One of the web-comics I've recently discovered has been doing a series of comics about the state of America in the last few days and he's right on. Check them out for a good laugh (or cry).

Uncle Sam and Liberty – Hmm. Similar concept to this one

Tough Times

Uncle Sam's Addiction. – This one is brilliant on so many levels.

Star Wars Sam

America Sleeps

The Devil and execs

Brilliantly written though not just a little depressing.

And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both.

Well, not really, but they could be. You see, John McCain believes in light market regulation. Because, gosh darned it, that's worked so well in the past…

And for your amusement, click for today's political cartoon on the issue.

And another about the bailout.

So I know that to buy a website that either the name of a famous person or business in the hopes of making them pay you bunches of money when they get smart enough to want that site is Cybersquatting and is illegal. Simple enough.

I also know that buying a domain that similar to a major site in the hopes of getting traffic from people who make spelling mistakes is also illegal. For example, if I were to register Hotmial and I got lots of traffic from people who meant to go to Hotmail. Clearly bad.

But here's the important question: what about ad squatters? Ad squatters are what I call those people who buy up every possible domain that consists of words or letter combinations that people would likely buy, park annoying ads on them and leave them there for all time. For you to actually get that site, you would have to pay a lot more money than if the site weren't registered assuming the ad squatter decides to sell at all.

I say ad squatting should also be illegal because if someone like me wants to register a domain name for a new business or website, I'm screwed because every possible good name has been taken. If some real company or individual somewhere legitimately used the site for their own blog or store, I wouldn't mind, but these jerks only have worthless ads and no content and do nothing to add to the Internet as a whole. In fact they make it worse because search engines often list them as relevant due to the domain name alone when in fact they have nothing useful on their pages at all.

I've read the stories about how these people make millions a year on these annoying ad pages, and I say screw them. I don't begrudge someone from coming up with a brilliant idea and making a lot of money, but when you're choking the opportunities of everyone else to do it at the same time, that's not ok.

So question time: Is this already illegal and either way is there anything someone can do to get a domain name away from one of these weasels? If not, does anyone know a senator they can convince to introduce a new bill or modification to one of the existing cybersquatting laws?

The Thomas v. Captiol case was something we all watched with horror as some poor woman was slapped with a fine of $220,000 simply for having downloaded some music. However, that case has recently been overturned due to the fact that the RIAA's argument that merely having copyrighted music available for download is a crime.

It's hardly surprising that there has been a huge backlash against Spore due to the decision to include DRM. I'm a little surprised, but very happy, that someone had the tenacity to file a class action lawsuit against them for it.

In the end, no company has the right to control your game playing to this degree. It's a shame that a game from such a well-renowned company would be smeared and tarnished because their foolish decision to treat their customers like criminals.

I guarantee that if Starcraft II does something like this, I will pass it by only buying it after some enterprising hacker releases a fix sans DRM that I can download.

(H/T to Slashdot for the link)

Bruce Schneier explains that because screeners take no action with liquids other than to throw them away, there's no reason a terrorist won't keep trying until they succeed.

Check it out.

Most credit reporting companies have made it as difficult and cumbersome as possible to get a credit freeze because they desperately hope that by putting barriers in your way, they can discourage you from doing it (in my opinion). That said, Transunion has suddenly decided to offer FREE freezes to everyone, even people who live in a state that allow them to charge a fee. Not only that, but they are also allowing you to do it through an ONLINE system rather than a cumbersome certified mail system.

I'm so shocked I had to to confirm it and here it is:

There's no telling how long this will be the case so make sure you get it done now while you can.

Brilliant:

First off, Verizon is doing away with contracts under certain conditions. Let's face it, contracts are for cowards. Carriers had to default to them because of the industry's spotty record of customer service. It was their way of preventing you from fleeing.

That aside, the news is that Verizon has decided to no longer force contracts on people who already have a Verizon phone and will only use them when people want to buy a phone at the subsidized rate (in other words, those penny phones that actually cost several hundred dollars).

