Sarah Palin is No. 1 on Google

As it has done every year, Google has released its lists of the most popular search terms in 2008. It is called The Goggle Zeitgeist (loosely translated as “The Spirit of the Times”).  This year the honor goes to Sarah Palin. She heads the worldwide list.

There are, however, many different lists covering categories like Politics, Trendsetters and Sports and countries like New Zealand, Singapore and Findland as well.

Checkout the entire Google Zeitgeist 2008 here.

Salvation Army goes High Tech

The Salvation Army announced that it will try a new program to increase donations for this holiday season. It will now be possible to text a $5 donation directly from your cell phone to the charitable organization. The program will be introduced first in the Atlanta area, beginning around Thanksgiving:

“We’ve been putting kettles out for over a hundred years,” said James Seiler, commander of the Metro Atlanta Area Salvation Army. “This year we’re gonna try something different.”

Beginning in two weeks, cell phone users in the Atlanta area can text message “TSA” — which stands for “The Salvation Army” — to 90999 and a $5 donation will be added to their phone bill.

The phone number and instructions will be posted on the familiar red donation kettles outside 297 locations in the 13-county metro Atlanta region. The hope is that this alternative way of giving will appeal to cell phone users who may not be carrying extra cash.

“Society in general carries less cash,” said James Seiler. “It enables people who want to help, who want to support, to hit a few quick buttons on the telephone.”

With the economy in turmoil, charity organizations are having a tough time raising funds. An October study by GuideStar.org, which tracks nonprofit organizations, found that among 2,927 individuals representing at least 2,730 charitable organizations, 35 percent reported a decrease in gifts during the first nine months of 2008. That’s nearly twice as many as for the same period in 2007.

The Atlanta area has been hit hard with job losses according to Seiler, who says that some people who had given in the past have been coming to the organization looking for help. Last year the region gave $1.4 million to the charity between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year the goal is to raise $1.6 million.

The Salvation Army is also promoting online donations in Michigan and other states with its Online Red Kettle Promotion. They are encouraging people to logon on to OnlineRedKettle.Org

For more information about the Salvation Army visit The Salvation Army International website or The Salvation Army USA website.

Teen Uses Text Messages To Foil Burglars

Lauren Durnbaugh, 13, of Lithopolis, Ohio did not attend school last Tuesday but she did receive an A+ in a real life test. She was home alone when she heard the sounds of someone breaking into her house through an unlocked rear door. The teenager went to her bedroom and hid under the covers while the intruders were ransacking the rest of the house.

“I ran into my room and got under the covers and was hiding,” Durnbaugh said. “I didn’t know what to think and I couldn’t breathe. I was scared.

What she did there, under the covers, not only saved the house from being robbed but also led to the arrest of the two persons responsible for the break-in….. she sent text messages to her mother at work telling her what was going on.

“OMG. They’re in the house. I think we’re being robbed,” Durnbaugh said in a text message to her mother, Margo Roby, 53, who was working at a car dealership about 15 minutes away.

In the meantime, the intruders were going through all the rooms in the house and even searched the teen’s bedroom and sat on her bed. They had no clue that Lauren was there hiding under the covers.

After receiving the text messages from her daughter, Margo Roby raced home while calling 911. When she arrived at the house she saw the burglars’ car parked in her driveway. She rammed the car with her own vehicle. This got the attention of one of the intruders, later identified as Jenna Marie Burns, who came out of the house. The two women began to wrestle just as the sheriff’s deputies and the Lithopolis police chief arrived. They arrested both Jenna and her companion, Jeremiah Lee Fyffe.

Jewelry, a laptop computer, a digital camera and a tool box were among items the intruders had set outside apparently to be carried away, Sheriff Dave Phalen said.

Margo then rushed into the house in search of her daughter.

“I ran in to get my daughter. She was just shaking like a leaf,” Roby said. “After we cried, she said, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I did that,'” Roby said.

Jenna Marie Burns, 20, of Orient, and Jeremiah Lee Fyffe, 26, of Lockbourne, were arrested and charged with burglary. Burns also was charged with robbery. Both remained in a county jail Wednesday on $100,000 bond.

