Posts by slfisher

GovLoop, an online social network for government workers that was started by a federal worker, has been sold to GovDelivery Inc., a venture-backed government communications platform, with GovLoop founder Steve Ressler as its head of social networking.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

The service currently has about 20,000 members, and Ressler would like to increase it to 100,000, he told the Wall Street Journal.

GovDelivery is "a supplier of government-to-citizen email and wireless communication systems (mostly for mass notification) to state and local but also to some federal agencies," according to Gartner government analyst Andrea DiMaio. However, noting that government users are now allowed to use mainstream services such as Facebook (though not Twitter), he wondered in his blog how much relevance GovLoop would continue to have -- comments that Ressler himself agreed with. "I see the future of GovLoop as a “knowledge network” for government – a place where government people can go to get their questions answered to do their job better," he said. "That can be asking a question on their government career, on a niche topic like how to implement a wiki, or a broad scope like talking about the future of cloud in government."

In its ongoing effort to become the coolest city in the U.S., the mayor of Portland, Oregon, is going to attempt tomorrow night to make it an "open source city," making its data as open as possible while respecting privacy, and buying open source applications when possible.

If passed by the City Council, Mayor Sam Adams' proposal will have the following steps:

"a. Enter into agreements with our regional partners to publish and maintain public datasets that are open and freely available while respecting privacy and security concerns as identified by the City Attorney;
b. Develop a strategy to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
c. Organize a regional contest to encourage the development of software applications to collect, organize, and share public data;
d. Establish best practices for analysis of business requirements in software review and selection processes, identify existing commercial software systems with licenses that are scheduled to expire in the near future, and encourage the consideration of Open Source Software in the review, replacement and continual improvement of business solutions."

As for carrots, the city is also hoping to encourage the lucrative conference industry to come to Portland; the proposal also suggests promoting "Portland as a host city for leading Open Source Software conferences and related technology events, such as LinuxCon, Innotech, etc."

In addition, all formal technology related purchasing and contract opportunities will be offered to the open source community, …

A poll on whether President Barack Obama should be assassinated, which was posted to Facebook on Saturday, has been taken down after an investigation by the Secret Service, according to NPR.

The poll consisted of a single question: 'should obama be killed? [sic]' with the choices yes, maybe, if he cuts my health care, and no, according to a screen capture of the poll.

The screen capture also reported that 387 people had responded, but that results were only available if a user approved the application, which has security implications. Reportedly, 339 people voted 'no.'

Facebook took down the entire application that allowed the user, who has not been named, to create the poll, NPR said. But according to the Los Angeles Times, the company didn't take the poll down til Monday, at which point 730 people had voted.

A blogger who had reported the poll to the Secret Service said they had received a call back, and were told that the Secret Service relies on users to report such incidents. Threatening the life of the president is a crime, the LA Times reported.

It is not known whether people who responded to the poll could be tracked down.

Idaho, where I live, likes to brag when it makes lists such as "best places to live," "best places to start a business," etc.

Now we've made another list: we're the most spammed.

According to MessageLabs, which was acquired by Symantec in November, the ten states with the highest percentage of spam are:
1 Idaho 93.8%
2 Kentucky 93.0%
3 New Jersey 92.8%
4 Alabama 91.9%
5 Illinois 91.6%
6 Indiana 91.0%
7 Massachusetts 90.9%
8 Pennsylvania 90.5%
9 Arizona 90.4%
10 (tie) Maryland, 90.3%
North Carolina and
New Mexico

The ten states (and territory) with the lowest percentage of spam are:
1 Puerto Rico
2 Montana
3 Alaska
4 Kansas
5 South Dakota
6 Tennessee
7 Vermont
8 (tie) West Virginia and Rhode Island
9 Wisconsin
10 (tie) Iowa and Florida

MessageLabs did not reveal figures for these areas except for Puerto Rico, at 83.1%.

Why Idaho? MessageLabs wasn't sure. It didn't indicate that Idahoans were particularly gullible about Nigerian princes nor particularly ignorant about anti-spam software (which, no doubt, MessageLabs and Symantec would be happy to sell them).

However, it did have some correlations to point out. "The areas that are subjected to the highest levels of spam are generally those locations that are populated with a higher density of small-to-medium sized businesses."

On the …

Remember Terry Childs? He was the network administrator for the city of San Francisco who -- claiming he was protecting the city government's computer system from incompetent coworkers -- changed the system's passwords and then for more than a week refused to give them to anyone, even after being arrested.

Childs eventually did give the passwords to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and was charged with four felony counts, basically of variations on hacking.

Well, it's more than a year later, and Childs is still in jail, without yet having been convicted of anything.

In August, San Francisco Superior Court judge Kevin McCarthy dropped three of the four charges, related to his attaching three modems to the network. The charge associated with his refusing to reveal the passwords stayed.

However, later in the month, Judge Charles Haines refused to lower Childs' $5 million bail, calling him a flight risk (when arrested, he'd been found with a large amount of cash) and a security risk to the San Francisco network.

In comparison, the San Francisco Felony Bail Schedule, which provides bail guidelines for a variety of offenses, lists a $1 million bail for the most serious crimes, such as sexual assault of a child, aggravated arson, or kidnapping for ransom, according to the IDG News Service.

Meanwhile, in January, Childs filed a $3 million lawsuit against the city, including $1 million in compensation for lost …

In an attempt to build support for a bill that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress, the online gambling industry is running online ads noting that legal online gambling could raise $48 billion for the deficit-plagued U.S. government.

"At a time when the federal deficit is at record levels, regulation will raise up to $48 billion over 10 years," according to the ad. "In a struggling economic environment, regulated Internet gambling would generate billions in new revenue for federal and state governments to fund key economic and social programs," the ad continues on another screen.

Representative Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, introduced legislation earlier this year, HR2267, that would allow the Treasury Department to license and regulate online gambling companies that serve American customers. Frank, who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, actually cited increased tax revenues as a reason to support the legislation.

