Let’s take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future. The year is 2016, and George Bailey, a former banker, now a part-time consultant, is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls (BeFa). He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Mr. Bailey’s taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it starts browsing his daughter Zuzu’s photo album, “Saturday Nite!” And what was this tweet from a few years back: “FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge”?

A new wave of startups is working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the web of associations on the internet known as “the social graph,” in which people are “nodes” connected to each other by “edges.” Banks are already using social media to befriend their customers, and increasingly, their customers’ friends. The specifics are still shaking out, but the gist is that eventually, social media will account for at least the tippy-top of the mountain of data banks keep on their customers.

“There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” said Ken Lin, CEO of the San Francisco-based credit scoring startup Credit Karma. “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”

And in the last year or so, financial institutions have started exploring ways to use data from Facebook, Twitter and other networks to round out an individual borrower’s risk profile…

[continues at Betabeat]

Three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to our memories.

Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).

McLEAN, VA — In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group’s effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

The agency’s Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly.

The Associated Press got an apparently unprecedented view of the center’s operations, including a tour of the main facility. The AP agreed not to reveal its exact location and to withhold the identities of some who work there because much of the center’s work is secret.

From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in a native tongue. They cross-reference it with a local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House. There might be a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Read More: AP

PHOENIX — Doctors and medical experts are concerned about a new trend taking place on Facebook.

Parents are trading live viruses through the mail in order to infect their children. The Facebook group is called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area.” According to the group’s page, it is geared toward “parents who want their children to obtain natural immunity for the chicken pox.”

On the page, parents post where they live and ask if anyone with a child who has the chicken pox would be willing to send saliva, infected lollipops or clothing through the mail. Parents also use the page to set up play dates with children who currently have chicken pox. Medical experts say the most troubling part of this is parents are taking pathogens from complete strangers and deliberately infecting their children.

More: KPHO CBS 5 News

A 36-year-old Texas man has pleaded not guilty to battery charges after allegedly attacking his estranged wife for failing to “Like” a status update he posted to Facebook.

Benito Apolinar had posted an update to his Facebook page about the anniversary of his mother’s death. Angry that the post had elicited no response from his wife of 15 years, he confronted her after dropping off their children at her home in Carlsbad, New Mexico on Tuesday.

“That’s amazing everyone ‘Likes’ my status but you, you’re my wife. You should be the first one to ‘Like’ my status,” he allegedly told her before punching her in the cheek and pulling her hair.

More: Yahoo! News

4chan founder Chris Poole discusses the problem with personal identity as conceived by Facebook and Google. Basically, that they expect us to maintain a single, consistent persona throughout life, which is not how we actually exist:

An Australian technologist has caused a global stir after discovering Facebook tracks the websites its users visit even when they are logged out of the social networking site.

In alarming new revelations, Wollongong-based Nik Cubrilovic conducted tests, which revealed that when you log out of Facebook, rather than deleting its tracking cookies, the site merely modifies them, maintaining account information and other unique tokens that can be used to identify you.

Whenever you visit a web page that contains a Facebook button or widget, your browser is still sending details of your movements back to Facebook, Cubrilovic says.

“Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit,” Cubrilovic wrote in a blog post.

He backed up his claims with detailed technical information. His post was picked up by technology news sites around the world but Facebook has yet to provide a response to Fairfax Media and others.

Stephen Collins, spokesman for the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said he did not believe Cubrilovic’s revelations would see people turn away from the site in droves but he hoped users became more engaged with the issue.

Televangelist and self-professed prophetess Juanita Bynum has sparked curiosity among internet users and the Christian community for several comments on the minister’s Facebook page where she appears to type “in tongues.”

Bynum’s prayer posts soon caught the attention of the media, with one reporter at a spirituality website speculating that the minister was communicating “in tongues.” On one prayer post, visitor Cindy McCraw commented, expressing her agreement. “I believe it’s tongues (holy spirit). It’s called praying in the Spirit,” McCraw wrote.

