Combine unsupervised teenagers, digital cameras and e-mail, and, given sufficient time, you'll end up with risque photographs on a computer somewhere.

There's a problem with that: Technically, those images constitute child pornography.

Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.

News Alert to all your 16 and 17 year olds out there: You can bang, but you cannot take pictures of it.

Teens prosecuted for racy photos

Life is too sort to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

This is a hard, hard decision.

The Problem with the Legal Profession

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.

366 maps and PDF posters will be finished by February 2007. Use the menu above or click on a thumbnail image below to view a map.

Update: for a tour of this dataset, see <a href=

Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before

What the hell happened? Where did we go wrong? How was Christianity co-opted by a political party? Why are Christians supporting laws that force others to live by their standards? The answers to these questions are integral to the survival of Christianity.

While the current state of Christianity might seem normal and business-as-usual to some, most see through the judgment and hypocrisy that has permeated the church for so long. People witness this and say to themselves, "Why would I want to be a part of that?" They are turned off by Christians and eventually, to Christianity altogether. We can't even count the number of times someone has given us a weird stare or completely brushed us off when they discover we work for a church.

It's nice to see some people get it.

Bakker, Brown: What the hell happened to Christianity? - CNN.com

Unbelievable. AOL released a file containing the search engine queries of over 500,000 users during a three month period. It's being mirrored all over.

Here is a screenshot of the download page before it was taken down, complete with a spelling error.. "ananomized"

Link to AOL data release

Tom: Basically the Supreme Court rules that 4th ammendment doesn't apply to searches that a custom offical does when you come back to the US, because you aren't in the US yet.

Me: So where am I?

Tom:... want do you mean?

Me: If I'm not in the US yet, then I have to be "somewhere." What is that somewhere? Are there laws? There obviously aren't US laws, becase the Courts ruled I'm not in the US yet. Can I just punch the customs offical in the face?

Tom:... I don't recommend punching the customs offical in the face unless you want to be handcuffed to a hospital bed for 3 days getting a chemical enema.

Me: Maybe this whole time everyone thinks there's order in the duty free zones, but its really anarcy. It's like a collective hallucination.

Tom: Thats a good point, what's to keep me going into the duty free store and start stealing stuff?

Conclusion: The customs office is a Temporary Autonomous Zone

Decius wrote:
Furthermore, the contents of one's laptop are the closest physical thing to the contents of one's head.

All my research notes, thoughts, and ideas are in my laptop. I encrypt it now for good reason. If I lost it at BH, that would be very very bad. But I shouldn't have to hide it as well.

As soon as you have to start hiding things because the government shouldn't have the right to look at them instead of the government simply respecting and understanding that they shouldn't have to look at them, we have lost something fundamental. And thats just so fucking sad.

RE: Yes they ARE doing random laptop searches at borders

aestetix
The Temporary Autonomous Zone
Synopsis

Ever suspect there's more to life than what meets the eye? Or glance at art and wonder what inspired it? The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) concept is based on an anarchistic principle of freedom between the cracks of society. As the forerunning ethic behind the rave scene, various conventions, and events like Burning Man, it is highly relevant to understanding where the "hacker ethic" holds root.

Aestetix apparently gave a presentation about Temporary Autonomous Zones.

As I just finished reading the assorted essays of Hakim Bey (and am developing the strange PT desire to blow up a TV tower...) it will be cool to discuss this with him at Phreaknic. Tom also some some insight, with some pretty cool stories about TAZsque commerce zones in the slums of Hong Kong.

Aestetix and TAZ

Decius wrote:
I just received fairly reliable word that the Georgia Private Investigator Felony Statute has been vetoed by the Governor. Unfortunately I don't have a press link on that, so if anyone out there has a secondary source they can confirm this through, that would be helpful, but it seems like the Governor has heard the message from the technology community and understood the ramifications of this law. Thank you to everyone who communicated with them!

Confirmed:

The existing definition of “private detective business,” continued in this bill, in conjunction with the applicable exemptions in the law, fails to exclude from the private investigator licensing requirement many professions that collect information or may be called as expert witnesses in court proceedings. To expand the penalty from a misdemeanor to a felony without revision of the existing definitions in the law could result in unintended consequences; I therefore VETO HB1259.

Hell Yeah! Go Tom and his 1337 gubernatorial skillz

RE: HB 1259 Vetoed!

Decius wrote:
MySpace gets into the competitive censorship game and quickly learns that they very much do not have control of the thing they just bought.

I am reminded of a line from Alien Resurrection, "You think you can tame them?"

I enjoyed this turn of events because it should me the so-called "new media" can resist crap that "old media" companies can pull. Murdoch and crew views MySpace as they view TV. It has content which maybe they don't directly create. The content attracts an audience. They sell advertising space to present to that audience. They take demographic samples of our audience to better sell our ads.

However, Fox and other TV studios *always* control the content of the content, because they want to tone and trim the type of audience they have. If content is objectional, old media simply edits or even removes the content. See the "Ellen" "Roseanne" "Family Guy" "Playmakers" and any number of other events as an example of this practice.

But with MySpace, the audience is the content creators. They revolved when the studios tried to pull their traditional shenanigans. I would make the argument that MySpace is an excellent microcosm of what the Internet should have been: a lot of bitchy teens with nothing of substance to read; a bunch of intellectually questionable folk who claim to be geniuses; some interesting tidbits here and there; some shady stuff most parents would not want their kids exposed to; some downright illegal things.

The difference between MySpace.com and the larger Internet is that with MySpace.com the ratio of content creators to content consumers is many orders of magnitude greater. This has some interesting and cascading side effects:

1-MySpace reacts to censorship threats much more effectively than the Internet. Because instead of reading some obscure article that says that Kazakhstan is censoring political humor, you personally find your words were removed from a website. Companies can less afford to censor their social networks than DNS registars. The Kazakhstan registry makes peanuts off your site and cares nothing about your traffic. News Corps loves your site and because even if only you visit it, they are serving ads to you.

2-MySpace will have more "scenes," "niche markets," and "sub-genres" than the larger Internet because more of the users will say "[issue] isn't being address and its easy for me to fix that." Further, the censorship protection (while not bulletproof) enables people to truly express their interests without revealing their idenities (WHOIS info enforced by law is scary).

3-MySpace's low barriers of entry for participation and feature set means it will attract more users that traditional web publishing. Maybe people will branch off, but creating and publishing to a Blog is much harder than creating and writing to MySpace. Userbase snowballs so more users continue to join. Again, (some) censorship protections.

4-MySpace is a better representation of Tim Berners-Lee's original World Wide Web than the WWW is because of the content creators to content consumers ratio. Granted the world-edittable features aren't their yet, those can be added for "friends" and other MySpace specific issues.

MySpace: A better WWW than the WWW.