Since introduction of the legislation, a bipartisan group of more than 50 co-sponsors have signed onto the bill, according to an article in PokerPagesOnline. Supporters include George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor; John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary; Charles Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means; Edolphus Towns (D-NY), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; Pete King (R-NY), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee; and Ron Paul (R-TX), vice-chairman of …

To be sure, there are all sorts of methodological issues with this study. I am not a trained statistician, but I have had coursework in it. My primary concern with this story was not necessarily criticizing the methodology of the study itself, but the fact that people were even thinking this way, a sort of guilt by association thing, what it could mean to people themselves based on who their friends were, and what that could mean in terms of people's willingness to publicly friend other people.

Two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have learned that it is possible to predict which men in social networks are gay, even if they aren't out, based on who their friends are.

It's the theory behind traffic analysis, or the process of intercepting and examining messages to deduce information from patterns in communication, even without the content of the messages.

According to an article in the Boston Globe, the project, code-named Gaydar, analyzed the Facebook friend links of 1,544 men who said they were straight, 21 who said they were bisexual, and 33 who said they were gay. "Gay men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men, giving the computer program a way to infer a person’s sexuality based on their friends," the article said.

The students then asked the program to determine the orientation of men who did not declare it on Facebook, and ten men -- whom the students knew to be gay -- were also predicted to be gay by the program. (The program was not so successful at picking out gay women, or bisexual men and women.)

It's not that people need to be worried about being outed by a couple of MIT students. But a number of organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have warned users how much personal information they are revealing in social networking sites without realizing it. What MIT students can do, other people -- including potential bosses …

Far from being made superfluous by the Internet, a recent study by the American Library Association finds that the library is often the only source of free Internet access in a community.

More than 71 percent of all libraries (and 79 percent of rural libraries) report they are the only source of free access to computers and the Internet in their communities, according to the survey. 76 percent of public libraries offer free wireless access. However, nearly 60 percent of libraries report Internet connection speeds are insufficient to meet patron demand at some point in the day, and 81 percent of public libraries report there are not enough public Internet computers to meet patron demand some or all of the time.

Libraries are particularly being used in the economic downtown, with 66 percent of public libraries ranking job-seeking services, including resume writing and Internet job searches, among the most crucial online services they offer – up from 44 percent two years ago. In a separate survey, 80 percent of New York libraries indicated they helped someone search for a job in late 2008, the ALA said. More than 90 percent of public libraries provide technology training such as online job-seeking and career-related classes, general Internet, and computer use instruction.

With more governments turning to the Internet themselves to reduce costs, many government services are now often available only, or most easily, via the Internet, leaving people without Internet access stuck.

Ironically, at the same …

Back in the day, people would write letters "to be opened only in the event that I am dead."

But if most of your life is conducted online, then what? As we age, a number of my single friends have morbidly wondered what would happen if they died. Would anyone notice they were gone? How could their online friends be notified? Or, if they died, how could they keep their family from finding out about their alter ego as Master Leathertongue on some more outre' sites?

Time Magazine did a fairly complete overview of the issue earlier this month. In short, the various email and social media sites are prepared, and there's a couple of services that you can use.

Email:

Yahoo! Mail's rule is to keep accounts private, though the company was taken to court in 2005 when relatives of a Marine killed in Iraq sued to gain access to his e-mail account. (Yahoo copied the e-mail messages onto a CD rather than give the family the password.)

Hotmail allows family with proof of death and proof of relationship, Time said. Gmail requires the same proof, as well as a copy of the headers of an email message sent from the deceased to the petitioner.

Social media:

After the shootings at Virginia Tech, Facebook created the notion of a "memorial" page, which turns off status messages and freezes the friends list but keeps the person's Wall …

If you've used Facebook for more than, oh, five minutes, you've seen a Facebook quiz. "What Greek dance are you?" "Which NFL coach are you?" "Which Diplomacy country should you play?" and so on. (I forget every quiz I see, and I'm up to more than 250 by now.)

But there's one quiz you might want to take a look at, which is the What Do Quizzes Really Know About You? on Facebook, from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Facebook applications typically have a boilerplate page, giving them access to all the information in your account. But this can add up to an awful lot -- especially since such applications also get access to information about your friends as well, the ACLU quiz warns.

The quiz then goes on to show you exactly what sort of information about you it has collected, as well as information about your friends, such as an aggregate of political affiliations, people's locations, and a sampling of groups to which they belong.

The purpose? To encourage users to change their privacy settings as well as to encourage them to contact Facebook to offer better privacy.

Coincidentally, on Thursday, Facebook announced a 12-month plan to enable users "to make more informed choices about their privacy."

"Specifically, Facebook will introduce a new permissions model that will require applications to specify the categories of information they wish to access and obtain express consent from the user …

What, you hadn't heard?

"A Senate bill would offer President Obama emergency control of the Internet and may give him a "kill switch" to shut down online traffic by seizing private networks -- a move cybersecurity experts worry will choke off industry and civil liberties," FOX News said breathlessly. (Nice use of action verbs, though.)

"Obama-mania control of America continues,[sic] first the Census was pulled to the White House, now a bill that would give Obama and his unscrupulous cronies’[sic] control of the internet[sic] is making its way through the Senate," said examiner.com.

Eek.

(Now that Fox News has hold of the story, expect a lot more of this. Funny how protective the right wing is of the Internet all of a sudden.)

The bill, S773, the "Cybersecurity Act of 2009," was introduced in April. It is intended to help protect national security in the event of war, natural disaster, or an act of cyberterrorism by giving the government the ability to control the Internet. The first take of the bill came under a fair amount of criticism at the time, through organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"One proposed provision gives the President unfettered authority to shut down Internet traffic in an emergency and disconnect critical infrastructure systems on national security grounds goes too far," the EFF said in April. "Certainly there are times when a network owner must block harmful traffic, but the bill gives …

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a ruling that not only threw out other cases, but has more broadly set a limit upon the use of data seized in a computer search.