Northern Germany has announced that the Like button, with its ability to track a user’s movement across the internet, violates German and European privacy law. But without tracking plugins, how will corporations and advertisers record our activities and interests, so that they can better serve and satisfy? Via ZDNet:

Commissioner Thilo Weichert, of the Independent Center for Privacy Protection, said the social network’s “Like button” plugin illegally puts together a profile of their Web habits.

The ULD said if you visit Facebook.com or use a Facebook plugin such as the Like button, you should expect to be tracked by the company for two years: Facebook allegedly builds a broad profile for individuals not on the service as well as a more personalized profile for its members.

Traffic and content data are transferred to Facebook’s servers in the US and an analysis is sent back to the website owner concerning the usage. The ULD believes such profiling infringes German and European data protection law. Users are not given sufficient information about this and the wording in Facebook’s conditions of use and privacy statements do not meet the legal requirements relevant for compliance of legal notice, privacy consent, and general terms of use.

“ULD has pointed out informally for some time that many Facebook offerings are in conflict with the law,” Weichart said in a statememt. “This unfortunately has not prevented website owners from using the respective services and the more so as they are easy to install and free of charge. Web analytics is among those services and especially informative for advertising purposes. It is paid with the data of the users. With the help of these data Facebook has gained an estimated market value of more than 50 bn. dollars. Institutions must be aware that they cannot shift their responsibility for data privacy upon the enterprise Facebook which does not have an establishment in Germany and also not upon the users.”

The newest government in the world was designed with help from comments on the internet. God help us all.

After Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008, the island nation decided it was time to write a new constitution, this one not based on its parent country of Denmark but rather made from the original ideas of its citizens. Iceland’s small population of 320,000 elected 25 assembly members from 522 ordinary candidates (including lawyers, political science professors, journalists, and many other professions), who in turn opened their process up to the public in an unprecedented fashion.

The Constitutional Council was highly active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, where they solicited comments and suggestions for the new government. On Friday July 29th, 2011, the Iceland parliament officially received the new constitution, comprised of 114 articles divided into 9 chapters. Set to be reviewed, and then put before vote for ratification by October 1st, the internet-assisted document marks a possible paradigm shift in governing. In the 21st Century, we’re writing our constitutions with social media. The future is a crazy place.

More on Singularity Hub

The NYPD has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. Newly named Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, one of the department’s online and gang gurus, has been put in charge of the new juvenile justice unit. He and his staff will mine social media, looking for info about troublesome house parties, gang showdowns and other potential mayhem, sources said.

The power of social media to empower both criminals and cops has been on full display in London this week, where riots and looting have been spreading dramatically. The rioters have been using Twitter and BlackBerry messages to choose targets for looting or burning – and to alert one another about police positions.

Read more: NY Daily News:

The Pentagon is developing plans to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as both a resource and a weapon in future conflicts. Its research and development agency is offering $42 million in funding to anyone who can help.

Social media will change the nature of warfare just as surely as the telegraph, the radio and the telephone did, and the Pentagon is fearful of being caught short. Some of its goals were laid out in a document being circulated among potential researchers and is to be presented at a briefing on Tuesday in Arlington, Va., at the offices of the military contractor System Planning Corporation.

As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker …

More in the NY Times

Facebook is the third of what is probably a quartet (or quintet) of the destruction of the innocence of computing. First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook. I suspect fourth will be related to control of networking itself, and fifth will be licensing of high level computer ability. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can’t really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn’t resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.

Each era of computing has had companies that rose above the others, whose stratospheric rise in income and success and mindshare and whatever else marketing fucktards want to call it turned heads. A start-up goes from an eyebrow-raiser to a non-proper noun to a verb. A million asshole salespeople and technological wannabes and pundits and sniffing elites make the word longer, as in “like facebook”. Something is like facebook, does something like facebook, wants to be like facebook, is like facebook but in some way different that somehow will magically propel it in even farther, without realizing that under contemporary situations, facebook is as high up as you want to go.

