Internet-D

Late this Friday, Craigslist removed its Adult Services section for American Craigslist users, leaving only a CENSORED bar where the link would normally be. This comes after months of attention and pressure from news outlets and local governments to close the section, which is widely known as a haven those interested in working or hiring in the oldest profession.

It is likely that Craigslist took action this weekend due to last week’s letter from seventeen state attorney generals demanding that the section be taken down.

However, it is unclear exactly what this CENSORED bar means for the future of the section, because Craigslist has not, as yet, released a statement. But that doesn’t mean no one has speculated.

From Wired:

If Craigslist has bowed to public pressure, that would signal a major shift in the company’s strategy.

According to the Advanced Interactive Media Group, Craigslist’s adult services section accounts for 30 percent of its overall revenue — a projected $36.6 million in 2010 out of $122 million…

Craigslist has made numerous changes to its sex listings over the years to accommodate critics, changing its sex listings label from “erotic services” to “adult services,” imposing rules about the types of ads that can appear, and manually filtering ads using attorneys. But it has also fiercely defended its overall practices as ethical, and criticized censorship as a useless and hypocritical dodge.

From TechCrunch:

I’ve reached out to Craigslist for comment and await their reply. But the choice of words is significant – the section wasn’t simply removed, the censored word was used.

The site has been embattled as old press and state attorneys general use any excuse to blame sex crimes on the site. From South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster’s failed crusade against them to a variety of press stories about sex and other crimes. If it’s just a sex crime it isn’t a story. But if a listing on Craigslist was involved, it’s a big story.

From Ars Technica:

If this does indeed mark the end of the line for the adult services section on Craigslist, it doesn’t mean that all adult services ads will magically vanish; they’re likely to migrate to other parts of the site. That said, the attorneys general will no doubt view the apparent shutdown of the adult services section as a victory in their war against the online sex trade.

And how will all this effect the future of certain PAX meetups? We’ll have to wait and see.
GeekOSystems

Many of us rely on Facebook to keep in touch with friends. After all, many people still shy away from newer services like Twitter or FriendFeed. The problem is, having all that data out in the cloud is risky.

What if Facebook removed your account? What if you wanted to take the data elsewhere? Despite their recent moves to open up, Facebook still make it difficult to remove your data.

Stepping in to solve this problem is SocialSafe. This Adobe Air app from a British team has the sole purpose of backing up your Facebook photos, address book and profile information. Accessing your account via Facebook Connect, it’s fast and effective at copying all the data to your local storage.

via SocialSafe offers Facebook ‘backup’ solution.

With some of the recent problems that facebook has been having, I’m finding that the service is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.  I need options for when I want to bail on them, and something like this may do the trick.

The website for a law firm that helped successfully prosecute the four founders of The Pirate Bay was up and running Monday after it came under siege by hackers during the weekend.

The MAQS law firm, with offices in Denmark, Estonia, Poland and Sweden, shuttered its site late Saturday, posting that its site “was currently under attack and we have therefore decided to shut it down until the attack ceases.” The siege, believed to be a DDoS attack, represented the third time in two months that hackers had attacked a website of those involved in The Pirate Bay prosecution.

A lawyer for the MAQS firm, Monica Wadsted, represented the Motion Picture Association of America during The Pirate Bay trial that ended April 17. The four defendants who founded the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker were found guilty of copyright infringement, ordered jailed for a year and fined millions.

The case, tried in Stockholm, is on appeal. Under Swedish law, the case was a joint civil and criminal trial.

The Swedish website for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, another group in the case, was defaced in February by hackers protesting the group’s involvement in the ongoing Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm. A hacked message on the homepage of the recording industry association’s website had urged Pirate Bay prosecutor Hakan Roswall of Stockholm to “stop lying.”

Last week, the IFPI site was hit again, this time briefly shuttered after succumbing to a DDoS attack.

Wired

Erm No comment.

.

Welcome to LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web. LIFE and Getty Images, the two most recognized names in photography, have joined forces to provide you instant access to millions of breathtaking photographs – for free. LIFE.com not only lets you wander through the legendary LIFE and Getty archives, but with more than 3,000 new photos added every day, it also gives you the best pictures of the people and places shaping our world now.
– The iconic magazine rebuilt and relaunched - The Red Ferret Journal

   Life.com

My god, it’s full of stars.

#4. Flying Hillbilly Truck Driver

Hillbilly Tornado Man rivals the Mona Lisa for his subtle depiction of both intrigue and perplexity. What was Mona Lisa smiling about so enigmatically? Why is Hillbilly Tornado Man’s truck lodged 50 feet up a tree? Why does he look so satisfied about it? Was he caught in a twister? Did he literally ride the whirlwind? Did he just fucking drive it up there like an Appalachian Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Did he throw it?! Nobody knew, all they knew was the man had a chest like a barrel of meat, he could not afford an entire shirt and his goddamn truck was in a goddamn tree.

The Truth:

That’s Mark Madson, and the truck behind him is actually a tree-house he built for his son, Luke, in the town of Beloit, Wisconsin. So, on the downside, the truck-in-tree was not the fantastic drunken feat of a modern day redneck Paul Bunyan, but actually just a pretty slick – if dangerously negligent – act of charity from a father to his son. None of that changes the fact that, when faced with creating a play space for his little boy, Mark Madson said “fuck you” to blueprints, cracked open a Coors Light, rammed a truck into a tree and called it a day. And it also doesn’t change the fact that, when the photographer came to do a photo shoot about it, Mark oiled up his chest-planks, threw on his formal vest and posed like he was the Captain Morgan of moonshine.

Check out the rest at Cracked.