The ruling has to do with the "plain view" doctrine, which allows law enforcement to take steps to pursue a crime when the evidence of it is in plain view. Prosecutors in an investigation of steroid use in baseball were using the entire contents of a spreadsheet to look for players who had tested positive, even though only about ten players were actually under investigation.

"After obtaining an electronic spreadsheet from the drug testing lab, though, the government reviewed the records of hundreds of players and many other people," explained the website law.com. "In the years since, drug dealers, athletes and coaches have been prosecuted for perjury, and the names of other baseball players who tested positive for steroids were leaked to the media."

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in an unusual instance of the entire court hearing the case rather than a subset of three judges, ruled that this was improper, both for the steroid case and in general.

The government should not be able to keep anything one of its agents happened to see while performing a forensic analysis of a hard drive, the finding read.

"The government should, in future warrant applications, forswear reliance on the plain view doctrine or any similar doctrine that …

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, states were required to set up websites in a specific format to explain to citizens how the money was spent.

The first look at how states have done has come out, and it isn't pretty.

According to a report by Good Jobs First, a national policy resource center for grassroots groups and public officials, promoting corporate and government accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families, most states are not doing a very good job so far at explaining how they're spending the money. On a scale of 1 to 100, the average of all the state scores for ARRA sites is only 28.2, and the median is 25, though scores specific to highway funding are slightly higher.

"Only six states score 50 or better for their ARRA website: Maryland (80), Colorado (68), Washington (63), West Virginia (60), New York (53) and Pennsylvania (50)," the group found. "Thirteen do so for their highway reporting, led by Maryland (75), Washington (73), Colorado (65), Nebraska (60) and California and New York (each at 58). Only four states (Colorado, Maryland, New York and Washington) score 50 or better on both measures."

Factors in each state's grade included:

• Planned spending totals by broad categories (energy, housing, transportation, etc.) as well as more specific programs;
• Data on the distribution of spending among the state’s counties (or other geographic divisions);
…

As predicted, a number of cyberbullying laws were put into effect after the suicide of Megan Meier last fall, which left prosecutors unable to charge the Missouri woman who created a fake MySpace person to mock the 13-year-old girl with anything other than violating MySpace's terms of service.

Not surprisingly, Missouri was one of the states, and now Elizabeth Thrasher has been the first person charged with felony cyberbullying, for allegedly posting photos and personal information of a teenage girl on the "Casual Encounters" section of Craigslist

According to a story by the Associated Press, the victim is the 17-year-old daughter of Thrasher's ex-husband's girlfriend.

Thrasher's Craigslist posting included the teen's picture, employer, e-mail address, and cell phone number. The girl, who has not been named, received calls, e-mails, text messages, and pornographic photos to her cell phone, and contacted police.

Thrasher, who is currently out on a $10,000 bond, could face up to four years in state prison, or up to a year in county jail, and a $5,000 fine.

An editorial in the Los Angeles Times called the arrest, and the law on which it was based, an overreaction. "t seems absurd that Thrasher faces up to four years in state prison for committing the online equivalent of writing "For a good time, call ... " in a well-used bathroom stall," the Times said. "The problem is with prosecutors who think that transgressions are automatically magnified if …

As feared, the Administration has caved to telecom industry restrictions on mapping the availability of broadband Internet, making it less likely that $7 billion in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, will actually help improve broadband access to people who don't have it.

According to the Washington Post, the U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday that companies such as Verizon Communications Inc, Comcast Corp., and AT&T Inc do not have to share how much money they make from each Internet subscriber. Nor must they say how fast their Internet connections typically run. Instead, they will provide data by the block -- not by the address -- which is usually about a dozen homes, depending on the size of the block. They also will share the speed of Internet service that they advertise -- not that they can actually provide.

One of the first steps in the process of expanding broadband Internet access in rural areas of the U.S. is for the Federal Communications Commission to produce a map of the areas that already have service -- and those that don't. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) came under criticism earlier this year for making $1.35 billion in loans that primarily added broadband Internet service to areas that already had it, rather than by bringing it to areas without it.

In fact, the funding had included $350 …

Want to do a public records search on email messages from your state legislator?

Chances are, you won't be able to, even with the recent move toward transparency in government.

Even states that do have an email retention policy in state government -- and many of them don't -- often don't require legislators or members of the executive branch to comply with it. (We already know that's the case for members of the executive branch in federal government.)

The National Conference of State Legislatures, the go-to people on comparative state legislative policies -- doesn't have anything written on email retention policies. In fact, the most recent work on the subject appears to be from 2006. "[T]here are still no truly uniform standards for the retention and management of email messages among the states," that article said. "[A] look at individual policies in the 50 states will find that they are, quite literally, all over the map. An accompanying list of such state policies as existed looked woefully outdated even then, with policies dating back to 1996, and a somewhat more recent list still shows many gaps. There isn't even a standard organization that governs the development and management of such policies.

This becomes a problem because citizens can't find out what their legislators are doing in email. There are no "Watergate tapes" when someone can eliminate entire conversations by pushing a button. "[L]arge numbers of messages, …

The Twitter Platform Team is recommending to all Twitter developers that they make sure their applications support 64-bit integers because the popular service has almost reached the limit of 32-bit unsigned integers.

"Twitter status ids are fast approaching the maximum 32-bit *unsigned* integer value (4,294,967,295)," posted Marcel Molina, identified as a member of the team.

"The current estimate is that this will occur in approximately 60 days, at the end of September," Molina continued. "The 60 day window is a best-guess approximation based on projections. It could conceivably happen sooner."

Molina went on to suggest to Twitter developers that they ensure their applications, as well as the libraries they use, support 64-bit integers.

Convention and visitors bureaus -- perhaps more than 300 of them -- are increasingly using Twitter to help market their locations, and a recent study examined how they do that.