Microsoft did awful fucking things. I mean, all the time. Really awful things. So did IBM, way back when. Compaq? Assholery. Sony? Doing ten awful fucking things this morning before breakfast. Of course awful things are on the agenda and the lifeblood of any firm so big that it can affect law, affect standards, make millionaires just sucking under its folding metal chair for breadcrumbs. Facebook is just doing it to People.

The old saw is that people don’t understand that Facebook doesn’t consider the users their customers – they consider the advertisers their customers. Make no mistake, this is true… but it implies that Facebook takes some sort of benign “let’s keep humming along and use this big herd of moos to our advantage”. But it doesn’t. Facebook actively and constantly changes up the game, makes things more intrusive, couldn’t give less of a shit about your identity, your worth, your culture, your knowledge, your humanity, or even the cohesive maintenance of what makes you you. Facebook couldn’t care less about you than if it was born in your lower intestine and ripped out of you in the middle of the night.

But the fact that anyone would put anything of any unique nature on there, that matters to them, is beyond insanity – it’s identity suicide. It’s like you are intentionally driving down the road of life, ripping pages of your journal and photo albums, and tossing them out the window. Good luck finding anything again. Good luck knowing in six months, a year, something will even be findable. Try and communicate with anyone using their designed-by-a-second-trimester-fetus “message” system with any of the features from the last 30 years. Go back and try and negotiate it for search and topic control and usefulness. No. Not happening. Everything on Facebook is Now. Nothing, and I mean nothing on Facebook is Then. Or even last month.

So asking me about the archiving-ness or containering or long-term prospect of Facebook for anything, the answer is: none. None. Not a whit or a jot or a tiddle. It is like an ever-burning fire of our memories, gleefully growing as we toss endless amounts of information and self and knowledge into it, only to have it added to columns of advertiser-related facts we do not see and do not control and do not understand.

Looks like they haven’t managed to get completely get rid of it. Hard to believe this story is real. Lauren Schutte reports in the Hollywood Reporter via MSNBC:

Twenty years later, Nirvana is still managing to cause controversy.

The band, whose Nevermind album made waves when it was released in 1991 because of its cover art which featured a naked baby boy floating in a pool, has run into censorship yet again, this time on its Facebook page.

After product shots of the album (which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this fall) were uploaded to Nirvana’s Facebook page, the social networking company removed the photo citing a violation of its Terms of Use.

“Facebook does not allow photos that attack an individual or group, or that contain nudity, drug use, violence or other violations of the Terms of Use,” the notice read.

More on the Hollywood Reporter via MSNBC

“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”

Reuters claims that social media has overtaken porn as the primary reason for having an internet connection. (My advice: If you want to make a fortune, figure out a good way of combining the two.)

Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

Google has finally unveiled Google+, the company’s top secret social layer that turns all of the search engine into one giant social network.

Google+, which begins rolling out a very limited field test on Tuesday, is the culmination of a year-long project led by Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of social. The project, which has been delayed several times, constitutes Google’s answer to Facebook.

The search giant’s new social project will be omnipresent on its products, thanks to a complete redesign of the navigation bar. The familiar gray strip at the top of every Google page will turn black, and come with several new options for accessing your Google+ profile, viewing notifications and instantly sharing content. The notification system is similar to how Facebook handles notifications, complete with a red number that increases with each additional notice.

[Continues with screenshots at Mashable]

When we control for demographic factors, we find that there is a significant relationship between trust and the use of Facebook – not other social networking sites. A Facebook user who uses the service multiple times per day is 43% more likely than other internet users, or three times (3.07x) more likely than a non-internet user, to feel that “most people can be trusted.”

When we control for demographic factors, we find that internet users are significantly more likely to trust most people. Controlling for demographic factors, internet users are more than twice as likely (2.14x) to think that most people can be trusted.

To get a measure of how much trust people have in their fellow citizens, we asked people: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” 41% of Americans said that most people can be trusted. This is much higher than the 32% of Americans who said that most people can be trusted, the last time Pew Internet asked this question in 2009.

