailiwick of security Web site Attrition.org since July 2005 -- and has at times proven daunting, as the database now contains more than 1,000 incident reports covering some 330 million records. Into the breach, so to speak, steps the Open Security Foundation, which is announcing with Attrition.org that as of this morning OSF will formally maintain the DataLossDB -- also known as the Data Loss Database - Open Source.

Attrition.org staff member Kelly Todd, a DataLossDB project leader, tells me that a primary motivation behind the change is to increase public contributions to and involvement in the database.

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This pollster believes so. He says that because most polling organizations do not go after those respondents who communicate only or primarily via wireless, they may be underestimating support for Barack Obama, whose supporters are presumed to have cut the cord in greater numbers than those of John McCain. Yes, the pollster pushing this theory is a Democrat, but seems to me he's on to something.

As you may have noticed, we haven't exactly achieved the paperless society that some had predicted a few decades back. As a matter of fact, we're using more paper than ever, according to this story in the San Jose Mercury News. My industry, publishing, has been doing its part by closing down print newspapers and magazines like so many dot-com startups. (And Steve Ballmer says we're just getting started.) So, people, how about a little help out there.