Development Counsellors International, a New York-based tourism firm, said it looked at the convention and visitors bureaus representing the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas ("cities," more or less), determined which groups have Twitter accounts, and evaluated nearly 3,000 individual “Tweets” posted over a 30-day period by each organization.

The most effective such bureaus, according to DCI, in alphabetical order, are:

• Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association
• Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation
• New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau
• San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Tampa Bay and Company

Of 54 travel attraction organizations that represent the largest MSAs, 12 were not found on Twitter at all, DCI said. Of the remaining 42 with Twitter accounts, three had no tweets at all, the study found.

The most popular organizations, by number of followers, were:

1. travelportland Travel Portland 7999
2. VisitChicago Chicagoland Regional Tourism Development
Office 5231
3. BaltimoreMD Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors
Association 4784
4. VisitPhilly Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing
Corporation 3086
5. ExpCols Greater Columbus Convention & Visitors Bureau 3079
6. PositivelyCleve Positively Cleveland Convention & Visitors Bureau 3040
7. visitmusiccity Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau 2715
8. VisitHoustonTX Greater Houston …

How transparent is too transparent? In an attempt to make it easier for ordinary people to see what their governments are spending their money on, more entities -- from city to federal -- are putting this information online, noting that it's a public record. But some government workers are uncomfortable about having their names and salaries posted online.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, states are required to set up websites in a specific format to explain to citizens how the money was spent.

Beyond that, however, a number of other states are going further, putting information ranging from transit projects to water projects to actual checkbooks online. (A number of so-called transparency sites, such as New York and the District of Columbia, cover only contracts, however.)

Most such sites are sponsored and updated by local governments. For example, Georgia puts full names, titles, agencies, salaries, and travel expenses online, via the state.

In Idaho, a nonprofit organization is supposed to be setting up such a site next month (ouridaho.com, currently password-protected), and it obtained information from local governments by publicizing ones that did not cooperate.

Some states have said such transparency websites cost too much, which watchdog organizations such as the Sunshine Review have denied.

Other governments have been uneasy about the notion of posting such information online, even when …

A company has been awarded a patent for providing episodic media downloads, which essentially gives it a patent on all forms of podcasting.

The company, VoloMedia, calls itself the "leading provider of advertising and reporting solutions for portable media, extending the reach of video and audio from the PC to devices such as smartphones (e.g., iPhone, Android, BlackBerry), media players (e.g., iPod, Touch) and set-top boxes (e.g., Apple TV, Vudu) whether connected or offline." The patent was filed in 2003.

In a blog entry, company founder Murgesh Navar said it had filed a dozen patents since 2003 and this is just the first, with others to follow.

What is making some people nervous is the broad nature of the patent. "Today, podcasting is 100% RSS-based," Navar said. "However, the patent is not RSS-dependent. Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads. It just so happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did."

Consequently, today the Internet was ablaze with people citing prior art -- or, examples of people describing podcasting before this patent went into effect, which should have meant VoloMedia should not have been able to patent the idea. Most notable is a January 11, 2001 blog posting by Dave Winer, describing the technology that VoloMedia uses.

Patents in the computer industry have a long history of being overly broad, ignoring prior art, and eventually being …

A group of University of Washington students and professors has developed an application called Vanish that automatically makes data used with it disappear after eight to nine hours.

The open-source software is downloadable now, as well as information about how to use it and a research paper about its development, which will be presented at USENIX next month.

Using the system requires that users encrypt their data, meaning it is only for certain data, not for everything. Currently, it works with Firefox. Any text application, including Web-based e-mail such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, Web chat, or the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, can work with Vanish. Researchers said the same technique could work for any type of data, such as digital photos.

The software works by using a key to encrypt the data, which none of the recipients possess, and storing the key in pieces in various places on the network. "As machines constantly join and leave the P2P network, the pieces of the key gradually disappear," the group explains. "By the time the hacker or someone with a subpoena actually tries to obtain access to the message, the pieces of the key will have permanently disappeared."

It is also possible to set up the system to keep data for multiple eight-hour periods.

The group notes that the system is a research prototype only, and that certain legal requirements -- such as having corporate or government documents accessible -- may preclude …

A recent panel sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) discussed the issue of gay characters in online games, some of which forbid them.

Games produced by Bay Area-based Electronic Arts Inc., such as the Sims properties and Spore have no restrictions about revealing the fact one is gay or lesbian, according to the Bay Area Reporter, a San Francisco-based newspaper for the gay community. However, users of the Microsoft Xbox system are not allowed to mention their orientation in their profiles or names, though they can do so via voice chat.

Noting that 98 percent of the time the word "gay" is used in game data, it is used pejoratively, Microsoft said it has this policy to prevent harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender gamers, as well as the creation of homophobic player names, called gamertags.

However, the paper said that Microsoft executives are reviewing their policy, which the company said it is modifying so that in the future Xbox players will be allowed to come out in their profiles or gamertags. GLAAD is also working with Microsoft to help the company with the transition.

Members of the panel included Caryl Shaw (Senior Producer at Electronic Art's Maxis), Dan Hewitt (Senior Director of Communications & Industry Affairs for the Entertainment Software Association), Stephen Toulouse (Program Manager for Policy and Enforcement, Xbox Live), Cyn Skyberg (Vice President of Customer Relations at Linden Lab), and Flynn DeMarco (founder of …

Some users discovered last week that Amazon has the capability to remove books from their Kindle electronic reading devices, even though they were bought, paid for, downloaded, and in the users' possession.

Ironically, among the books with which this was discovered was George Orwell's 1984, which postulated a society where history could be changed by rewriting it. Orwell's Animal Farm was also affected, as were Harry Potter books and books by Ayn Rand, users reported.

Amazon said the company took this action when it discovered that the company that had uploaded the text of the books to the Kindle site did not have the rights to do so, and that the legitimate copyright holders had made the request, according to the New York Times.