Burns’ mother, Virginia Burns, said her daughter is only guilty of “bad association.”

“I think that my daughter has made the wrong choice in people, and now she’s going to pay the price for that association,” she said. “I believe in my daughter. She is a goodhearted individual. But she has made a bad decision and she’ll pay the price for it.”

Margo Roby said she blamed herself for failing to lock the door when she left for work. But she’s proud of how her daughter handled herself. If convicted, Burns faces a maximum sentence of 16 years in prison; Fyffe faces a maximum of eight years.

The Library of Congress Needs Your Help

Have you ever looked at some old family album and wondered who are these people? Maybe a long-lost cousin or a forgotten family friend. Did you ever wonder how old is this picture anyway? If you are lucky there may be some information scribbled on the back. If not maybe you could ask grandma or uncle. Old analog cameras were incapable of recording time/date stamps and sometimes people would write on the back of old photographs the particulars…..but often there would be no information. Just recently my mother sent me an old black and white picture (remember those??) of my dad and his brothers when he was a boy. I had to ask her to identify each person in the picture…even my own Dad!!

Today most cameras are capable of record meta data, detailing the time, date and even location of a picture. We have online services like FLICKR where photos can be uploaded and shared. Tagging is a common feature where anyone can add information to a photo. We have come a long way since the early days of photography.

However there are literally millions of unidentified photos, whose information has been lost with the passage of time. The Library of Congress has thousands of historical photos that it needs help with. It is appealing to FLICKR users to help identify, tag and make pertinent comments. It is hoping that people will add valuable information that might otherwise be impossible for it to find. The pictures, which are stunning in their quality, were taken from the early to mid 1900s, and the subjects range from baseball players to Rosie the Riveter types during World War II.

These photos can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/Library_of_Congress.

Even if you can’t help identify or provide more information about these pictures, take a look anyway. It is a window on a past era that reminds us of what it was like back then.

 

Laptop Searches – Are They Legal?

If you are going through customs, does the government have the right to search your laptop? If you have an encrypted file on your hard drive can, you be forced to give up the password? Are computers “extensions of our memories” or just electronic “containers”? These questions are under judicial review in a number of cases involving child pornography found on laptops during routine customs searches.

Michael T. Arnold

Michael T. Arnold arrived in Los Angeles on a flight from the Philippines carrying his laptop with him. The customs officer decided to check out the hard drive. He came across two files named “Kodak Pictures” and “Kodak Memories”. He clicked on them and they revealed child pornography. Arnold was arrested.

Before the courts, the government contended that they have every right to search each laptop coming into the country, whether or not they have any suspicions. It is just like going through someone’s suitcase.

Judge Dean D. Pregerson of Federal District Court in Los Angeles disagreed as he suppressed the evidence against Michael Arnold.

“Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory,” Judge Pregerson wrote, in explaining why the government should not be allowed to inspect them without cause. “They are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound.”

Computer hard drives can include, Judge Pregerson continued, diaries, letters, medical information, financial records, trade secrets, attorney-client materials and information about reporters’ “confidential sources and story leads.”

Nevertheless the judge’s opinion seems headed for reversal. One appeals court sided with the government and another ruling appears to be headed the same way, swayed by the argument that:

A computer is just a container and deserves no special protection from searches at the border. The same information in hard-copy form would doubtless be subject to search.

Jennifer M. Chacón, a law professor at the University of California says searching a computer “is fairly intrusive.” Like searches of the body, she said, such “an invasive search should require reasonable suspicion.”

The Association of Corporate Travel Executives and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said there have to be some limits on the government’s ability to acquire information.

“Under the government’s reasoning,” the brief said, “border authorities could systematically collect all of the information contained on every laptop computer, BlackBerry and other electronic device carried across our national borders by every traveler, American or foreign.” That is, the brief said, “simply electronic surveillance after the fact.”

