I was reading the review of Capitalism over at Reason and at the end it had this,

One final note: Just before the film started, Moore asked the audience to turn off any recording devices because the studio did not want bootleg versions of the film getting around. Apparently this socialism stuff has its limits.

I had to laugh. Frankly I think everyone who wants to watch the movie should show Mr. Moore exactly how much they support him and download it off the internet.

Megan McArdle points me to this amusing video about which  Gizmodo’s John Herrmann gushes, “I’ve read the articles, watched the instructional videos, and gotten an invite, but nothing—nothing—has done more to explain to me how this mind-melting Internet Thing works than Pulp Fiction, spectacularly adapted for Google Wave. (Warning: Tarantino language ahead)”

It’s an entertaining illustration but, frankly, not one that makes me pine for an invite.  Yes, Wave would seem to combine several existing tools in a streamlined way.  And it might be extraordinarily useful way of doing certain kinds of collaborative work.  Mostly, though, it looks like a big time-waster.

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” So begins a column by Jessica Vascellaro in today’s WSJ.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

[...]

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we’d complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren’t automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we’re nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they’re interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

[...]

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with “a river that continues to flow as you dip into it.”

I’m more “wired” than most, spending an inordinate amount of time blogging, Twittering and the like.   Indeed, I started this blog nearly seven years ago as a substitute for my previous habit of emailing links and clippings, often with brief commentary, back and forth my my friends.  I frequently instant message or direct message people for things that need immediate responses.

But none of it is going to replace email.

A river of information is interesting.  It’s why I finally “stuck” as an active Twitter user after two years of brief flirtations and not “getting” it.  But, even if you’re only following 100 people or so, you’re going to miss most of what’s in the river. And if you’re following 1000 or 2000 people — hardly uncommon — you’re going to miss almost all of it.  Which is perfectly fine if you’re looking for witty commentary, updates on the latest breaking news, which of your acquaintances out and about in Adams Morgan, and the like.

While it can be used that way, email isn’t, at its core, a mass communications platform.  It’s a means of direct communication with another person asynchronously.  If I need to let my wife know I’m running late, send my deputy an attachment for posting on the company website, send my folks the latest pictures of the baby, or any number of things that I actually need another person to read — not just have available to them if they happen to be wading in my river at a given moment — there’s no good substitute for email.

Twitter direct messaging is great if you can say what you need in 160 characters, including spaces, and the person’s following you on Twitter; otherwise, not so much. Texting is rather intrusive and, since it tends to set off audible alarms and cost the recipient money, borderline rude.  Instant messaging is also generally annoying, as it demands a person’s attention NOW rather than when they want to take the time to read messages.  Ditto telephoning, which I now reserve almost exclusively for extended conversations with friends and family a long distance away, quick bursts for when I can’t wait for email, or certain types of business transactions.

I haven’t yet used Google’s Wave, which may streamline the current flow of the river and avoid some of the fallbacks of the email alternatives.  The way we’ll use email will continue to evolve, too, much as I’ll now send someone to a blog post or an online photo album.  But we’ll always need something like email:  a direct, asynchronous means of sending infinitely variable types of information to specific people.

Update (Alex Knapp): Reading the above, I would just note that this is one in a string of articles over the past few years about the death of email, the death of voicemail, the death of the telephone, etc. These pieces tend to have one thing in common: they are written by tech journalists who, in their day to day business, are sifting through the constant stream of information on the Internet. You will note that they are almost never written by people with jobs outside of that industry, because everyone else with an office job gets more email and voicemail and phone calls than they can handle without investing in any one of the number of time management programs like Getting Things Done, etc. Speaking for myself, if email is dead, why do I get 100+ of them a day? And why are they communications that really can’t be handled any other way? If the phone is dead, why do I spend so much time on it getting work done?

Before proclaiming the death of a particular type of communication, it would be nice if journalists of this ilk actually did some, you know, reporting from a regular office and not just their laptop at home.