A number of sources reported that Amazon sent out a press release late Friday saying that, after the outcry, it would not do this again, but the press release is not listed on the company's website.

Amazon was able to delete the books through the Kindle's "synchronization" feature.

Kindle users, who have already complained that the device doesn't enable them to lend or sell books, expressed surprise and disappointment that Amazon retained the ability to delete books from their Kindle systems.

It's said about writers that you should never get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

But United Airlines has learned not to get into fights with musicians who have videocameras.

As Dave Carroll, of the folk-rock group Sons of Maxwell, reports on his blog, it all started on March 31, 2008, when the group began a week-long-tour of Nebraska by flying United Airlines from Halifax to Omaha, by way of Chicago. After they landed in Chicago, another passenger witnessed baggage handlers throwing guitars owned by the group, which ended up causing $1200 in damage to Carroll's $3500 Taylor guitar.

Then followed a nine-month saga where Carroll tried to get the airline to accept responsibility, eventually being willing to take $1200 in airline vouchers, but United still refused.

Carroll then told United "that I would be writing three songs about United Airlines and my experience in the whole matter. I would then make videos for these songs and offer them for free download online, inviting viewers to vote on their favourite United song. My goal: to get one million hits in one year."

He's more than halfway there after two days.

"United Breaks Guitars," the first one of the songs, was posted to YouTube two days ago and has more than 640,000 hits.

Moreover, not only did United reportedly post -- on Twitter -- that the video “struck a chord w/ us and we’ve contacted …

me? what would you like me to read? glad you liked it!

Yahoo! announced this week that it would build what it said what would be the greenest, most energy-efficient data center in the world, powered by Niagara Falls.

Data centers are some of the heaviest users of electrical power there are, both to run the servers themselves and to cool them. In fact, a typical data center facility spends almost half of its energy consumption on the systems powering and cooling the computers inside, and not on the computers themselves, according to a website on the subject created by Google, itself one of the largest such users.

Indeed, the cost of energy is such a major factor in data center costs that siting them is typically based more on the cost of energy than on anything else.

In addition to using Niagara Falls, the Yahoo! data center will use a building design that takes advantage of Lockport, N.Y.'s microclimate to use 100 percent outside air to cool the servers, said David Filo, whose title is "Chief Yahoo." (And as a former resident of that region, I can confirm that the air is very cooling, particularly in winter, where Buffalo is in western New York's snowbelt due to the "lake effect" from nearby Lake Erie.)

The result, Filo said, is that the data center will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better.

In comparison, Google said in October 2008 that it is averaging a PUE rating …

It's been known for a while that current and potential future employers look at people's profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook.

And it's also been known that people are using social networking sites to announce the status of their relationship -- or lack of one.

Now the two uses are getting together, with divorce attorneys mining social networking sites for evidence supporting their clients.

"Lawyers, however, love these sites, which can be evidentiary gold mines," said a recent article in Time. "Did your husband's new girlfriend Twitter about getting a piece of jewelry? The court might regard that as marital assets being disbursed to a third party. Did your wife tell the court she's incapable of getting a job? Then your lawyer should ask why she's pursuing job interviews through LinkedIn." One attorney quoted in the article said such research is "routine."

In addition, exes are posting information about their formers -- such as an estranged wife emailing "friends" of the spouse the additional information that he was married with children, which he had neglected to include in his Facebook profile.

Such messages on a social-networking site can even be part of a harassment campaign that led to the court's issuing a civil order of protection, one attorney said.

President Barack Obama's administration made two announcements Monday about improved transparency in government: one about IT projects in general, and one about improving broadband access.

The announcements were made at the Personal Democracy Forum, in New York.

Tuesday, White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and White House New Media Director Macon Phillips are expected to demonstrate an Internet-based interactive dashboard to provide data such as goals, schedule, cost outlays, key personnel, contractors employed, and where the effort stands in real time about every major information technology project pursued by the federal government, according to National Journal Online.

In addition, the Federal Communications Commission's Blair Levin reportedly announced broadband.gov, which will be live July 2 and will be a beta version of the plan the FCC is required to provide to Congress by February on how to provide universal broadband, according to the Tweets of a number of people attending the conference.

Follow what's happening at the PDF by using the hash tag #pdf09 on Twitter.

If Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, gets his way, blog postings like this one could be illegal.

On his blog, Posner recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded.

"Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion," his blog entry concluded.

Copying another site's work is one thing. But barring linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials? That would eliminate a huge amount of what makes the Web valuable.

In the early days of the Web, there were some issues regarding copyright issues and linking. But that sort of thing had largely gone away over time as newspapers realized that linking actually brought new readers to them.

But now, others are suggesting even broader restrictions, such as requesting the copyright holder's consent even to index items. "Google's products (and profit) would look a lot different if, for example, the law said it had to obtain copyright permissions in order to copy and index Web sites," said Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown, partners …

It's said that the Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. Maybe, but it barely survived the death of Michael Jackson.

A series of web sites fell like dominoes as Boomers and GenXers raced to verify the truth of the Jackson death rumors yesterday. Twitter, Wikipedia, tmz.com, latimes.com, and Google News all reported outages, according to CNN -- which had problems itself with cnn.com.

Reportedly, 30 percent of Tweets were related to Jackson, and there was so much traffic that Iranian protesters couldn't get to Twitter to update their news.

Even as of Friday noon EDT, 6 of the top 10 Twitter trending topics were related to Jackson.

Raising privacy and civil liberties issues, job applicants to the city of Bozeman are not only required to list all their social media accounts, but their passwords as well.

“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,” the City form states. The application shows a space for passwords.

According to KBZK, the local news station, which said it was tipped to the requirement by an anonymous source, city attorney Greg Sullivan said this was required to ensure employees will protect the public trust. He also added that no applicant had removed their name from consideration due to the requirement.