Sebastien Boucher

Sebastien Boucher is a Canadian citizen living in New Hampshire. He was crossing the border by car when a customs officer noticed a laptop on the seat beside him. The officer asked Boucher if he had any child pornography on his computer. Boucher said he couldn’t be sure because he downloaded a lot of porn but whenever he came across child pornography he would delete it. The officer started to examine the laptop. He came across some encrypted files which Boucher helped him open by providing the password. Those encrypted files revealed, according to the officer “lots of revolting pornography involving children”.

Boucher was arrested and the laptop was seized as evidence. When the government tried to re-open the encrypted files, they were unable to do so. Boucher was ordered by a grand jury to provide the password but magistrate judge, Jerome J. Niedermeier of Federal District Court in Burlington, Vt., quashed that subpoena saying that requiring Mr. Boucher to provide it would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The government appealed.

The government can make you provide samples of your blood, handwriting and the sound of your voice. It can make you put on a shirt or stand in a lineup. But it cannot make you testify about facts or beliefs that may incriminate you, Judge Niedermeier said.

But Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at the George Washington University, said Judge Niedermeier had probably gotten it wrong.

“In a normal case,” Professor Kerr said in an interview, “there would be a privilege.” But given what Mr. Boucher had already done at the border, he said, making him provide the password again would probably not violate the Fifth Amendment.

Until these and other cases have been clearly ruled on, there will be some ambiguity as to if these searches are legal or not. Is a computer “an extension of our memories” or just electronic “containers”? Whether or not there is anything illegal on your computer is not the question. The real question is – Does the government, in this situation, have the right to invade your privacy at will? or Is there no expectation of privacy when dealing with customs officials?

 

Internet Love Triangle Turns Deadly

This is one of those stories that you just can’t make up. Thomas Montgomery is a 46-year-old married father of two girls (aged 12 and 14). He gets involved with an 18-year-old girl on the Internet named Jessi. Thomas lies to Jessi and says he is an 18-year-old marine named Tommy who is about to go off to Iraq. Thomas also created another alias for himself as Tom Sr so that Jessi could pass messages and packages through him (Tom Sr) to Tommy in Iraq. The two “young people” continue to chat and get to know each other better. Tommy sends her a picture of a young marine, claiming it was him. Jessi sends Tommy a picture of herself as a beautiful young blond. Tommy falls in love with Jessi. Jessi falls in love with Tommy. Tommy proposed marriage and Jessi accepted. He sent her poinsettias, and she sent him G-strings and dog tags engraved with the message TOM & JESSI ALWAYS & FOREVER.

In the meantime Thomas’ wife Cindy becomes suspicious of her husband’s online activities. She eventually finds some of Jessi’s mementos and unravels the truth. Cindy’s marriage might not have been the happiest, but contending with the layers of deceit she uncovered — not to mention a teenager’s lingerie — was too much:

“What I cannot believe is that you are living out some bizarre fantasy — as father and son,” she wrote in a note to her husband. “If you want to separate — We can… but to continue to lie to me & the kids while she is sending ‘your son’ gifts in the mail is not acceptable.”

The couple stayed in the same house, though Montgomery complained to a coworker about being consigned to the basement. As a mother, however, Cindy felt she had to do something for Jessi. She wrote a letter, enclosing a recent photo of her family.

“Let me introduce you to these people,” she said, describing her husband, Tom, her daughters, 12 and 14 years old, and herself. ” There was no son, she told Jessi, only her husband, a 46-year-old former marine. “From what I am pulling from your letters you are much closer to [my daughter’s] age than mine let alone Tom’s,” Cindy wrote. “Are you over the age of 18? In this alone, he can be prosecuted as a child predator.” Adding that Jessi could be her own daughter, Cindy offered some maternal advice: “Do not trust words on a computer.”

For most people that would have been the end of the story………But in this case the story has just begun!!

Jessi didn’t know who to believe. Was there no Tommy? Or had Cindy invented the story because she wanted Tommy for herself? Jessi found a friend Montgomery had mentioned, Brian Barrett, a 22-year-old student at Buffalo State College who worked part-time with Montgomery and played poker with him. When Barrett confirmed his friend’s trickery, Jessi was devastated. How could her “everything,” as she referred to Tommy, be a nothing? She turned to Barrett for solace.