The mayor of a small Southern California city who was criticized for sending an e-mail showing watermelons in front of the White House says he will give up the mayoral post but remain on the City Council.

Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose heard calls for his resignation this week when he forwarded an e-mail showing a watermelon patch on the White House lawn under the title: “No Easter egg hunt this year.”

Grose has apologized and said he wasn’t aware of the racial stereotype that blacks like watermelon.

Officials in the Orange County town say Grose will officially resign as mayor on Monday. But Grose told KCAL-TV on Friday that he intends to remain on the City Council.

The mayor is a council member chosen to serve in that position by fellow members of the five-seat council.

MSNBC
Liar and a coward. He “wasn’t aware of the racial stereotype that blacks like watermelon”? Yeah. Right.

SEATTLE – A few weeks after launching the first wide-scale layoffs in its history, Microsoft Corp. admits it screwed up a key part of the plan.

First Microsoft realized that an administrative glitch caused it to pay more severance than intended to some laid-off employees. The company’s response: It asked the ex-workers for the money back.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29353191/

Wow. Surprising, no?

In an updated article:

Microsoft says:

“As stated in the Xbox Live Terms of Use, a member may not create a gamertag or use text in other profile fields that include comments that look, sound like, stand for, hint at, abbreviate, or insinuate content of a potentially sexual nature. Profiles that do are asked to change the language and suspended until changes are made. In regards to sexual orientation, for gamertags or profiles we do not allow expression of any type of orientation, be that hetero or other. Players can, however, self identify in voice communication where context is more easily explained to all players involved.

“Harassment of any kind is not condoned and is taken very seriously; we strongly encourage Xbox Live members to immediately report inappropriate behavior through the compliant tools in the service so that it can be investigated and the appropriate action taken.”

“The Xbox Live community grows daily, and we continue to explore methods and levels of enforcement to enhance the ways our members connect and have fun, while adhering to a code of conduct that encourages respect and keeps the service safe and fun for all our members.”

What is Microsoft doing and why? What’s their concern here?
The Consumerist 1st article
The Consumerist 2nd article

The folks on trial are referring to the event as a “spectrial,” a combination of “spectacle” and “trial,” and there’s little doubt it will be. The Pirate Bay backers are on trial for secondary copyright infringement in a case that has been building for several years. The trial begins on February 16 and is slated to go through March 4, with everyone from The Pirate Bay’s young backers to the head of the IFPI taking the stand to give evidence. In the middle of it all, on February 20, a “HUGE PARTY” is scheduled.

Public broadcaster SVT will stream audio of the trial, though video recordings from the courtroom are not allowed. The case will (obviously) be held in Swedish, with translation services offered to English-speaking witnesses, but The Pirate Bay wants to make the trial even more accessible to a wider audience. “Of course, this is not enough for us,” they write on their new trial-tracking website. “By the help of some friends, we will set up a translated and commentated stream. We will also discuss the trial with famous and/or interesting guests.” No word yet on how this will work or how to access it.

ars technica

A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The patient is fine,” said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. “Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.”

The case was first reported in November, and the new report is the first official publication of the case in a medical journal. Hutter and a team of medical professionals performed the stem cell transplant on the patient, an American living in Germany, to treat the man’s leukemia, not the HIV itself.

However, the team deliberately chose a compatible donor who has a naturally occurring gene mutation that confers resistance to HIV. The mutation cripples a receptor known as CCR5, which is normally found on the surface of T cells, the type of immune system cells attacked by HIV.

CNN
This is fantastic! This is a huge step forward.

This corset is designed after the Star Trek: Next Generation jumpsuits. The fabric was cut in the asymmetrical design and then pieced together.
– Etsy :: EveningArwen :: Star Trek Inspired Corset

Oh goodness.  thanks to Wil Wheaton for the heads up on this one, it’s made my day much brighter now

Reports have surfaced that Seattle police chief, Gil Kerlikowske has been tapped for a job in the Obama administration, most likely as the administration’s new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, commonly known as the “drug czar.” But unlike past leaders in the “War on Drugs,” Kerlikowske is outspokenly lenient on the enforcement of marijuana possession laws – at least so far – with local supporters of medical marijuana laws very pleased with the choice.
– Did Obama Pick a Pot-Friendly Drug Czar? : COED Magazine

Oh happy day?  will I finally be able to legally get drunk, take pills, AND smoke weed all at the same times?

I just watched this last night, and through the magic of the internet, you too can watch “Judgment Day – Intelligent Design On Trial” which is a complete and utter destruction of Intelligent Design, or to should I say “cdesign proponentsists”.  Please tell me what you think of the program after you watch it!

Ah well.

Now I want some techno geek to do the same thing with 4chan’s Enter Sandman by Metallica.
Metallica with LOL CATS

This is just scary. There is something very wrong with the Japanese sometimes.

Unknown source.

Apparently someone hacked into the electronic road signs in Texas and proceeded to have some fun. Oh and The End Is Near!

Make sure you have annotations turned on.

President Obama has become the nation’s thumb-typer-in-chief. He reached a deal with his security advisors Thursday that will let him keep his BlackBerry, albeit a version equipped with heavy encryption designed to keep bad guys from intercepting his messages and tracking his location. Though security concerns remain, the nation’s 44th president can try to keep it real by using his smartphone to e-mail with people outside the Beltway.
Previous presidents have shied away from electronic communication, worried that it would leave a permanent record of their correspondence. White House aides say they assume his e-mail will eventually become public. But Obama thought it worth the fight. He’s obsessed with the device, saying, “I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry. They’re going to pry it out of my hands.”

Obama is Da Man!
Los Angeles Times

Oooh. Ouch! That looks really painful. I had an allergic reaction that caused me to go e-dermic and this may be worse.