Writing for n+1, Rob Horning concocts a frightening, fantastic, and thought-provoking essay on how we live today, connecting the reign of “fast fashion” companies such as Forever 21, social media such as Facebook, and 21st century capitalism’s demand that workers market and reinvent themselves endlessly:

I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals.

Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager to condemn contemporary capitalism, as the companies almost systematically heighten some of its current contradictions: the exhaustion of innovative possibilities, the limits of the legal system in guaranteeing property rights, the increasing immiseration of the world workforce.

Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say—as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear.

How did this happen? By seeming to mitigate the problems that neoliberalism creates by shifting economic risk onto workers, social media has been able to colonize the collective consciousness. Facebook, fast fashion, and the like provide new mechanisms of solace, quantifying our connections and influence (and thereby making them more economically useful to us) while enhancing the compensations of consumerism by making it seem more productive, more self-revelatory. Though we may be only one of a thousand friends in everyone else’s networks, that never seems especially important when we’re in the midst of posting new pictures.

In turning to social media for comfort, we’ve become happily dependent on digital devices, as we have come to rely on the accelerated rate of communication and exchange they facilitate. They offer us chances to articulate, evaluate, and augment who we are while archiving our identity-making gestures as a collection we can later fawn over and curate. The archiving makes the self seem richer and more substantial even as it makes it more tenuous. Our identity can never be so strong as to render any particular gesture negligible; it is cumulative at the same time that it is totally discontinuous. This has the effect of allowing everything we do to seem either significant or irrelevant, depending on which view suits our needs. The online repository has gradually become the privileged site of the self, the authorized version that redeems the frustration and desperation incipient with the provisionality of work life, that corrects the errors and discourtesies we commit in our confrontations with the physical world.

Read the full essay at n+1

French TV and radio presenters have been banned from mentioning social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter on air.

The country’s broadcasting watchdog has ruled that doing so would break guidelines on advertising.

Stations can still talk about services without naming them, it said.

The French government is seen by many internet watchers as overly keen to regulate in relation to new media and the web.

In a ruling, published online, the Conseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), said: “Referring viewers or listeners to the page of the social network without mentioning it has the character of information.

[Continues at BBC News]

Photo: Prisonblues (CC)

Saturday, around 50 people held a demonstration through dance at the Jefferson Memorial in southern Washington, D.C., which overlooks the Potomac River. Over 2,000 people had testified on Facebook that they would show up, but these testimonials apparently turned out to be the Internet’s letting off steam.

A week before, U.S. Park Police arrested five protesters for silently dancing in the memorial, which they did in response to the April 12, 2008 arrest of Mary Oberwetter, a 28-year-old D.C. resident, who was eventually charged with “interfering with agency functions.”

The video of recent arrests received in its first 24 hours well over 100,00 views and, at the time of this writing, nearly 900,000. Russia Today journalist and 2010 House Candidate Adam Kokesh, a self-described Ron Paul Republican, found himself thrown to the ground and, briefly, even choked, last weekend for dancing, as he said, in celebration of the principles of Thomas Jefferson.

Recently, the Washington Post ran a consensus editorial claiming that by silently dancing in the memorial, the protesters had in fact justifiably invited their booking and whatever force shown to them. “If it goes anything like previous ones, it will not be pretty,” wrote the Post’s editors, adding, “And that won’t be the fault of the U.S. Park Police.” However, Saturday’s protest did go a great deal better than the previous weekend’s. There was no resorting to direct violence, but in the face of protesters already backed off to the steps of the memorial, where the Post’s editors swore back and forth that “anyone is free to polka,” police were in fact brandishing automatic rifles.

Speaking on the steps of the memorial just minutes before the noon start of the demonstration, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of activist group Code Pink and one of the five arrested the previous week, lamented that the “pursuit of happiness” advertised in the Declaration of Independence, authored largely by Jefferson, was outside the prerogative of the defense by Park Police in the memorial. She cited the unobtrusive nature of listening to headphones and silently dancing in commemoration of the declaration’s author.