Their conversations quickly turned intimate. Soon, in public forums online, she and Barrett called Montgomery a child predator and taunted him. Montgomery was furious. “Half the company” thought he was a “fucking loser and predator,” he IM’d Jessi. Parents no longer trusted him with their kids. His life was so destroyed that he appeared to be contemplating suicide. “U can say goodbye forever to me and Tommy,” he told Jessi.

Despite her own anger, Jessi couldn’t turn her back completely on Montgomery. He was all that remained of her lost Tommy, after all. Jessi promised Montgomery she would stop talking to Barrett, saying she took up with him mainly to get revenge. As it turns out Jessi lied. She continued to talk to Barrett. She seemed torn between the two men. Eventually, Montgomery found out that Jessi and Barrett were talking again. He was furious.

Later that evening, September 13, 2006 at 10:16 pm, Barrett punched out of work and walked to his white pickup truck in the parking lot. He swung open the door of his truck, settling into his seat. Three shots pierced the driver’s side window, and Barrett slumped sideways. He’d been shot in the neck and upper arm by what police believe was a .30-caliber carbine rifle.

When detectives later examined Barrett’s cell phone, they found Jessi’s number. Lieutenant Ron Kenyon called her in the middle of the night to confirm that she’d had an online relationship with Montgomery and to warn her that she might be in danger. He then sent a message to her local police department in West Virginia, requesting that a cop go to Jessi’s home at the address she’d given him.

Officer J. L. Kirk arrived the next morning at a dingy white house next to an automotive-parts dealer. But Jessi wasn’t there. Her mother, Mary, said that the teenager was away and that she had no way to contact her. Kirk reported back to Kenyon, who insisted that he’d just spoken to Jessi a few hours earlier and that she had to be in the house. Kirk continued questioning Mary, whose manner struck him as strange. The more he pressed, the more nervous she got until she finally “came clean,” as Kirk put it.

She was the woman Kenyon had spoken to. In fact, she was the woman Barrett had fallen so hard for. And yes, Mary was the woman Montgomery may have killed for. She’d used her daughter’s identity to beguile the two men.

Back in Buffalo, Kenyon couldn’t believe that the Jessi he’d talked to was really her mother. “She was very convincing,” he said. “She sounded like an 18-year-old girl to me.” He drove to West Virginia to see the truth himself — that the lithe 18-year-old blond of Barrett’s and Montgomery’s fantasies was a plump 45-year-old married mother of two with short brown hair.

When questioned, Mary said she joined Pogo a few years ago to relax and kill some time. It was only after she paid for the membership, however, that she realized she’d used Jessi’s screen name. Mary was directed to a teen room, and she never bothered to correct the mistake. She didn’t intend for her many admirers to fall in love with her. Nor did she fall in love with any of them; she says she is happily married to her husband of 23 years. Brian was a “sweetheart” and when he initiated the flirtation, she didn’t know how to discourage it without revealing her true identity. Tommy, she said, “was a child who needed someone to show him they cared.”

On November 27, 2006, police arrested Thomas Montgomery on murder charges.

At the trial Prosecutor Frank Sedita argued for the maximum sentence of 25 years, describing Montgomery’s “almost predatory” pursuit of the woman and his resentment of Barrett when she cooled to Montgomery’s advances after 1 1/2 years and thousands of pages of Internet chats.

“My wife and I don’t understand how this could happen, how such evil could walk the Earth,” Barrett’s father, Daniel, said at the sentencing hearing. “To gun down a boy over simple jealousy does not make sense to us.”

Montgomery’s lawyer said fantasy and reality blurred for the then-married father of two teenage daughters, who was involved in his church and was president of his daughters’ swim club. Montgomery, now divorced, attempted suicide in his jail cell after his arrest. He chose not to speak at his sentencing.

“Until September 2006, this was a man who held his head high,” attorney John Nuchereno said. “By September 2006 — call it an obsession, call it an addiction, call it what you want — he was suffering from a diminished capacity of some sort.”

48-year-old Thomas Montgomery, entangled in an Internet love triangle built largely on lies, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing his rival for the affection of a woman he had never met.

