Last night at DNC, AT&T threw a lavish thank-you party for the dems who let the telecom off the hook for working with the bush administration in helping them spy on people without warants.  Salon’s Glen Greenwald tried to infiltrate the party and get some of the names of the dems who had blindly helped the telecoms.  Met with evasion, Greenwald was not able to get any names but he did film the party and is hoping the online community can help identify the dems.

Greenwald was also on Democracy Now this morning.

via boingboing

According to the Technically Incorrect blog at CNET, Nike, by asking the Chinese gov’t to reveal the name of the person who posted to a yahoo msg board and accused to company of having something to do with Liu Xiang’s, a famed Chinese hurdler, withdrawal from the event is behaving like a

granny who’s just had her handbag stolen by a tiny teenager and asked a big, burly policeman to find the man who took it? The company’s actions serve only to highlight the issue more, when letting a sleeping blog lie might have allowed for this little conspiracy theory to waft its way into the annals of obscurity.

And what does Nike think, the Chinese gov’t will simply waggle its finger at the olympic conspiracy theorist, all the imprisoned Chinese bloggers certainly may beg to differ.

Everybody knows that the iPhone can make phone calls, play movies & music, surf the web, and a lot more. But, Will It Blend? That is the question

It seems viral ad campaigns have begun to engage in savvy product placement, everybody wins! Or at least both Blendtec and the companies that pay them for blending their products do…

His analysis finds that Democrats who appear on The Colbert Report enjoy a significant increase in the number and total amount of donations they receive over the next 30–40 days when compared to similar candidates who do not appear on the show. Specifically, Democrats who come on the program raise $8,247 more than colleagues who don’t do so on the 32nd day following their appearance—“a bump of roughly two-fifths over the normal rate of receipts.” Republicans do not appear to benefit at all from appearing on the program; notably, they raise more funds in the month before coming on the program while actually raising less money in the month following their appearance—hinting at a possible “Colbert bust” for the GOP instead.

While conceding that it is “important not to read too much into these results” Fowler does also state that “one might be tempted to dismiss the importance of the Colbert bump because it is just money.” Clearly, political fundraising is done for a purpose and the most important consequence of any bump is whether Colbert candidates win elections. With only the 2006 elections having been completed since The Colbert Report came on the air, the upcoming 2008 elections will likely provide greater insight into this interesting and humorous wrinkle in modern American politics.

arrrrrrrrr

Torrent files are also used for legit purposes as well. i won’t list them all here, but you can find more info on legit torrents here.

Popular Swedish file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay has been blocked by most of the major Italian Internet service providers, the company said in a note on its blog.

The action follows Italian law enforcement’s actions in last month to shut down Colombo-BT.org, which the IFPI called the largest BitTorrent site in the country and which offered links to 390,000 music and 500,000 movie files.

For its part, The Pirate Bay said it has already changed IP for the site, which the group said should return access to half of the ISPs.

It also recommended Italians switch their DNS to OpenDNS, “so they can bypass their ISP filters,” and directed users to LaBaia.org (Italian for “The Bay”), which is operational.

WatchingTV Online will be following YouTube and the new way of watching video and TV on the Internet, it’s impact on the Television industry and will explore the new generation of TV series, focusing on their impact on society - in the US and around the world.

The blog author of textually is on vacation until Aug 19.

Citizens have been using lo-fi digital technology to call into question police accounts and to government practices:

Sous-veillance” will see video sharing sites such as YouTube used by citizens to shine a spotlight on things such as deadly hygiene lapses in hospital wards and uncollected rubbish, according to the European Information Society Group (Eurim).

Recently during a New York critical mass, a biker, Christopher Long was shoved off his bike. The video of the now famous shove was posted on YouTube has had over 1,000,000 hits. According to the NyTimes:

Officer Pogan composed a story of his encounter with Mr. Long. It bore no resemblance to the events seen on the videotape. Based on the sworn complaint, Mr. Long was held for 26 hours on charges of attempted assault and disorderly conduct.

The availability of cheap digital technology — video cameras, digital cameras, cellphone cameras — has ended a monopoly on the history of public gatherings that was limited to the official narratives, like the sworn documents created by police officers and prosecutors. The digital age has brought in free-range history.

via /.

There is a great article in PC magazine about the death of Usenet.  Started in 1980, usenet was essential in both introducing young boys to porn and creating vibrant online communities.  Usenet has essentially died due to social networking (I mean usenet is so hard to USE right?) and child porn fears.  sad so sad.

via /.

Kevin Martin is planning to sanction Comcast for traffic shaping.  Although good, this isn’t a victory by any means as Martin, anointed by the great W., blames telecoms needs for traffic shaping on their inability to expand due to over-regulation.  He believes, as any “small” government lovin’ Republican should, that telecoms should be free to charge users whatever they want in exchange for letting these users do whatever they want, the usual “freedom isn’t free”.  Martin does seem to be moderate compared to some his compatriots, he is also pushing cable companies to allow users to pick the channels they want to subscribe to instead of being forced to subscribe to over-priced packages. link

I wonder if anything will happen to Bell here in Canada, who blatant traffic-shapers…