“In order for us to get access to the chosen candidate’s information, we need to be able to view their page,” Sullivan said, according to a transcript of the interview. “And so that’s the way we’ve chosen to go about doing it. As far as we know, there’s no other way to get into their specific Face book page.”

That is, of course, incorrect—as the station’s reporter pointed out, the city of Bozeman could create its own page and ask applicants to link to it, which would give them access to their pages. Such ignorance of social networking creates troubling questions of what other mistakes could be made by handing over the …

Following the lead of John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, President Barack Obama had mentioned in his campaign platform a "Craigslist for Service" (which met with the full approval of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark).

It has now come to fruition with what Obama is calling "the summer of service." "This summer, President Obama is calling on all of us – young and old, from every background, all across this country – to participate in our nation’s recovery and renewal by serving in our communities. From June 22 to September 11, United We Serve will begin to engage Americans from coast to coast in addressing community needs in education, health, energy and the environment, and community renewal."

AllforGood.org has been set up to give people the chance to give back to their community and share opportunities to help. According to the website, the team that created it is made up of volunteering enthusiasts from places such as Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink. Google is hosting the All for Good website and products, and several Google engineers worked on All for Good as a 20-percent project (Google lets engineers spend a day a week on projects that interest them).

People can search for volunteer opportunities based on keywords, such as helping with veterans. It is also location-based and automatically comes up with volunteer opportunities in one's geographic area.

It is also integrated with Facebook and uses Facebook's "like" feature. …

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 1993.

In the same way that people in Mumbai used Twitter last fall to publicize news of terrorist attacks in that Indian city, Iranians are using Twitter to let the world know what is going on in that country after a government crackdown was imposed to quell unrest and dissent after dubious election results.

Using the hash tag #Iranelection, a number of people purportedly from Iran are not only reporting news from that country, but using Twitter to pass on a series of Internet port addresses that are open in the country, though the government has tried to shut down the Internet to keep news of the unrest from leaking out.

"working Iran proxies 218.128.112.18:8080 218.206.94.132:808 218.253.65.99:808 219.50.16.70:8080", for example, is being Tweeted and re-Tweeted by a number of people.

More than 150 Tweets a minute are being posted about the Iranian election, including descriptions of 500,000-person protests, and even photographs.

Moreover, other people outside Iran are using Twitter to criticize CNN for what they perceive as its failure to cover what's going on in the country, using the hash tag #CNNfail.

Given that some courts have found that people can be charged for violating the terms of service of a particular site, it's important to keep track of what the terms of service are so you don't inadvertently violate them.

(Incidentally, some other courts are finding that violating terms-of-service policies are not worth criminal charges.)

But what do you do if a site changes its policies, as Twitter has been known to do?

Now there's help. A new site, TOSBack, sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tracks 44 terms-of-service policies, and notes when and what changes are made.

Sites that TOSBack tracks are Amazon, Apple, Automattic, Blizzard, Craigslist, Data.gov, DoubleClick, EBay, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Facebook, Flickr, GoDaddy, Google, MySpace, Organizing For America, Recovery.gov, Twitter, Whitehouse.gov, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

One example of an upcoming change will be "verified accounts" in Twitter. After a number of cases of Twitter spoof impersonation, ranging from Idaho Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter to St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa (who is suing the company, though it denies it settled the case), Twitter says it plans to verify the accounts of "public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation."

"Initially, verification will not be tested with businesses. However, we do see an opportunity in that arena so we'll keep you posted when we …

Some people are complaining that the company hoping to map the availability of broadband Internet is too closely tied to the same major telecommunications and cable companies that stand to benefit from the more than $7 billion in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, reported the Wall St. Journal today.

One of the first steps in the process of expanding broadband Internet access in rural areas of the U.S. is for the Federal Communications Commission to produce a map of the areas that already have service -- and those that don't. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) came under criticism earlier this year for making $1.35 billion in loans that primarily added broadband Internet service to areas that already had it, rather than by bringing it to areas without it.

Just the mapping alone is likely to cost $350 million, the Journal reported.

The biggest U.S. provider of broadband coverage maps, Connected Nation Inc., is trying to become the provider of maps for the federal stimulus program. But it is backed by big telecommunications companies like Comcast Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. that potentially stand to benefit, the Journal reported.

For example, of the company's 12 directors, eight are high-ranking executives in companies such as AT&T, CTIA The Wireless Association, Comcast, Verizon, Communications Workers of America, United States Telecom Association, National Cable and Telecommunications Association, …

Remember the 14 million missing email messages from the White House under President George W. Bush? Remember the (albeit flawed) court order (issued days before President Barack Obama's inauguration) directing the Bush White House to figure out what happened to them?

Never mind.

A federal appeals court recently ruled that the White House does not have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of the email, because the appeals court found that the White House's Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, under which the suit was filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), according to the Washington Post.

Potentially millions of email messages -- including those covering key moments related to the invasion of Iraq and to a federal probe of the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's classified employment with the CIA -- could have been missing. The Justice Department had reported that after a $10 million investigation, it had located 14 million email messages. However, the serendipity of the find, along with the refusal of the department to detail the procedures it had used to locate the email messages, had raised suspicions, leading to the failed lawsuit.

"[W]e are asked to decide whether a unit within
the Executive Office of the President is covered by the
Freedom of Information Act," the court's decision reads. "In this
case, we conclude that the Office of Administration is …

In what may be a first, a company has bought rights to a Facebook page -- in a bidding war, even. OraBrush, a company that makes tongue cleaners, has outbid Hershey's for the rights to the "Kisses" public profile, according to the Inside Facebook blog.

Pricing was not disclosed.

The Kisses page has 1,158,002 fans, and every time the owner of the page posts something to it, it automatically appears on the status page of all its fans because it has "stream access." This means it's an easy way to advertise.

"Facebook wants Pages to be authentic channels for brands and authorized agents, leaving generic topics to Facebook Groups, which don’t have stream access," said Inside Facebook.