 

Google Billionaire to Wed

Larry Page, 34, the co-founder of Google Inc. announced plans to marry on the weekend of Dec. 8th. The lucky lady is Lucy Southworth. The wedding location has not been disclosed. The two have been dating for over a year.

Lucy Southworth was a biomedical informatics doctoral student at Stanford University. She will be marrying a multi-billionaire. Larry Page is said to be worth $20 billion. The invitation list to Page’s wedding is expected to include many of Google’s current and former employees, as well San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and billionaire Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group.

Former Vice President Al Gore, a senior adviser at Google, has been invited to the wedding but won’t be able to make it because he will be picking up the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. He said he still hopes to make an appearance through video conferencing.

 

Mona “The Hammer” Shaw vs Sub-Moronic Imbeciles

Mona Shaw 75, seems to be a nice lady. She lives in a nice house in Bristow, Virginia with her husband of 45 years, Don. They are both retired from the Air Force. She is secretary of the local AARP, secretary of a square-dancing club and takes in strays for the local animal shelter (they have seven dogs at the moment). She has a heart condition. She lifts weights at a local gym. The couple attend a Unitarian Universalist church. All in all she seems to be enjoying her retirement. That is until she decided to sign up for her local cable company’s (Comcast) “Triple Play” service, which combines phone, cable and Internet services.

Little did she, or anyone else, know that she was about to become the spokeswoman for all disgruntled people who have suffered at the hands of a behemoth bureaucracy whose very name is an oxymoron – Customer Service.

Mona called Comcast and scheduled a day for them to come out and install their “Triple Play” service. Comcast did not show up on that day, a Monday. They came two days later but left with the job half done. On Friday Comcast cut off all service. That same Friday Mona and her husband Don went down to the local call center office to complain.

Mona demands to speak to a manager. A customer service representative says someone will be right with them. Directs them to a bench, outside. (Remember, it’s mid-August.) Mona and Don sit. After two hours have gone by they are still sitting and waiting. Finally the customer rep leans out the door and says the manager has left for the day. Thanks for coming!

Mona was livid! The insulting idea that, as Shaw puts it, “they thought just because we’re old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone.”

So, after stewing over it all weekend, on the following Monday, she went downstairs, got Don’s claw hammer and said: “C’mon, honey, we’re going to Comcast.”

(It should be noted right now that what followed next was a totally inappropriate (albeit satisfying!) way of settling a dispute with Customer Service.)

Look out!! It’s Hammer Woman, avenger of oppressed cable subscribers everywhere!

Hammer time: Shaw storms in the company’s office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!

“They cuffed me right then,” she says.

Her take on Comcast: “What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles.”

“I scared the tar out of some people, at least,” she says. “It had never occurred to me to take a hammer to a phone company before, but I was just so upset. . . . After I hit the keyboard, I turned to this blonde who had been there the previous Friday, the one who told me to wait for the manager, and I said, ‘ Now do I have your attention?’ ”
“My blood pressure went up around my ears. I started hyperventilating. They had to call the rescue squad and put me on a litter.”

By the time it was over, she recalls, there were an ambulance, two police cruisers and a sergeant’s car in the parking lot. Shaw received a three-month suspended sentence for disorderly conduct, a $345 fine in restitution and a year-long restraining order barring her from the Comcast office.

She does, however, finally, have phone service………..On Verizon!!

 

Pedophile caught in Thailand

Christopher Paul Neil, 32, was arrested by Thai police just 8 days after entering the country on a flight from Seoul, South Korea. He is accused of sexually abusing dozens of Asian boys, aged 6 to 12 years old, mostly from Cambodia and Vietnam. His capture was the result of an unprecedented appeal from Interpol to the public seeking to determine his identity.

It was three years ago that German police came across about two hundred internet photos of a man abusing young Asian boys. His face had been digitally altered to hide his identity. Recently they were able to reverse engineer the pictures to uncover his face. His photo was then published around the world by Interpol asking for help in finding out who he was. With the help of hundreds of tips from people they were able to identify him as Christopher Paul Neil, 32, a Canadian who taught at schools in at least three Asian countries — South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. Before teaching, he had worked as a chaplain in Canada, counseling teens.