This weekend, I got one of those fake “virus clean” popups after clicking a link to a New York Times article from Memeorandum.   Apparently, I wasn’t alone as there are a dozen or more posts about it today at Techmeme.

The NYT itself has this Note to Readers:

Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and directing them to a site that claims to offer antivirus software. We believe this was generated by an unauthorized advertisement and are working to prevent the problem from recurring. If you see such a warning, we suggest that you not click on it. Instead, quit and restart your Web browser.

That’s in fact what I did. But it’s very annoying since it either means losing all of the other pages you’re currently browsing or risking the malware popping back up when your browser tries to helpfully reload the unexpectedly closed pages.

Troy at Inputs & Outputs has some very technical details.  And Riva Richmond, writing for the NYT Gadgetwise blog, offers these helpful tips:

If you are a Windows user and saw a suspicious antivirus warning on your screen, it is possible that the ad’s creators infected your computer with a malicious program, even if you avoided all contact with it. “Click or not, the user could still get infected,” said Neil Daswani, a founder of Dasient, a security firm that specializes in Web site security issues.

Some similar antivirus scams have been known to use security vulnerabilities in Web browsers to automatically install malicious software in what are known as drive-by downloads, Mr. Daswani said. As a precaution, those who encountered a pop-up warning should run a scan using their favorite (legitimate) antivirus software.

If you don’t have such software installed, it’s time to get some. The big brand names in the field include Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro, although it is not known whether their programs are able to detect any infections that might be caused by these latest ads. One analysis of the problematic ads indicated that an antivirus program called Avast, which has a free 60-day trial available, was able to spot them before they caused trouble. Another good free tool for Windows users is Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, which checks for the most common malicious programs on the Internet.

Peter Kafka at Media Memo:

You generally have to travel farther down the Internet publishing food chain to find this kind of bogus ad–go hunting for porn and/or illegal downloads, for instance, and you’ll find plenty of this stuff.

But Web advertising is still a wild and woolly place, and this type of thing still plagues high-end publishers too. Sometimes it’s the fault of ad networks the publishers use to move their unsold inventory; sometimes the bogus ads are bought directly from the publishers themselves.

Indeed, I’ve accidentally inflicted these type of malware pop-ups on my own sites, as several ad networks that run third-party advertisements — Google is the most noteworthy — do too little to prevent it from happening.

Google filed a patent five years ago for its home page design. Yesterday, it was approved.

I’m with Valleywag’s Ryan Tate:

We always thought the page was brain-dead simple, but apparently it’s an innovative “graphical user interface.”

[...]

In other words, subject to how the patent is enforced, Google owns the idea of having a giant search box in the middle of the page, with two big buttons underneath and several small links nearby. Since the time of the patent application in 2004, the company has moved some links, for searching News and Groups and other alternate databases, from directly above the search box to the top of the home page. But Google presumably believes its patent is broad enough to cover the variation.

Mashable’s Barb Dybwad has a similar reaction:

The patent application contains a single illustration of the familiar Google.com user interface which, as we know, is quite spartan. In other words, Google essentially owns the concept of putting a big search box on top of two buttons and putting some text links nearby.

No one knows exactly how or even if Google (Google) plans to use the patent to go after similar interfaces. But if they chose to, at least Yahoo (Yahoo!) and Ask.com would be potential targets. Microsoft’s new Bing (Bing) search might be spared thanks to its background image approach and other interface dissimilarities.

Perhaps more likely, Google’s patent will scare away any new startups brave enough to enter the search space against existing towering giants in the first place. They might think twice about borrowing the “keep it simple, stupid” approach of Google.com.

How in the world can this be patentable?

Techgeist’s Michael Klurfeld has a benign theory of what Google is after:

I think Google filed this patent over liability concerns. The Google homepage is certainly iconic. I doubt there’s anyone who’s been online for an extended period of time who doesn’t recognize the image. Let’s say I’ve been around online for a while, but I’m not all too… perceptive. I could go to some malicious site posing as the Google homepage which steals my data. It could actually say “Goagle,” but I may not have noticed. Google then has a legal basis by which to shut down the owners of that webpage.

