Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard Review

Summary:

Positive:
15 Programmable keys
LED's in all the keys
4in by 1in LCD display
Media buttons

Negative:
The Keyboard Layout takes a while to get used to
The Two USB ports in the keyboard is USB 1.1

9/10
read full review

Final Fantasy Versus XIII teaser

Lite-on Takes DVD-R Up To 20x

With the ongoing war between HD DVD and Blu-ray unlikely to be settled anytime soon it comes as a welcome relief to discuss a media everyone seem to have forgotten…

read more | digg story

Pure Pwnage Update

Two interviews and a new comic page. Plus some new fan gear at "the noobstore"

Interview no. 1 is from a tv-show called Urban Rush. And can be seen below:

Interview no. 2 is from the tv-show Good Game and can be seen here
The New comic page is here
And the noobstore can be found here

Wii Launch Game Wiiview Index

What's good? What's great? What should stay on store shelves.

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Total Cost of PS3's Components? $840

The total price tag for a 60GB PS3? $840.35 (20GB models: $805.85). For those of you keeping score, that means Sony is losing about $250 for every PS3 sold at a $599 retail price point. Ouch!
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720p PS3 games downscale on older HD sets

If you have a 1080i-capable television (that would be many older HD sets), you may be dismayed to learn that 720p PS3 titles will not upscale to fit the resolution. Instead, 720p titles will always be downsized to 480i or 480p. IGN confirmed this after testing four games -- Resistance: Fall of Man, NHL 2K7, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, and Need for Speed Carbon -- on a 1080i set that did not support 720p; all scaled down to 480p.
read more

Danish Electronic Entertainment Expo

Yes, i went to D3 this weekend.
This week i will make sure to tell you everything there is to tell about it; And upload the photos and video i got as well..

400,000 Wiis Hitting Japan on Day One

PlayStation 3's less-than-100,000-units launch has come and gone, and while gamers await Sony's second shipment, much of Japan is preparing for the Nintendo's next move. When Wii arrives in Japan on December 2nd, a little under two weeks after its debut here, Nintendo will deliver roughly 400,000 machines to gamers, reports BBC News.
read more | digg story

Less than one game purchased for every PS3 sold in Japan

Less than one game was purchased for every PS3 sold the actual PS3-to-software ratio was 0.98. Naturally, the sales discrepancy begs the question "what the heck are those Japanese people actually playing over there?" Unfortunately, the most likely answer is probably that they're playin' a whole lot of Ebay.
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Several US PS3 Games are Region-Free

Launch libraries are usually on the light side, but the lineup for the Japanese launch of the PS3 was looking thin even by the most forgiving of standards. Simple solution? Get rid of that pesky region lock! So far Tony Hawk's Project 8 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance has been reported to work perfectly on the Japanese PS3.
read more | digg story

Asus Unveils Hardcore Gaming Notebooks

A nVidia (Green LED's) and an ATI (Red LED's) version, Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM can be fitted and hard drives max out at 160GB. LightScribe compatible dual layer DVD burners make it onboard too along with 1.3MP integrated webcams. No official pricetag yet but the ATI version is expected to have an RSP of $3,588.


read more | digg story

Wii Will Play DVDs in 2007

Let's get this straight: Nintendo originally unveils Wii with DVD functionality, strips out the feature without telling anyone, and then reveals they'll be releasing a DVD-compatible version in Japan before performing a complete reversal and detailing a DVD-happy Wii coming sometime next year.
read more

PS3 Launches In Japan. Sells Out.

So the first of Sony’s three major PS3 launch dates (11 November) has come and gone and according to reaction from Japan – it’s most friendly of territories – all things went swimmingly with stock selling out in minutes.
read more

PS3 Backwards Compatibility Not Perfect

Even though PlayStation 3 literally includes PlayStation 2 hardware to make backwards compatibility a possibility, the transition hasn't been completely seamless. In fact, Sony's well aware of what games aren't making the next-generation transition and has launched a website where users can find details on what the issues are.
read more

nVidia Launches 8 Series

It's now officially time to upgrade your old graphics card, as nVidia launches their new Direct X 10 enabled series launched..
I know this baby is going on my wish list this christmas:


read more

Playstation 3 at Tokyo Game Show

Attack of The Show's Kevin Pereira talks to Sony's Kaz Hirai about the PS3, 1080p and the launching titles. Kaz reveals that some of the games coming at launch will run at 60 frames per second 1080p! And this is at launch. Very impressive!.

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Video of the Playstation 3 Interface

4 days ago i gave you the Wii interface video. Here is the equivalent for the PS3
show me | digg story

Vista & Office 2007 Packaging Unveiled

For the record Amazon is now listing the official release date for all Vista editions as 2 February while Office 2007 is still described as ‘Estimated to be available early in 2007’.
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Wii Sports not as cool it seemed

It turns out that Wii sports; Bundled with the Wii is not as cool as you might have thought.
For example in baseball to throw a curve ball, you first select it on the D-Pad and then make a standard throwing motion. instead of doing the actual movement and in tennis you do not control anything except the swing of your player's racket. The movement of these Mii-alike athletes is all done automatically by the game. This is all disappointing in a game that's supposed to show you Nintendo's bold new direction with the Wii.
read more | digg story

Video of the Wii interface

Wii Update

Adam Sessler from G4TV checks out what the Wii will be launching with.