Neil was caught on camera at the immigration counter at Bangkok’s international airport. The Thai police began searching for him and tracked him to a house in Nakhon Ratchasima province that he shared with a Thai transvestite friend whose phone calls were traced by authorities. Neil surrendered peacefully.

“I think he knew we were coming,” said police Col. Paisal Luesomboon, who was on the five-member police team that made the arrest. “He knew that there was an arrest warrant issued and that his face was posted everywhere.”

Neil was charged with detention of a child under 15 without parental consent, punishable by up to three years in prison; taking a child under 15 from his parents without consent, punishable by five to 20 years; and sexual abuse of a child under 15, punishable by up to 10 years.

A judge in the Bangkok Criminal Court signed a police order Saturday to extend his detention to 12 days, and could move later to keep him behind bars up to 84 days. After the brief hearing, Neil was incarcerated at the Bangkok Remand Prison. Maj. Gen. Wimol Pao-in, chief of division’s crimes against women and children said the investigation into the allegations could take a month and that a trial could start soon after.

Neil lived in Thailand from 2002 to early 2004, police said. Three Thai youths, aged 9, 13 and 14 at the time of their alleged abuse, contacted police after seeing Neil’s photograph on television, claiming he had paid them for oral sex in 2003. The boys said the suspect showed them pornographic images on his computer at his apartment in Bangkok, and paid them each $16 to $32.

The Canadians are also interested in Neil. Before teaching in Asia, Neil had worked as a chaplain in Canada, counseling teens. British Columbia Attorney General Wally Oppal said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had Neil under investigation in Canada for complaints “involving young boys.” He did not elaborate. An RCMP spokeswoman, Constable Annie Linteau, said only that Neil was “a person of interest” but added that the force was asking Canadians with information on him to call the child-exploitation tip line. “The RCMP had received complaints here and so obviously we have an interest in what happens to him in Thailand,” Oppal said. Maj. Gen. Wongkot Maneerin, deputy national police chief said Neil would “definitely” be prosecuted in Thailand. “He will have to go to Thai court first. After the case is over, then we can send him,” he said.

 

Sputnik – The Space Pioneer

On Oct. 4, 1957 the Soviets launched the world’s first satellite – Sputnik I. That was 50 years ago and it changed our world forever. It was the beginning of the Space Age. It would lead not only to exploration of space but to a new way of life on Earth. Today satellites are an indispensable part of our world. From weather forecasting to entertainment, from commerce to surveillance we simply can’t do without our eyes in the sky.

The launching of Sputnik was due to the tireless work of two Russian scientists Sergei Korolev, called the father of the Soviet space program and Soviet rocket designer Boris Chertok. They were working on missile delivery systems for nuclear weapons and actually developed the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile in May 1957. When the West failed to recognize the Soviet achievement, Korolev suggested sending a satellite into space. Within weeks, Korolev designed a basketball-sized sphere. It contained two powerful radio transmitters designed to emit beeps over the course of three weeks. Its shape was meant to capture people’s imagination by symbolizing a celestial body. On Oct. 4, 1957, Sputnik I blasted off into Earth’s orbit. Sputnik’s beeps could be heard on radios around the world. But Chertok says that the team members were so focused on the military aspects of their work, they failed to recognize its historical significance.

“We prepared the launch without any great expectations. If it were to succeed, [then] great. If not, no big deal,” Chertok says. “Because our main task was to get back to building a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.”

Chertok says the world’s reaction to Sputnik caught even the Soviet propaganda machine by surprise.

“As for Sputnik’s creators, it took us four or five days to realize that from then on, the history of civilization could be divided into before the launch and after,” he says.

The launch of Sputnik was a complete surprise to the US and shocked the Americans into action. Within three months they launched the Explorer I and the Space Race had begun.

Sputnik I

Length:	285 cm (112 in), antennae
Diameter:	58 cm (23 in)
Weight:	83.6 kg (184 lb)
Launch Vehicle:	R-7