It's hard to believe that a company like Verizon would do such a thing, but the Wall Street Journal confirms it. They say that there will be an activation fee, but no termination fee. Finally!

Good news for Georgians.

Related topic(s):

Credit Report Freezes (How to Stop ID Theft, Part 1)

When this guy tried to sign up for Comcast cable without providing his Social Security Number, they harassed him saying that they were required to ask for it under the Patriot Act.

Deal with this by first finding out what they're going to do with it and how they're going to protect it. I would most likely use the '0' trick or just make sure your credit reports are frozen and they wouldn't be able to run credit on you even if they tried.

Sarah Palin's Yahoo account has been broken into and e-mails found there posted to Wikileaks. I would say this was a pretty rotten thing to do, but the perpetrators claim they did it to prove that Palin has been using her private e-mail to circumvent recordkeeping laws about government business. If that's true, then perhaps this needed to happen.

(H/T to Privacy.org for the link)

When will people ever learn?

The optional license will include a picture and radio frequency identification tag that can be scanned to verify a person's identity. The tag will not contain any personal information – only an assigned number, authorities said.

How reassuring. So they won't be able to take my data from it, but they'll be able to clone it and frame me or just use the unique ID to track me remotely. But they're going to be passing out sleeves that prevent it from being read remotely without your authorization. So if you don't find it bulky and actaully use it, you'll be partially protected until it's time to pull it out to be read or if someone gets a few seconds alone with your wallet to pull it out and clone it.

(H/T to Slashdot for the link)

It seems that online predators are getting tired of savvy kids that know better than to be lured (or they're just getting lazy/impatient). Either way, one police group is warning that predators are shifting to a strategy of blackmail instead.

As always, be aware of what your kids are doing online and know who their friends are. Make sure they know what to do when threatened by someone online.

DNA might not be as strong evidence as you've been led to believe. Of course, if you can understand the math in this article, you're probably too smart to survive the jury selection process anyway.

(H/T to Schneier's Blog for the link)

I've said that there are legal alternatives to downloading shows and now here's an article listing (and rating) the various ways to do so.

On Lifehacker today: the fruitfly deathtrap!

This is brilliant. Using only a cup, some vinegar, and a folded piece of paper, you can lure and destroy all the fruit flies in your house.

It isn't bad enough that Countrywide was engaging in questionable loan practices , but now they've lost the data on millions of customers as well.

And, as usual, the completely worthless response:

The company nevertheless promised to provide two years of free credit monitoring to affected individuals through the ConsumerInfo.com division of the Experian credit bureau.

*Sigh*

If you've been affected, now would be a good time to get a Credit Freeze

The NSA has been working on their public image and trying to market itself as a cool place to work partially with their "Cryptokids" campaign. Their goal is to teach kids about what the NSA does in a fun, kid-friendly way.

But that's not what I'm posting about.

I ran across this interesting comic about the unpopular little-know cryptokid, Y.R. Tap, the NSA domestic spying fly. The fly shows the Cryptokids what can happen when civil liberties are violated.

This isn't going to be an exhaustive write-up about Paypal and the various trouble you can get into with it. Instead, I'm going to talk about one very important part of the system that most people should know how to deal with.

Specifically, the direct bank access.

When you sign up for Paypal, they ask for your bank account information so they can make some test deposits. Once you see the deposits, you return to the system to tell them how much was sent to verify your account.

Here's the problem: if you do it, Paypal will then have full access to your bank account to pull funds if you were to say, go negative on your Paypal account or some Paypal employee decides they need a little of what you have or a hacker breaks through their world class security.

Instead, don't ever confirm the deposits. What this does is allow Paypal to continue making deposits (for when you get cash in Paypal), but they can't debit your account (so there!). Granted, doing this will limit the amount of money you can filter through paypal (like $500 a month or so), but so what? Most people never do transactions that large and worst-case, if you manage to get a single transaction over $500, just withdraw it over the course of a few months.

If that's not realistic for you, fine, confirm the numbers, just make sure the account you're using is disposable.