The popularity of the subsequent video footage on Kokesh’s blog, “Adam Vs The Man” – even as other nonviolent protesters in Bahrain and Syria faced permanent injury if not total execution – displayed the degree to which the treatment of the protesters was clearly outraging many domestically.

The heart of the matter is a view of whether celebration of Jefferson’s ideals can even be done by dancing inside the memorial . Dancing is “distracting from the atmosphere of solemn commemoration,” agreed an appellate court with the original lower-court decision Kokesh et. al. were initially protesting. There seems to be an at least popularly-enough held skepticism that in fact any sort of dance-based celebration can even earnestly be done in honor of Thomas Jefferson. However, in the face of Jefferson’s legacy that people of the majority of ethnicities should live free or die, the brandishing of automatic rifles and tear gas canisters in the face of harmless expression seems a more serious defiling of that spirit of “solemn commemoration.”

The point of Americans who genuinely believe that dancing in a public memorial warrants its closing to the public, daresay violence against dancers, is that disbelief that the dancing is even being done in sincere celebration of the ideals of the First Amendment, an high-minded ideal that in reality has always been subject in one way or another to restrictions of minor status, obscenity, sedition or national security restrictions, or the general popularity of one’s ideas.

During the exchange with Benjamin, Tighe Barry, who was also one of the five arrested last week for dancing, said, “I think Jefferson would have said a long time ago that it’s time for government to grow up. If he were to spring up alive right now, he wouldn’t know what to make of any of this. I do know from the words that he said he would have changed the laws that are antiquated and outdated. He doesn’t seem like the person that would ever want a memorial that would be solemn and you have to come and pray to a certain god.”

Jefferson, on record discouraging celebrations of his birthday and whose grave marker does not mention his highest office of the presidency, is the figurative “god” to which Barry is saying that the courts’ decisions have demanded reverence.

The Washington Post’s editors would blatantly participate in libel against the protesters, saying “a group of self-proclaimed libertarians who decided to defy the court on Memorial Day weekend.” Barry and his girlfriend, Code Pink Cofounder Medea Benjamin, are obvious socialists, as indicated by, among many things, their not-so-subtle habit of wearing pink clothing.

Barry would also fire back at the editorial’s charge that the “dancers’ energy and presumably good intentions would be better channeled by addressing real injustices.”

“I was in Tahrir Square [in Cairo, Egypt], looking – I was there for the entire revolution. I was looking for someone from The Washington Post editorial board to come out and say something about what was going on. And they waited and waited until the very last minute, when they figured out who was going to win and then they editorialized. You know, this is the Washington [Post] editorial board. You know, they need to straighten it out.”

After approximately 10 minutes of silently dancing, which began roughly around noon, a few protesters immediately began silently dancing, apparently without any requests that they stop dancing. After another 10 minutes, approximately 50 people had joined in and were making their way in a conga line around the statue of Jefferson himself. Clearly upping the ante from the previous complaint that they had not been allowed to silently dance, the emboldened crowd began yelling slogans and cheering jubilantly, several chanting the text of the First Amendment. As the circular marchers made passes by, Kokesh stopped, roughly in front of me, and made a point of accepting handshakes from generally admiring coprotesters.

Recording video on phone, it was apparent that the initial discussed tactic of the police was to walk up to protesters and simply ask them to leave, if they felt like dancing. I didn’t hear any of those initial conversations up close, but their occurrence was apparent because individuals would began asking others to not leave, because that’s, as some protesters loudly suggested, when the police would begin their arrests. No matter one’s conclusions about the rights of Kokesh et al and those of the original demonstrator, Oberwetter, to silently dance, by the time the monument was shut down a week later after the first Kokesh protest, activists had chosen to turn their new demonstration into a markedly less silent one.

Without announcement, the police had put up a metal barrier at the entrance to the memorial, without any sort of public announcement. This tactic was effective insofar that it made it so that police didn’t have to block people, with their own bodies, from coming back in once they had left. However the tactic was not so effective because it also made it difficult to comply with their orders, once requested to do so. Once asked to leave, this reporter attempted to make his way out of the meter-wide gap in the barrier, only to find it impossible to get out through the line of camera-bearers all too intent on capturing more salacious police brutality, if in fact it went down.