IANAL but it strikes me that a trademark would cover that sort of thing. A patent implies something novel and non-obvious. A search bar with two buttons? Not so much.

In my early morning Teddy Kennedy Dead at 77 media roundup post, I observed, “That the Chappaquiddick scandal didn’t make the first several paragraphs — or even first page — of several of these obits is quite remarkable. It would be like writing an obit for Richard Nixon that didn’t mention Watergate or one for Michael Jackson that glossed over repeated allegations of pedophilia.”

Hanna Rosin expands on that point quite a bit, including implicitly pointing out that it was a rather large elephant in the room:

Google Trends this morning is a perfect window into our tabloid culture and the recesses of our depraved minds. While the papers are full of words like “dynasty” and “legacy,” Mary Jo Kopechne, according to Google Hot Trends, is uppermost in our thoughts. Her name comes up as number one in the ranking, and several more places on the list, misspelled. Chappaquiddick shows up high and often, too; once correctly, and then in several illiterate incarnations.

Partly, I blame this discrepancy on the American papers, which are still bent on hagiography. I prefer British obituaries, which tell it like it is. And partly, of course, this is the fault of our vapid tabloid culture. The only surprise today is that Kate Gosselin has been knocked back all the way to number 30. “Michael Jackson alive” is a popular trend. Yeah. Jamming with Elvis.

Finally, there is the issue of the obvious narrative the papers are not stringing together. In my mind, I’ve always equated Ted Kennedy with Chuck Colson, the disgraced Nixon aide who went on to found an admirable Christian organization called “Prison Fellowship.” Public officials who do terrible things and then say they’re sorry (often in a press conference or book) are a dime a dozen. But the ones who do something terrible and then repent indirectly in the form of a lifetime of dedicated public service are rare. Colson and Kennedy are just about the only two I can think of.

Mary Jo Kopechne is on our minds because this narrative about Ted Kennedy makes sense, in some intuitive, appealing way. Kennedy killed a girl. That’s his rosebud. He made up for it partly by declining the ultimate glory of running for president, and choosing the more humble path—helping the underclass using the slow, steady machinery of the Senate.

Other than the fact that Kennedy actually did run for president — in a bitter primary battle with President Jimmy Carter in 1980 — that all strikes me as right. And, indeed, the Guardian obit covers this neatly in a single paragraph:

Kennedy’s career was significantly blighted by the Chappaquiddick incident of 1969 in which the car he was driving ran off a bridge and plunged into the water, killing his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. While he never reached the pinnacle of power, Kennedy eventually shed his playboy image to become a serious political presence in the Senate. His death marks the twilight of a political dynasty and deals a blow to Democrats as they seek an overhaul of the healthcare system, one of Kennedy’s personal goals.

Teddy Kennedy lived an extraordinary life of tremendous accomplishment interspersed with some horrible scandals and family tragedy.  It’s why he was such a fascinating figure. But his story simply can’t be told without the word Chappaquiddick.

UPDATE:  E&P’s Sam Chamberlain tallied how far into the obits the first mention of the incident appeared:

NY Daily News- 13^th graf

Associated Press- 7^th graf

Boston Herald-  10^th graf

Boston Globe-  5^th graf

NY Times- 14^th graf

NY Post- 14^th graf

Washington Post-  9^th graf

Wall Street Journal-  6^th graf

LA Times-  12^th graf

Chicago Tribune-  12^th graf (same obit as LA Times)

Miami Herald-  10^th graf

Reuters- 18^th graf

USA Today- 19th graf

Politico- 24th graf

The Hill-NO MENTION

Roll Call-25th graf

National Journal-11th graf

Times of London- 8^th graf

In fairness, for a variety of reasons having to do with the printing and editing process from bygone days, a newspaper “graf” is often much shorter than a proper paragraph.  Still, the most notable single fact about Kennedy’s life was mentioned well after the average reader would have lost interest.

