Remember the Idaho elected official a few weeks back who got in trouble for forwarding a message, comparing Michelle Obama to a black widow spider, to 26 people from his official email account? It gets better. The Kuna-Melba News, a weekly paper that covers western Ada County and eastern Canyon... (Read More)

A number of localities have tried to recreate the magic that resulted in locations such as Silicon Valley in California and Route 128 in Massachusetts. Now it's Idaho's turn. More than 100 Idaho business executives and politicians want to turn some 79,000 acres of land in Idaho, about 20 miles... (Read More)

A high-tech worker in Australia reports he was advised by one recruiter there not to mention that he played World of Warcraft, because "employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players," believing "that WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere,... (Read More)

A simmering Facebook controversy came to a...head? Female Facebook users are up in....arms? Sigh. It's hard to write about this seriously. Today was the live and virtual nurse-in on Facebook, as a protest against the social networking site's policy forbidding pictures of nursing moms (reports... (Read More)

Ah, yes, the wonderful Christmas tradition of watching Santa's travels around the world using a missile defense system. It's actually a very sweet story. "The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the... (Read More)

For many people, the first they heard of Saturday's plane crash at Denver International Airport was via a Twitter message from someone who'd been on the plane, which quickly made its way through the Internet: "Holy ****ing s*** I wasbjust in a plane crash!" (Despite what some overly dramatic news... (Read More)

Yet another nebulous set of organizations are exhorting people to help "save the Internet!" by making high-speed Internet more broadly available but where it's not altogether clear just how the organization is planning to do that. And surprise, some of the people are the same between the two... (Read More)

Perhaps Idaho politicians and government workers just shouldn't be allowed near the Internet. Steve Rule, commissioner for Canyon County, was criticized earlier this month for forwarding an email message, comparing Michelle Obama to a black widow spider, to 26 people, many of them at Canyon County... (Read More)

A newly elected Idaho state legislator is considering drafting a bill to make anonymous blogging illegal. Ironically, the legislator in question is a retired newspaper editor. (Idaho has a "citizens legislature" that meets only three months a year; few of them are professional politicians.) Steve... (Read More)

It's an annual event: Churches and other facilities putting out creches and other displays for Christmas find parts of it -- typically the baby Jesus -- stolen, with both a financial and a sentimental cost. Now, those facilities are equipping their baby Jesuses with GPS in order to track them down... (Read More)

In 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in New York while, reportedly, about a dozen people were able to hear her screams. Her death became a cause celebre about the callousness of New Yorkers, though in reality they may not have realized what was going on. On November 19, a... (Read More)

If I were the gambling sort, I'd place bets that legislators will use this week's verdict in the MySpace hoax case, which resulted in the suicide of a teenage girl, to strengthen the laws against impersonating someone else (even an imaginary person) online. As described on CNN, Lori Drew, 49, of... (Read More)

'Internet for Everyone' sounds like a laudable goal. Very Mom and apple pie. Who could be against that? The problem is that the name of an organization doesn't necessarily accurately depict what it's trying to do, and what Internet for Everyone is actually trying to do is far from clear -- and... (Read More)

Ever had some computer malware spit a bunch of porn onto your screen? Now imagine it happening in a roomful of schoolchildren. Now imagine it could send you to jail -- for forty years. That's what happened to Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, Conn., in 2004. Using a computer in a... (Read More)

If you ever had a big brother, you know that the same guy who gave you noogies could also protect you from a bully at school -- but you had to take the bad with the good. 'Big Brother,' in surveillance, is the same way. Government surveillance is getting easier and closer. In Arizona, police are... (Read More)

It seemed too good to be true: A Britax Marathon child car seat, the top rated seat from Consumer Reports, usually with a price tag of nearly $300, on sale at Target for $43, with free shipping. It was. The news spread like wildfire between members of the wired mommy community, and many people... (Read More)

Is the time that it takes to boot up and power down a computer at the beginning and the end of the day work? A number of lawyers are trying to settle that question. On the one hand, users start rebooting the computer and then spend up to 15-20 minutes chatting, getting coffee, and so on during the... (Read More)

In response to a letter signed by 40 state attorneys general, the popular classified ad site Craigslist has taken additional steps to keep sex workers from using its site. Left unsaid, though, is that Craigslist had little choice, unless it wished to risk being made a party to illegal... (Read More)

If you thought the Barack Obama Presidential candidacy was wired, wait til you see the Obama transition team. The team has already put up a website on the transition, including places where people can sign up, make suggestions, and apply for jobs. In addition, according to some reports, Obama has... (Read More)

People looking for examples of how social media can be leveraged to create a brand typically think of cutting-edge technology companies, not housewives exchanging cleaning tips. They haven't heard of Flylady. Which is getting increasingly hard to do these days, especially now that Flylady -- the... (Read More)

If you like the Google Earth mapping application, there's now an application that works with it and provides information on "Marine Protected Areas" on the Earth. Installing the application shows all the various marine protected areas (MPAs); clicking on them provides some information, including a... (Read More)

Fox News is ominously warning about the potential of Twittering terrorists. The U.S. Army's 304th Military Intelligence Battalion released in mid-October a report describing how a number of social media and other technologies, including Twitter, could be used by terrorists. After all,... (Read More)

In another case of a potentially rogue government programmer, the investigator found more than he bargained for: tens of thousands of pornographic images of children. As with San Francisco city government computer engineer Terry Childs earlier this year, Marc Young, computer applications manager... (Read More)

Just months after Google purchased the entire online rights to a new satellite's imagery, the U.S. government, citing budget concerns, has canceled plans to launch two more commercial satellites. According to the Associated Press, the House and Senate intelligence appropriations committees cut... (Read More)

In recent weeks, both American Airlines and Delta Airlines have announced that their in-flight wireless Internet services will include a filtering service to keep passengers from viewing porn on their laptops. I admit it, I'm torn. Porn proponents such as Violet Blue, in the San Francisco... (Read More)