TwitPic Gets Paris Hilton Busted for Cocaine

Las Vegas Police arrested hotel heiress Paris Hilton last weekend for possession of .08 grams of cocaine found in her black Chanel purse. Her only defense was that the purse was borrowed from a friend. However a few days later, it was discovered that Hilton had posted a TwitPic of the purse with the caption “Love My New Chanel Purse I got Today. :)” on her Twitter feed a month and a half earlier. There went her alibi!

Paris Hilton posted this photo of a black Chanel purse to TwitPic and Twitter a month and a half before telling police it belonged to a friend after they found cocaine in it.

KGB Gets Windows 7, Russian Spies on Facebook!

Okay, it’s not really the KGB anymore. But the Russian Security Service made an unusual request of American-based Microsoft this week. They want the full source code to the Windows 7 operating system. Microsoft is delivering without issue. It is the company’s policy to entrust the unlocked source code of any of its products to any government that wants it. Including Russia, and even China in the past. This isn’t really all that strange. But it is ironic just a few weeks after ten Russian “spies” were discovered on American soil and sent packing back to the good old U.S.S.R.

Photos of Anna Chapman lifted from her social networking sites surfaced in the media almost immediately after her arrest.

UPDATE :: Google is Back in China

China renewed Google’s internet content provider license this week. This July 4th I wrote a blog post about digital freedoms enjoyed here in the United States and some of those rights that are suppressed in other countries (read that blog). One of my prime examples was China’s censoring of Google search results. Google had found a loophole in the censorship by redirecting Chinese traffic to its servers in Hong Kong. But in response China blocked all access to Google search results from any country.

http://www.google.cn/

Prince: “The Internet is Completely Over”

You’re probably thinking, “WHAT?!?”. I was too when I read the quotes from the 80’s pop star this morning. Prince’s comments are from a May interview with Peter Willis of the British newspaper The Mirror. His latest album, 20TEN, was released exclusively in CD format as a giveaway in issues of The Mirror.

July 4 – Celebrating Our Digital Freedom

This weekend is the Fourth of July… Independence Day… the federal holiday celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, thus declaring the United States free from the Kingdom of Great Britain. But things have calmed down a little since the 18^th century; and we’re on better terms with England now than we used to be. So the holiday has become a celebration of our freedom as Americans in general. Recent events in the tech press got me thinking: as Americans we also benefit from certain digital freedoms not as easily enjoyed in other parts of the world.

UPDATE – Facebook Blocks Twitter’s Friend Finding Feature

Earlier this week Facebook blocked the new feature of Twitter’s Facebook application that allowed users to find friends on both sites. Last week I wrote a blog post about how I believe smaller social networking sites should not allow their users to sync content with Facebook and Twitter because it diverts traffic away from their own sites (read that blog). I concluded by suggesting that the best way to leverage the huge user bases of Facebook and Twitter is to use the larger sites to invite friends to engage on the smaller networks.

Ruidoso Man-cation Reveals Mobile Internet Addiction

This weekend I spent a few nights in Ruidoso, New Mexico with five guy friends. It was to be the ultimate dude’s trip. Fishing, horse races, gambling, beer drinking, grilling, and a beard-growing contest. No women, no work, and no 3G internet connection… Wait. No 3G?!? I was not prepared for the fact that the high mountains and dense tree coverage around our cabin outside of town would cut my iPhone and I off from the hive mind.

Facebook Syncing is Bad for Smaller Social Networking Sites

I have recently been experimenting with a lot of the new smaller social networking sites like Gowalla, Tumblr, and Miso. All three of the sites I just mentioned allow users to have their posts on them automatically synced to their Facebook and/or Twitter accounts as status updates there. Posting links to your infant website on the two biggest social networking sites in the world right now seems like a reasonable enough way to increase traffic. But I’ve noticed that any interaction with those posts mostly occurs on Facebook or Twitter instead of drawing my friends to the smaller sites to sign up and interact there. So I’m beginning to wonder whether Facebook syncing is beneficial or harmful to the life of these new networks.

A Gowalla Check-In Synced to Facebook

Xbox’s ‘Kinect’ Could Change the Way We Use the Television

This week E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) took place at the Los Angeles Convention Center. E3 is known as the premier event for announcements about all things video games. One of the main attractions this year was Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 (formerly known as Project Natal). The Kinect is an add-on device for Xbox 360 equipped with a camera and microphone that translate your movements and speech to commands for the Xbox 360.

New Mac mini Gets HDMI. But what about Blu-ray?!?

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last week, odds are you’ve heard all about the 4^th generation iPhone that was unveiled at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference. The announcement was expected though. And followers were a little disappointed that Steve Jobs didn’t have another surprise for us. But on the night Apple’s online store began accepting pre-orders for iPhone 4, it also quietly updated the store with a drastically refreshed Mac mini model.