Remember when Liskula Cohen forced Google to reveal an anonymous blogger who was using their domain to call her a “skank” and suggest she performed lewd sex acts? Naturally, now that she has been outed — as Rosemary Port, a Fashion Institute of Technology student — is suing Google for violating her privacy.

“This has become a public spectacle and a circus that is not my doing,” said Port, whose “Skanks in NYC” site branded the 37-year-old Cohen an “old hag.” “By going to the press, she defamed herself,” Port said. “Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my Web site: One from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it,” Port said. “That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated.”

That’s probably about right. I’d never heard of Liskula Cohen before the news of this suit went public. Then again, Cohen’s site was likely a first page result on Google when people searched for “Liskula Cohen.”

The pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student added that she’s furious at Google for revealing her identity, so much so that she plans to file a $15 million federal lawsuit against the Web giant.

“When I was being defended by attorneys for Google, I thought my right to privacy was being protected,” Port said. “But that right fell through the cracks. Without any warning, I was put on a silver platter for the press to attack me. I would think that a multi-billion dollar conglomerate would protect the rights of all its users.”

In her suit, she’ll charge Google “breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity,” said her high-powered attorney Salvatore Strazzullo.

“I’m ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court,” Strazzullo said. “Our Founding Fathers wrote ‘The Federalist Papers’ under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously. Shouldn’t that right extend to the new public square of the Internet?”

While people have the right to try to keep their anonymity secret when writing, it’s not a positive right.
And, to the extent Google had a duty to protect Port’s identity, the certainly fulfilled it by defending it in court up to the point where a judge ordered them to reveal that information to Cohen.

It would cripple our civil law system if citizens or corporations could be sued for complying with court orders! Indeed, I’m not sure how to stop that merry-go-round.

I gave Google’s Chrome browser a go the first few days after its debut but found it rather annoying and went back to Firefox.  The latter has gotten so balky of late, however, that I’ve followed Alex Knapp’s suggestion and given Chrome another chance.

For the most part, it’s fine.  I’m not having the crashing issues that I was with Firefox and the minor annoyance of menu commants being nonexistent or not where I’m used to them are somethng I can live with.

But I’ve having some issues with the WordPress and Drupal interfaces of the various blogs I run.

In WordPress, embedded photos don’t show up in the WYSIWYG editor, which I use interchangably with the HTML editor.  Also, especially on my home computer, it quite frequently saves published posts back in draft mode and eats various edits, especially tagging.

In Drupal, it works well enough but doesn’t render pages on the backend very cleanly.  Annoying but livable.

Anyone else experiencing these problems?  Any suggestions aside from “Buy a Mac!” or “Use Linux!” that might alleviate them?  I’m running Windows XP on rather robust machines with dual monitor setups in all cases, if that matters.

A Vogue cover model of whom I’d never previously heard and does not conform to my preconceptions of what a Vogue cover model looks like has won a lawsuit against Google over an anonymous former blogger who called her names on the Internet.

A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” on the internet.

In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation.  A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over.

Ms Cohen, a tall, Canadian blonde who has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Versace, went to court after reading the wounding anonymous comments on Google’s Blogger.com.  “I would have to say the first-place award for ‘Skankiest in NYC’ would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen,” the blogger “Anonymous” wrote in one posting. The blog, since removed, ridiculed the former Australian Vogue covergirl as a “40-something” who “may have been hot 10 years ago”, when she was actually 36.

Justice Joan Madden rejected the blogger’s claim that the blogs “serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting”, and should not be treated as factual assertions.

The model was looking forward last night to discovering the identity of the alleged acquaintance who insulted her. “Everybody is waiting to see who this coward is,” Steven Wagner, her lawyer, said.