Unable to make my way out of the gap, which I was facing, trying to push my way through, and refusing no request, a Park Police officer shoved this reporter into the crowd of not-budging cameramen. It was unnecessary force, but their motivations were clear enough. If the police did not apply at least a little unnecessary force this time, they stood to lose even more face than they obviously did last weekend, when as Kokesh said to RT, they were inundated with angry phone calls, which, he suggested, could have expedited the release of the libertarian and socialist protesters.

You can see it in my footage after I’m shoved: My hand is shaking. Memories of last week’s footage came back to me. While I never feared for an instant that, on account of the dancers, foreign tourists would think less highly of Jefferson or America, I did fear, perhaps irrationally, that police would begin a disastrous power trip that could end with a lot of hurt people. In light of more substantially more egregious civil rights abuses, it easy to, as did The Washington Post, dismiss the cause of dancing in the Jefferson Memorial as trivial. At the same time, it is impossible to at the same time, maintaining consistency, suggest that the police actions, up to and including the mere closing of the memorial, in response to such trivial actions are more warranted. The pretense of this solemnity enforcement is that it will stop ridicule of Jefferson or impress upon visitors an “appropriate” regard for the man, when the idea that a law can enforce such a genuine internal consideration is an illusion, a mirage.

As I reported for the Buffalo BEAST back at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the naïve idealism of some American Revolutionary revivalists is really quite striking. It is the product of a grade-school indoctrination Americans receive, one not unlike that of many country’s citizens regarding still-vogue leaders past. It reminded me of being in the 4^th grade in a school in Virginia hearing my teacher ask, sure, slavery was bad, but what were some of its benefits.

I caught this same tone repeatedly at the Jefferson Memorial dance-off, between the chants of “TJ, TJ” and blood-boiled, screeching testimonials to Jefferson’s beyond-reproach character.

Last weekend, I was at the Mount Vernon home of the first constitutional president of the United States, George Washington, and in a line of tourists on the veranda. The lawn was quite vast, and the general had ordered his chattel slaves to have it cut with a scythe. Mind you, this was not a farming operation for the production of food; this was a prurient and petty exercise in aesthetics.

A guide was stationed out on the porch, with arm’s length of me.

“How many human beings did George Washington own? Eight hundred? A thousand?” I inquired, not stuttering, but the guide appeared mildly repulsed by the question, her chin pulling backwards in a kind of micro-whiplash, and then she asked me if I were asking about the general’s land-holding acreage, before I made a clarification, and she told me he owned more than 300 people.

It seems pretty clear that Jefferson would have been outrageously offended that people were facing police action, quite possibly to the point of advocating lethal-force resistance to the officers on the scene. Of course, this would have been and would be an evil mistake, but it goes to show the weakness of appealing to Jefferson’s authority itself to justify this resistance.

Somewhere around the 12:20 p.m. peak of the dancing, Kokesh stopped to face the throng of journalists, bloggers or onlookers to proclaim how acts of disobedience of this type were cardinal to bringing down the state. It was a thought-provoking comment. If the purpose of the action were to collapse the state itself, what monuments would there within which armed guards were to regulate behavior in the first place?

After the event, Kokesh said that, were he only allowed to not pay taxes, he would gladly give up his claim of access to the memorial.

It was then, after police had forced everyone willing to go out, Kokesh was on the steps bull-horning back at the stragglers in the sanctum and their onlookers, proclaiming that “the people had won” and requested that no one risk arrest at that point. The police’s granting 30 minutes from dancing’s starting until my being asked to leave, at least individually as a bystander, seemed tacit acknowledgment of wrongdoing.