To do this, though, Facebook is going to need to do something about "page squatting," which Twitter began addressing earlier this year by not allowing people to "squat" on Twitter IDs in hopes of making a profit, or infringing on a vendor's trademark with the intent to confuse consumers. Facebook has still not created any sort of trademark infringement policy, according to its help section.

The same thing happened with domain names; a few savvy people started signing themselves up to own domain names like "www.mcdonalds.com," with the thought that, someday, McDonald's Corp. might want to be on the Internet and would offer them oodles of money to buy the name from them, but eventually, it was determined that URLs …

Busy this weekend? President Barack Obama and his IT staff are asking for ideas through June 3 to help make government more open.

The call for ideas first went out on May 21. So far, there's 1171. People can vote thumbs up or thumbs down on the ideas.

"Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase," said Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer, and Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, on the White House blog. "On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki to draft recommendations in collaborative fashion."

The ideas fall into a number of categories, including transparency, participation, collaboration, capacity building, legal and policy challenges, and "uncategorized."

Thus far, the most successful idea, with 728 votes, reportedly comes from House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and calls for a 72-hour mandatory minimum public review period on all major spending bills brought before Congress.

The least successful idea, with -59 votes, calls for all soldiers to be brought back from other countries and used to guard the U.S. border from illegal immigrants.

It's also possible to see what other ideas individual users have voted positively or negatively.

As expected, Representative Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, has introduced legislation that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress.

The legislation would allow the Treasury Department to license and regulate online gambling companies that serve American customers, according to the New York Times. Under the current law, approved by Congress in September 2006, financial institutions are banned from handling transactions made to and from Internet gambling sites.

Frank, who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, gave two reasons for the legislation. First, the federal government could collect increased tax revenues if Internet gambling was regulated. Second, he said online gambling should be legal as a matter of personal liberty, calling it an activity the government should neither encourage nor prohibit.

Unlike the 2007 bill Frank introduced, this bill forbids betting on sports events, while the earlier one let sports organizations decide themselves whether to prohibit online betting on their games.

Both bills allow states and Indian tribal lands to opt out if they do not want their residents using licensed Web sites, and require companies seeking a license to employ safeguards to help prevent minors from gaining access to gambling sites and combat compulsive gambling. However, Representative Spencer Bachus, Republican of Alabama and the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, said he was skeptical about age verification technology and other safeguards, citing 2007 testimony from an Internet security expert before …

"Universal service" should encompass broadband Internet access in the same way that it originally encompassed telephone access, according to a new report from the Federal Communications Commission to Congress.

The report, Bringing Broadband to Rural America: Report on a Rural Broadband Strategy, is written by Michael Copps, acting chairman of the FCC. It was written for Congress as a preliminary step for a national broadband plan, due in 2010, and as a requirement from the 2008 Farm Bill.

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the report noted.

RUS, one of a number of agencies charged with helping improve broadband access in rural areas, came under criticism earlier this year for making $1.35 billion in loans that primarily added broadband Internet service to areas that already had it, rather than by bringing it to areas without it.

"Congress recognized that this funding initiative, though substantial, was still just a down payment on the broadband needs of the country, and that even after this money has been invested, many Americans, including those residing in rural areas, will continue to lack access to critical broadband services," the report said. "Therefore, the Recovery Act charges this Commission with developing a national broadband plan by next …

A study conducted by American Airlines and Hewlett-Packard has found that frequent flyers would rather geek than eat, with more than 47 percent saying that airport wireless access was an important amenity, compared to about 18 percent who said food was.

The purpose of the study was to help promote American Airlines for high-tech business travelers; the company pointed out that it offers power ports on all of its mainline aircraft, available at each seat in First and Business class, as well as selected rows in the Economy cabin, and that it planned to install Gogo Inflight Internet -- which it first installed last August -- on more than 300 domestic aircraft over the next two years. (Gogo costs $12.95 for flights more than three hours, and $9.95 for flights less than three hours, and purports to be full Internet access.)

The study was not scientific and it was conducted in such a way as to elicit that sort of response; it was conducted by email to American's "loyal customer database," who had taken more than 20 trips in the previous year, and people only responded if they wanted to. In addition, while the companies said they had received 1,582 responses, they did not say how many people had received the survey, so the response rate is impossible to calculate.

Other findings included the following:

• A combined 67.7 percent of frequent travelers surveyed said a dead battery (41.4 percent) and …

The continuing saga of Craigslist vs. the state attorneys general took another turn, with South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster contending that the continued presence of ads for "erotic services" on the site constituted a criminal violation for which Craigslist management was personally responsible, and with Craigslist management firing back with a list of all the other places in which such ads could be found and asking whether McMaster was prepared to arrest them all too.

Late last year, Craigslist came to an agreement with 40 attorneys general -- including McMaster -- to help reduce prostitution on the site. In March, 2008, the organization implemented a telephone verification system for the "erotic services" section of the site, requiring a working phone number for advertisers, and enabling blacklisting of phone numbers for those who post inappropriate ads. Phone verification resulted in an 80% reduction in ad volume, and significantly increased compliance with site guidelines, Craigslist said.

In addition, Craigslist began requiring credit card verification and a small fee per ad for posting in "erotic services," to further encourage compliance with site guidelines, removing paid ads that violated site guidelines.

After the murder of an erotic masseuse allegedly committed by Phillip Markoff, which became known as the "Craigslist murder" because he had reportedly found his victim there, the site at first refused to shut down the erotic services section, and capitulated last week.

"As of today for all US craigslist …

Following the lead of Facebook users whose uproar over a change in terms led the social media company to change them back, Twitter users are now clamoring about a change in what Twitter shows.

Twitter users "follow" other users, meaning they see their posts. People can either create new posts or reply to other users. What Twitter has done is changed things so that people only see replies to other users if they are also following those users.

The company said it made the change in response to user request. "Receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option."