While I absolutely believe that bloggers should be held just as liable as anyone else for defamation — even if that requires forcing the disclousure of their identity to the alleged victim — it’s hard to see how voicing the opinion that someone is the “skankiest in NYC” even comes close to defamation.  There is no factual assertion being made, given that there would seem to be no universal standard of measurement for such condition.

A second report at the NY Post (via Tom Maguire) however, reveals something that might rise to the level of defamation:

A Manhattan judge ruled yesterday that a blogger can’t hide behind a web of anonymity while flinging the ugly words “skank” and “ho” at somebody online.

The sternly worded ruling orders Google to give up the identity of an anonymous blogger-assailant who inexplicably devoted an entire blog — titled “Skanks in NYC” — to maligning beautiful blond model Liskula Cohen.  [Apparently the view of reporter Laura Italiano, who editorializes throughout. - ed]

Once she learns her attacker’s name — possibly as early as today — the model can serve the anonymous blogger with a defamation lawsuit.

The blog, which was posted through Google’s “Blogger.com” subsidiary last year, had included sexy fashion shots of Cohen with captions using the words “skank,” “ho” and “whoring.”

The thrust of the blog is that [Cohen] is a sexually promiscuous woman,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden wrote in her decision. That included references to Cohen as “whoring” and “ready to engage in oral sexual activity.”  As such, the international cover girl is entitled to insist in a defamation lawsuit that the blogger’s statements are false and damaging — and to get from Google the blogger’s name she needs in order to do so, the judge ruled.

Cohen’s lawyer, Steven Wagner, said he hopes the decision sends a message to bloggers, Twitterers, and whoever else would use the anonymity of the Internet for cowardly defamations. ”The rules for defamation on the Web — for actual reality as well as virtual reality — are the same,” Wagner said. “The Internet is not a free-for-all.”

Well, it pretty much has been for going on two decades now.  But, again, I agree that people should be held liable for their actions on the Web. Indeed, spreading false rumors on the Web is far more damaging than simply stating them in words somewhere, given the much larger audience.

I’m not sure what the rules of discovery are in such cases. Presumably, the blogger isn’t entitled to a fishing expedition through Cohen’s sex life to see whether there is any truth to the descriptors he applied.

One imagines that the burden here is high, though.  The word “whore” has been transformed in the popular culture into a meaning well beyond traditional prostitution.  And I’m not sure that insinuating that an adult engages in oral sex with other adults, especially of the opposite sex, can even still be considered defamatory.

UPDATE:  My wife informs me that the identity of the blogger has already been revealed.  Gawker (Warning: NSFW) has a good roundup, including a link to a new story at NY Post.

The anonymous cyber-bully who harassed and belittled Manhattan model Liskula Cohen with insulting terms like “skank,” “ho” and “old hag” on a mean-spirited blog was a female acquaintance of hers.

[...]

The model said she’s still mystified about why the woman went after her so viciously. “I have no idea. She doesn’t have a lot going on and she’s jealous,” she said. “It’s the only logical explanation.”

[...]

She “was an irrelevant person” whom she’d bump into at events and restaurants around town, Cohen said. “She was always around.”

Cohen said they exchanged pleasantries when she called her on Tuesday night. Then Cohen confronted her when the woman asked, “How are you?” “I’m sure you know exactly how I am right now,” Cohen told her — and then astonished the backstabber by apologizing to her. She told her, “If I’ve ever done anything to you to actually deserve this, then I’m really very sorry.”

The stammering blogger responded, “We shouldn’t be talking . . . We should talk with the lawyers.” Cohen stopped her in her tracks. “I said, ‘No more lawyers. It’s OK. I said I forgive you. It doesn’t matter anymore,’ ” Cohen told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Except that she’s still suing for defamation.

Pretty sure this is still in Beta:

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

via Hal Hildebrand

E.D. Kain makes the interesting point that it may be too late for Microsoft’s bing to make much penetration into the search market, regardless of whether it’s better at producing desired results, because we’ve already reached the point where the name of the market leader has become a verb.

