From The Wall Street Journal Online: Court Order Seeks Email Data of WikiLeaks Volunteer Jacob Appelbaum

From the article: “The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.”

No matter what you think about WikiLeaks, the way the government can without warrant request and receive your personal information from on-line services, information they couldn’t receive that way if it was on your personal computer at home, is really terrifying. Until some protections are enacted by Congress, anyone who allows their email to sit on a server more than 180-days is subject to this information request, so make sure you download everything to your home machine and delete from your provider to avoid “fishing expeditions.”

Twitter is desperate to monetize its service, and in doing so is determined to track its users as much as possible - and on a social networking service, that’s a lot. It’s latest tracking system is the t.co “shortened” link…they act as if they are doing you a favor, but in truth they are tracking 1) what URIs are clicked on a lot, and 2) which specific URIs you click on. There is simply no way to opt-out of this nonsense, and while before not adding a “real” URI but instead typing “blogs.oldradio.net” would bypass their “shortener,” no longer; even that becomes expanded (that’s right, expanded!) to a t.co URI.

And frankly I’m sick to death of companies tracking every d*mned thing we all do on the Internet, so I’m removing the URIs from the blog’s auto-tweet. My interested followers will already have the blog bookmarked (and the smart ones will be using my RSS feed over on the sidebar to monitor the blog anyway), so this way I can at least prevent Twitter from monetizing my tweets by tracking my followers.

But then, I’m not trying to make money here on the blog, so I don’t need to monitor my visitors, or how they get here.

My daughter is going on a school trip this week, so my wife is busy getting things ready. In her copious spare time, she’s offered to sew luggage tags for both Katie and a friend. Naturally, her sewing machine decided to “play up,” and she can’t find the yellowed manual to fix it.

Enter me, search-engine guru extraordinaire.

I hit the web searching for the manual…oddly, unlike almost every other device or appliance, there are a buttload of places selling PDF copies of the manuals. Even bet these slimeballs don’t have rights to ‘em, but there it is. I found some manuals, but none for the cabinet-based White sewing machine the Mrs. uses.

Then I stumbled over this blog post, and success - went to Singer, entered the model number alone (no other information, as suggested by the blog post) and there was the manual to her sewing machine.

And I used technology a little more than most might - I transferred the downloaded PDF via WiFi to her 7″ tablet, which she took to the basement and the machine, referencing the manual on the tablet while she worked. So no trees were harmed by printing the manual out, she was able to work with the machine, and everyone was happy.

I love technology…