However, numerous Twitter users -- posting with the hashtag #fixreplies to help track the discussion -- point out that seeing replies to people they don't follow helps them discover interesting new people to follow.

Moreover, one of the events that really put Twitter on the map in terms of real-time news -- widespread notice of an attack in Mumbai on Western tourists -- wouldn't have been possible under this new policy, #fixreplies supporters point out.

Currently, 81 sites link to the description of the new policy, with most of them appearing to disapprove of it. It is the leading discussion topic on Twitter right now. There is also at least two online petitions.

Other users point out that tools such …

People are continuing to find new and interesting things to do with Twitter.

One is Stweet, a combination of Twitter and Google Map's Streetview that uses georeferencing. Select a city from the picklist (or enter another city at the bottom of the screen) and it'll show you the most recent Twitter posting from that city, as well as the Streetview image of the location from which it was posted.

The image updates when a new Tweet comes in from that city, which means it's going to be very interesting the next time there's an earthquake or other disaster. Too bad Streetview isn't real-time. Yet.

Needless to say, it only works with cities that have been set up to work with Streetview, or you get the message "No geolocated Tweet for this location."

Meanwhile, hacklab, a Toronto-based group of computer geeks, has wired up a laptop to the toilet and it posts a random message to Twitter with every flush.

"hey, it's more useful and relevant than just about everything else on twitter!," said the writeup.

Hacking toilets is a time-honored tradition; students of Dr. Jeff Case, one of the developers of the Simple Network Management Protocol, developed an SNMP-enabled toilet in the 1990s to let people know when the toilet (located down a long hall) was free by having it display an image of the status (door open or closed), as well as a flushing sign when the …

Along with a number of other changes brought forth by President Barack Obama’s administration, another one might be the re-legalization of online gambling -- particularly poker -- in the United States.

Online gambling in the U.S. was made much more difficult, though not technically illegal, in 2006 by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which made it unlawful for banks, credit card companies, and online payment processors such as PayPal to transfer funds from players to online gambling establishments.

While the law did not criminalize the playing of poker online, it made it more difficult for people to get their money online.

Representative Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, attempted to bring forth legislation to overturn the ban in 2007, but was unable to do so because of conservatives who considered gambling not only immoral, but perhaps even an issue of national security. Because of the new administration – led by a President who plays poker himself – it is thought that the atmosphere now might be more amenable to a repeal.

It could also help the U.S. financial situation. In September, 2008, PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimated that legalizing online gambling in the U.S. could bring in up to $52 billion in revenue to the government – an increase of 22 percent over a similar study in 2007, due to increased interest in online gambling.

Conservatives are still concerned. The conservative thinktank Heartland Institute cites Tom McClusky, senior vice …

The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department is opening an antitrust investigation of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service.

In 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed suit against Google, claiming that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from libraries for use in its Book Search service was a violation of copyrights.

Google reached a settlement with the groups last October that gives Google the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual texts, as well as selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions, the Times reported, with revenue to be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

The problem is with books whose authors cannot be found or whose rights holders are unknown, because Google would have sole rights to those books, according to the Times. For its part, Google points out that users will now once again have access to many out-of-print books.

A mainstay of situation comedies is when one of the characters plays hooky at work to go do something else -- bowling, watching a ball game, going to the movies -- and gets caught. Never fails.

Now there's a new wrinkle for them to try.

Reuters is reporting that a Swiss insurance worker for National Suisse lost her job for being seen surfing Facebook after calling in sick and saying she could not work in front of a computer as she needed to lie in the dark.

National Suisse emphasized the firing was because the woman had lied, not because of anything she'd done on Facebook -- an important distinction to make, because some people have lost their jobs based on things they've done online.

The woman accused her employer of spying on her and other employees by sending a friend request that allowed access to personal online activity, which National Suisse denied.

Expect to see it -- "ripped from the headlines" -- on television soon.

Craig Newmark, the San Francisco-based founder of the Craigslist want-ad site, is reportedly refusing pressure to shut down his site's Erotic Services section in light of an alleged murder where the victim advertised there, according to a story in the Huffington Post.

Philip Markoff, a Boston University medical student, is charged with killing Julissa Brisman, a 25-year-old masseuse, on April 14 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place hotel. He also is charged in a robbery at a nearby hotel of another masseuse police say he met through the Craigslist classified ads Web site.

Newmark was requested by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to eliminate photographs in the "erotic services" section, hire staff to screen images and ads that violate the site's terms of service, and fine users who violate those terms.

If the name "Blumenthal" sounds familiar, it should. He's been involved in any number of cases involving sexual predators and the Internet. Earlier this year, he subpoenaed MySpace to find the number of sexual predators there. He also responded angrily to a study indicating that the issue of sexual predators on the Internet was vastly overstated.

Late last year, Craigslist came to an agreement with 40 attorneys general -- which may or may not have included Blumenthal, but it's a good bet -- to help reduce prostitution on the site. In March, 2008, the organization implemented a telephone verification system for the "erotic services" section of the …

Though the swine flu just began hitting the news media on Friday or so, there's already a number of sites and ways to help you keep track of developments (and give you nightmares, frankly, but forewarned is forearmed).

1. A Google Map of reported swine flu cases. It's not perfect -- it looks like there's some duplication -- but it gives you a general idea of where it's been spotted internationally.

2. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention already has a swine flu website up. It's in both English and Spanish and has as much information as the CDC, sponsored by the U.S. government, has on the disease, its spread, and what you can do. You can also sign up for email alerts when the page is updated.

3. You can also follow the CDC on Twitter by following @CDCEmergency. If you really want to get overwhelmed, search for the hashtag #swineflu.

4, 5. There are two Flu Wikis, this one and this one. It isn't clear how they're all that different other than layout, but over time it will probably become more obvious which one is updated more often. The second one appears to make it easier to track developments in different countries.

Also, should a pandemic be declared, it would be the Department of Homeland Security that would be in charge of the plan, though its website doesn't have a specific swine …