Once something becomes a sort of universal noun, that’s bad enough.  Kleenex did this in the tissue market, becoming pretty much synonymous with tissue.  So whether or not you were using a generic tissue or a Kleenex, you called it a Kleenex.  They transcended brand.  But it’s so much more potent to achieve verb status, and that’s what Google’s done.  You “google” something now – you rarely hear someone say “search.”  You never hear anyone say “just ask it” or “just yahoo it” – or at least, I never do.

The only other example that comes readily to mind is “xerox” as a synonym for making photocopies.  Then again, Canon and others have made quite an inroads into that business.

Kain makes a less catchy but perhaps more salient point in the comments:

Nor do they understand connectivity and product overlap the way Google does. Google connects your email, chat, documents, search, and even browser now, etc. into basically one product, and with upcoming innovations like Wave and their OS that connectivity and overlap will just become far, far more effective. (Apple has done this fairly well also with hardware added into the mix) Microsoft has tried with “Windows Live” and all that, but there are just too many gaps, too many brands, etc. I mean “bing” is now part of the whole cadre of Microsoft products, but is it really tied into them well? Why Microsoft hasn’t made their Windows platform more webby is beyond me. And why they make it so difficult to integrate everything is also confusing.

That, to me, is the real issue.  Google may not be the best at anything but they’re pretty good at everything.  It’s mighty convenient to have my email, calendar, task list, and whatnot in one place. They’re all good enough that I’ve stopped looking for competing apps even though there may well be something better out their for any particular product.

I sincerely hope that Microsoft — or somebody — creates a viable enough alternative to keep Google honest, though.  Google’s marketplace dominance gives them an awesome amount of power in determining which websites thrive and fail, which videos get seen by the masses, and whatnot.  Having a ready alternative will make it harder for them to abuse that position.

Mozilla has just released version 3.5 of its Firefox browser. CNET’s Stephen Shankland:

Firefox 3.5 has a range of new features, including a new JavaScript engine for faster Web applications such as Google Docs; the ability to show video built into Web pages without plug-ins; a private browsing mode; fancy downloadable fonts; and geolocation technology that can let Web sites know where you are.

“So much is happening on the Web right now, it’s a great time for browsers,” said John Lilly, CEO of Firefox backer Mozilla, in a statement. And, he boasted, “Firefox 3.5 brings together the most innovative Web technologies and delivers them in the most complete and powerful modern browser.”

PC World’s Michael Muchmore adds,

The new version brings a private browsing mode, faster JavaScript performance, and support for emerging HTML 5 standards such as plug-in-free video and audio playing. [...] The browser also includes new technology that will allow users to tell sites their location, which will let sites deliver relevant information, for example, about nearby eateries and businesses. The features uses Google Location Services, which obtains your whereabouts using a database of WiFi access points and other known IP addresses.

Though JavaScript performance is more than twice as fast with the browser’s new TraceMonkey engine, it still trails Chrome on benchmark tests performed by PCMag.com. The new video and audio support make use of the Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora open source codecs, but these are yet to be adopted by the Web’s governing body, the W3C, as official standards.

A geekier review by UZee at TechnoPath :

This latest update includes many improvements to the rendering engine, including support for native <video> and <audio> tags in accordance with HTML 5 specification, as well as improved support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3. The TraceMonkey JavaScript engine also saw some fine tuning to make it even more faster allowing a much smoother browsing experience. This however had no effect on the Acid3 score which was still 93, same as the previous version. It is interesting to note that Minefield also got an Acid3 score of 93, meaning that there was no significant change in the JavaScript engine for that release.

I of course downloaded and installed it immediately.  Well, actually, I downloaded it from Mozilla’s site, it took forever, and I wound up with a corrupt file.  I then downloaded it from CNET (linked above) in seconds and installed without difficulty.