A group of tourists told me that if the protesters inside had truly wished to fight for freedom, they should simply enlist, presumably to go fight in missions like that most tolling in Afghanistan, where some recent polling has shown that perhaps as many as 80 percent or more of men believe that the NATO mission is bad for Afghans, and NATO forces openly refuse to comply with President Hamid Karzai’s demands that they stop air attacks on houses.

It was fascinating to see a conception that their own personal liberties were maintained through military operations in a country where soldiers are largely undesired, and whose actions are roundly condemned by the elected leadership in place.

By the refreshment stand near the Jefferson Memorial around 1 p.m., a mid-30s man was yelling at another at the top of his lungs, swearing upon “the altar of God” “eternal hostility” to that tourist, blaming him and his ilk, not the police, for the monument’s closing.

The tourist complained that foreign tourists, families, and his prepubescent son were not able to see the memorial they had traveled to view. He indicated that the dancer yelling at him believed that “his rights were more important than mine,” adding “[my family pays] the bills to keep that open. You got it closed. You people got it closed. Congratulations.”

“We families,” he would continue, “we get our rights violated because you insist on being a buffoon. That’s what happened. That’s what happened. My rights are more important because I have a right to go in there and enjoy the monument.” The tourist would personally charge that the law can enforce a “solemn atmosphere” in the monument.

The tourist’s blood still boiling, I attempted to get his consideration of the predicament of another protesters, who had brought several of his young children, that police had told him that his children would be taken into protective custody if he stayed at the memorial. As that father stood far outside of the sanctum of the memorial, talking to his children, an officer approached them and said, “If you get caught up in the sweep, they go down also. It’s child services, just letting you know.”

I asked the tourist how exactly that officer’s request was in particular consideration of families. He did not answer the question, which encouraged me to ask him point-blank if indeed the protester’s children should have been placed into custody.

The frustrated tourist declined to answer this question directly but did indicate his sense that the police, who were carrying Armalite assault rifles in the face of dancing protesters, “didn’t do enough.”

As onlookers reacted belligerently to this claim, the tourist’s son said, “I’ve learned nothing from you.”

Lior and Vardit Adler just had a baby girl. She’s probably all cute and wrinkly! But they hate her soo much that they named her Like, in honor of the Like button in Facebook. Of course, they explain it differently:

To me it is important to give my children names that are not used anywhere else, at least not in Israel. If once people gave Biblical names and that was the icon, then today this is one of the most famous icons in the world, he said, joking that the name could be seen as a modern version of the traditional Jewish name Ahuva, which means “beloved.”

I believe there will be people who will lift a eyebrow, but it is my girl and that’s what’s fun about it.

Yes, dear readers, you are totally right: These parents — who live in Hod Hasharon, a town north-east of Tel Aviv, Israel — are idiots. Idiots, idiots, idiots. Idiots. Idiots who named their first two children Dvash — Hebrew for honey — and Pie. Compared to Like, those names seem as normal as John and Jane.

Read More on Gizmodo

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Skype and others cosigned a letter “strongly opposing” a bill introduced by California State Senator Ellen Corbett that would force sites to explain privacy settings in “plain language.”

Her recently introduced Social Networking Privacy Act (SB 242) would require a notice before users hand over their personal information to a site. In Sen. Corbett’s own words, “You shouldn’t have to sign in and give up your personal information before you get to the part where you say, ‘Please don’t share my personal information.” The bill would also grant parents the right to request photos or text be removed from any of their children’s social networking pages within 48 hours.

Calling the bill “unnecessary” the letter from Facebook, Google and the other tech giants details how the bill would damage business for the California technology sector and violate the Constitutions of both the United States and California based on First Amendment rights. With a $10,000 fine for each violation, the bill could certainly have some repercussions on the companies’ bottom lines. What a turnaround for the infamously censor-happy Facebook to start defending free speech.

The tin-foil-hatted nuts at BusinessWeek explain how and why Facebook will become the largest bank in the United States. (Perhaps most disturbing is the thought of a universal currency called ‘the zuckerberg’.)

