the tweney review

The FBI has been telling some journalists to turn over their notes, email messages, and sources, secretly, as part of an investigation into the hacker Adrian Lamo, according to Mark Rasch, a computer security expert and former head of the FBI’s computer crimes division. “… the FBI has threatened to put these reporters in jail unless they agree to preserve all of these records while they obtain a subpoena for them under provisions amended by the USA-PATRIOT Act,” Rasch writes, with justifiable outrage: The First Amendment is supposed to protect journalists from subpoenas of this nature, with certain specified exceptions.

This just proves how rotten the Patriot Act really is. Rather than an emergency measure needed to fight terrorism, it’s being used as a tool for vastly increasing the power and scope of government investigations, wiretaps, and asset seizures, as the New York Times reported Sunday. (alternate link to story: SFGate) We have, I’m afraid, traded a whole bunch of freedom for a scrap of false comfort.

“There are a color, a form, and a motion in all sound.”

The pleasure generating equipment named the game which can feel transformer feeling in the rhythm which comes on the contrary by the act a player “shoots”, and it are “Rez.”

Oh, yeah, the game comes with a vibrator, too. Mid Night Shooting, ok.

According to this story from Reuters, Dutch health ministries have found that exposure to the radiation from third-generation (3G) cell phone towers can make you sick. On the other hand, cell radiation improves your alertness and memory. Are these guys for real??

I took home a Gateway Tablet PC this weekend to test it out. With its built-in WiFi connection, the tablet makes a pretty decent Web-browsing and reading machine: I could stretch out on the couch, for instance, and read the latest WSJ while holding the tablet on my lap at any comfortable angle. Or on the front porch. Nice.

But the real killer app for the Tablet PC, as far as my daughter is concerned, is Sesame Street. Age two and a half, Clara is already very familiar with this Web site and its many, Flash-based interactive games. (I’ve had “Chicken Dance Elmo” drilled into my brain from seemingly infinite repetition — and don’t even get me started on the SoCal surrealism of “Make-A-Monster.”) With an ordinary computer, she needs to sit at a desk with a grownup who can work the mouse for her, since she doesn’t yet understand the mouse-cursor connection — a fairly complicated piece of hand-eye coordination.

With a tablet, though, she can click on things herself, just by tapping on the screen with the stylus. She mastered this in short order. Many of the games on the Sesame Street site ask her to click on various things, and there are immediate results when she does — things make noise, the monsters respond by talking, colors change, etc. What’s more, we could sit on the couch instead of at a desk. This is a plus since she frequently wants to hop down onto the floor to dance along with the music from the site.

The only potential disaster happened when she grabbed a bottle of cleaning fluid her grandfather was using and started to spray it onto the screen. Yikes! We stopped her in time, fortunately.

The Gateway tablet is a test unit from the Mobile PC labs. Would I pay $2300 for one of my own? No way. But bring the price down, and make it a bit more durable, and you’ve got a pretty good toddler computer.

I’ve posted a new issue of the tweney report: Spamfighters. This issue also went out via email to 2,647 subscribers. Although I’ve not published much lately, the bounce rate is pretty low — only a handful of defunct email addresses on the mailing list this time.

According to a research firm called Strategy Analytics, sales of digital camera-equipped cell phones have, for the first time, exceeded sales of standalone digital cameras: Mobile Commerce World.com

“Mobile phone makers shipped 25 million handsets with built-in cameras worldwide in the first half of the year. This number is compared with four million in the year-earlier period.”

Threat Matrix is a TV drama about the Department of Homeland Security and their anti-terrorism efforts. Last night’s episode centered on some terrorists sneaking into the country via shipping containers.

The show is a mediocre and jingoistic ripoff of 24. And the terrorists were supposedly sneaking into the Port of San Francisco, “one of the busiest ports in the world.” Maybe in 1930 … perhaps they meant Oakland? But the writers got one thing right: It’s very easy to get anything you want into the U.S. through shipping ports. A four-month investigation by Baseline magazine culminated in this long, detailed, and disturbing report: Why Our Seaports Aren’t Safe.

This summer, NPR ran a fine series on the extensive sharing and crosslinking between the blues, country music, and white and black musicians. But they inexplicably overlooked the banjo — which pretty much epitomizes the rich, intertwined, and often troubling musical history of America. Today they rectified that omission, with a very nice segment featuring banjo player and music historian Stephen Wade, who discusses oldtime banjo music and plays a few tunes on various banjos: NPR : Stephen Wade and the Banjo (audio)

The Government Information Awareness site is trying to provide a total picture of our government, the individuals within it, and their connections to various interest groups. In other words, it’s aiming to do for government officials what John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program would do for individuals — put them under the microscope, and use information technology to assemble a comprehensive view.

The site’s motto is a quote from James Madison which I also recently spotted, and underlined, in Howard Rheingold’s book Smart Mobs:

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” — James Madison

I’m psyched: Starting this week I am executive editor for Mobile PC magazine, focusing on mobile technology: notebooks, PDAs, handhelds, mobile phones, etc. Our first issue will be out in January. I’ll be editing features and the news/trends section. Got a mobile product, a story idea, or a trend you want me to know about? Write me: dtweney at mobilepcmag.com