A couple of the extensions that I forgot that I had installed are incompatible with the new edition, so it’s probably worth waiting if you use a lot of add-ons.
Via Twitter, Hal Hildebrand reports that the “clear private data” feature has been removed.  As I understand it, it’s been replaced by new features that allow you to browse privately and clear specific sites from your browsing list.  This, no doubt, is designed to hide from your wife or parents that you’re looking at, um, things you might buy them for their birthday.

One thing I noticed immediately is a + button next to the rightmost open tab which instantly opens a new, blank page.  That’s handy.  My workaround had been to open a random new tab from the toolbar.

UPDATE: It’s both shrewd and creepy that a certain company that does no evil is filling the ad slots on this page with promotions for its own, competing browser.

Not sure this is BREAKING NEWS, as CNN does, but it’s amusing nonetheless:

How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it’s just one — if that one is Michael Jackson.

The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.

“Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson,” a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as “volcanic.”

As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton’s blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.

CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke.

Twitter crashed as users saw multiple “fail whales” — the illustrations the site uses as error messages — user FoieGrasie posting, “Irony: The protesters in Iran using twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of ‘Michael Jackson RIP.’ Well done.” The site’s status blog said that Twitter had had to temporarily disable its search results, saved searches and trend topics.

Wikipedia saw a flurry of activity, with close to 500 edits made to Jackson’s entry in less than 24 hours. CNET reported that by 3:15pm PDT, Wikipedia seemed to be “temporarily overloaded.”

And so forth and so on.  It’s amazing that even robust servers can go down with too many simultaneous queries.  One would think that the advent of cloud technologies and redundancies would have ended that by this stage in the Internet’s maturation.  Apparently not.

Jeff Jarvis notes that there has been some controversy over Google’s Streetview, which allows people to see videos of what’s going on in the streets, including residential neighborhoods, in an ever-expanding number of locations.

In a few countries around the world, we’ve seen a backlash against Google’s Streetview as somehow an invasion of privacy, even though what Google captures is the very definition of public: what can be seen in the open.

I wish that journalists would defend Google and its definition of public, for it matters to journalism.

I don’t have strong feelings on Streetview, although I do find it mildly creepy that it’s displaying things going on in residential neighborhoods.  I strikes me that the good purposes to which this could be applied are few and the nefarious purposes are many.

What interests me about Jeff’s post, though, is how far he takes the argument.

No, public is public. We need that to be the case, for journalism and for society. We must protect the idea of public.

He contends, for example, that politicians caught in Amsterdam’s Red Light district, cracks in bridges, and the protests on the streets of Iran are public activities and those wishing to hide these things from the public shouldn’t be allowed to do so on some notion of “privacy.”  I’ve got no problem with any of that, although I do think there ought to be some sense of privacy even out in public.  Journalists and television cameras camped out on the sidewalks in front of some person’s house tend to go too far and, certainly, the scummy paparazzi that chase celebrities around hoping to get photographs to sell to the tabloids do.  Where precisely one draws that line, though, I don’t know.

Indeed, I’d say this doctrine should stretch to saying that everything a public official does is public – everything except matters of security. Thus Britain’s MPs would not be allowed to black out their spending of taxpayers’ money. Thus the default in American government would be transparency, making any official’s actions and information open and searchable. Thus anyone in Ft. Greene could scour Streetview to look for unsafe buildings.

This seems to mix apples and oranges.  I fully agree that how politicians spend our money ought to be absolutely transparent with, as Jeff says, some exceptions on matters of security.  But, surely, everything a Member of Congress or other public official does shouldn’t be “open and searchable”?  Their Netflix queues?  Their bank records?  Their kids’ report cards?  Where do we draw the line? Even public officials are entitled to have private lives.

Photo: Bad Control

Not one of his better efforts, frankly, but I haven’t seen anything from Weird Al Yankovich in years:

Jack Humphrey jokes, “Craigslist has truly arrived.  When Weird Al makes a Doors-inspired melody about your site, there’s really nothing left to do but cash checks and wait for Google to buy.”  Indeed. That seems to be the business model for quite a number of sites.

via @JayCaruso