Becoming a financial powerhouse would help Facebook avoid the fate of many once-popular networks. AOL, Friendster, Second Life, and MySpace all dreamed of growing forever, too. To survive, Facebook must become more than glorified e-mail. Sharing photos and gossip with friends might make Facebook hard to leave. But upload your checking account and Facebook may just be forever.

Nongamers may have missed Facebook’s clever foray into the world of “virtual currency,” where Facebook Credits cost 10 cents each and can be exchanged for game points or cartoony gifts. Those dimes are adding up—the U.S. market for virtual goods will reach $2.1 billion in 2011. Facebook’s currency, while just part of that market, is getting real. You can now purchase gift cards for Facebook Credits at Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy.

So why couldn’t Facebook use them as real currency, too? In fact, why couldn’t Facebook become your bank?

Facebook today both owns the Web—where 500 million-plus users now spend more time there than on any other site—and is a dominant app on smartphones. Beyond this customer base, Facebook has embedded “Like” buttons on almost every major website, becoming the only real product praise utility. Facebook has persuaded large retailers to build sites, called Facebook Pages, within its platform. Facebook already has a currency, its Credits. And Facebook recently expanded its monetary systems with Facebook Payments, purportedly for paying app developers. But the incorporation documents state that Payments is “organized for the purpose of transacting any or all lawful business.” Hmmm.

If only one of every five Facebook users adopted Credits to buy things, Facebook would be as big as PayPal. And once Facebook makes us comfortable with Credits, it could then transition to a “traditional” global bank, storing your financial assets like gem points in Bejeweled Blitz.

More than a billion-dollar prize, the finance industry would also be a brilliant defensive move for Facebook. The company’s main challenge is that it may be overvalued, based on investors hoping for future growth, while current revenue models do not scale exponentially.

A National Trust farm is to be run by online subscribers voting on which crops to grow and livestock to rear.

For a £30 annual fee, 10,000 farm followers will help manage Wimpole Home Farm, in Cambridgeshire.

The National Trust says its MyFarm project aims to reconnect people with where their food comes from.

It was partly inspired by the online Facebook game Farmville and follows the example of Ebbsfleet Football Club which is run on a similar basis.

Decisions about the running of the team in Kent has been in the hands of MyFootballClub subscribers since 2008.

[Continues at BBC News]

Zachary Sniderman writes on Mashabe.com:

It’s one thing to feel bad for homeless people; it’s another to be forced into their shoes. Advertising agency McKinney has teamed up with Urban Ministries of Durham (UMD), a non-profit based in North Carolina, to create SPENT, an online game that guides users through what it feels like to be homeless.

Here’s how it works: If you accept the challenge to play, you enter a simple point-and-click game, navigating multiple choice questions about your livelihood. The site says you have been stripped of your savings and are currently unemployed, asking, “Can you make it through the month?”

You’re given simple choices with varying consequences. Do you want to try working in a restaurant? A factory? If you live far from the city your rent will be cheap, but, as you’re informed through pop-ups, you’ll have to pay more for gas or transportation.

The game’s integration with Facebook is its best feature. When faced with some choices, (like your landlord raising your rent) the game will ask you to decide whether to ignore the claim, pay it or ask a friend. The last option opens up a pre-written statement in Facebook where you can email one of your actual friends for “help,” bridging the gap between virtual reality and the real uneasiness of having to ask a friend for assistance. This simple act also helps spread awareness for the game by attaching a logo and small description to your request.

[More at Mashable.com, or play it at playspent.com]

That’s what startup Cloud Girlfriend promises, although your friends on Facebook will never know it. The new Internet company helps guys who aren’t ready to admit, at least online, that they don’t have a significant other.

The new service allows users to create the perfect girlfriend who will write on your Facebook wall and otherwise make her ghostly presence known through social media.

Cloud Girlfriend has yet to officially launch, but the site is already generating overwhelming interest, advising visitors to “register early to get in line.”

According to the site, signing up is easy as:

“Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. Step 2: We bring her into existence. Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network. Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl.”

Similar services have prospered in Japan, [says] Technology Review’s Christopher Mims.