Sony Commercial on Why the Playstation 3's Cell Processor is Important

Nintendo Adds 4 More Wii Experience Videos To Wii.com

Watch how this Japanese family of four learns to play Wii Baseball. As usual, Nintendo found some random people and put them in a room with a TV and gave them the controllers with no explanation at all. As Iwata predicted, people *will* say "WOW!" just like the little boy did at 0:26.
show me | digg story
The other 3 videos can be found from the gallery page - individually linked here for convenience.
USA
Japan
UK

Firefox 2.0 Released Today

While Release Candidate 3 may have thrown a last minute spanner in the works it now appears that all is once again well in Mozilla central with today’s official launch of Firefox 2.0.
get it here | read more

PlayStation 3 Net Service & Launch Titles Unveiled

Despite the Xbox 360’s 12 month head start on the PS3 arguably its biggest asset in the console wars was paved by its predecessor: the establishment of a truly powerful online service. Now Sony – rather belatedly – has detailed how it intends to fight back.
read more | digg story

Panasonic’s 103 inch Plasma Starts Production

The TH-103PF9 is the largest in the plasma in the world. It ’s a full HD screen with a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 and offering up 2.07 million pixels. Just to put this truly stunning panel into perspective, it’s the equivalent of four 51in panels or 16, 26in TVs!
read more | digg story

WoW Character Transfer Error Empties Bank Accounts

Paid character transfer hasn't worked for the last 8 days, but it was only today Blizzard pulled the page. Blizzard, aware of serious issue, warns not to keep on trying to finalize the transfer, as it would always fail but would charge your account for each failed attempt. Dozens of people complain that their bank accounts have been drained..
read more | digg story

nVidia Proclaims New Notebook King

nVidia has busted out the GeForce Go 7950 GTX which it claims (and consequently probably is) the fastest mobile graphics card in the world. The downside is the company has mysteriously decided to keep all specifications under its hat for the time.
read more

Google Nabs YouTube For $1.65bn

The homogenisation of the Internet continues this week after wildly successful video sharing start-up YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65bn.
read more

Encrypt your Instant Messenger program

Whenever you talk online with your instant messaging (IM) client of choice, your conversations can be, and in all probability are, recorded, monitored, and read. Any data which travels over a network can be viewed using programs known as packet sniffers, with some specially crafted programs..
There is however a way to protect yourself against this:
Encrypting your conversations.. It's an easy and necessary step to take, and free 3rd party products are available for most IM's.
Here's a list with some of them.
protect me
If you use an IM not natively supporting encryption, and not shown on this list; Google is your friend

How safe is a hard drive really for storage of all your data?

This and how to recover your data if your harddrive dies is unveiled in this short film..
show me | digg it

RC2 Firefox & Vista Launched

It’s a time for nearlies this week with both Firefox 2.0 (awaited with some anticipation) and Windows Vista (awaited with some trepidation) almost out the door.
read more

Now Fujitsu Recalls 300k Batteries

Back in August when Sony announced there would be No More Battery Recalls you have to wonder just what it was smoking. Since this ill-founded statement Toshiba and Lenovo have hauled back close to a million Sony batteries while Dell asked us for a further 100,000 and now here’s Fujitsu…
read details

Futurama Returns

Speedbump Studios have created a fan-made commercial for the return of Futurama.
This is a funny little clip featuring Bender. Remember, Futurama returns in 2008!
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Pure Pwnage Episode 12 will be released November 6th.

Episode 12 of popular internet show Pure Pwnage will be Screened in 3 different cities and finally released on the internet the 6th. of November.
that and comic page 17 released
Screening dates and times

Wii Rayman Demo for the Nintendo Wii

Looks like a great game to play with your friends..

Huge Nintendo Wii Preview

If you're as excited about the Nintendo Wii as I am, and i know many of you are you'll love this in dept review of Nintendo's new console.
Including:
News from theNintendo European Press Conference
The Nintendo Wii Europe launch date! - 08/12-06
The Wii interface known as "Wii channels"
Virtual consoles - play your old Nintendo games on your Wii
WiiConnect24 - How your Wii uses the internet
and brief reviews on the following Wii game titles:
Zelda & Metroid, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Super Mario Galaxy, WarioWare Smooth Moves, Tony Hawks Downhill Jam, Call of Duty 3, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and Wing Island. A must read if you want to know what's worth knowing about the Wii
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Microsoft Launches The Zune

Served up in three colours (white, black and erm...brown?!) the 30GB device firms up a long list of what we already knew such as 3in screen (with QVGA res), FM radio and WiFi. An impressive range of codecs are supported including H.264, MP3, AAC (interesting!) and WMA while content can be shared from Zune to Zune. If you buy DRM-ed content this sharing is limited to three plays unless your compatriot is a "Zune Pass" subscriber, which is the company's own music download service.
read full review

Test Drive Unlimited for the Xbox 360 reviewed

Sometimes, Test Drive Unlimited feels like the world’s first Massive Multiplayer Online Racing Game, other times it feels like an exotic lifestyle simulator, but one thing it never feels is ordinary.
read full review

Wii Wiilease Wiivealed

In a staggered launch the innovative little console will ship first to the Americas on 19 November and then Japan on 2 December with the European date frustratingly not revealed until tomorrow (we’ll stick on an update).
read more

Announcing Splinter Cell: Double Agent for Wii Launch

Not content with a mere seven Wii launch window games, Ubisoft is adding yet another one to the growing list.
read more | view the screenshots | digg story

Now Panasonic/Matsushita Recalls Laptop Batteries

It seems that the 4.8m batteries collectively recalled by Apple and Dell in the last month have not only made the public skittish but the major manufacturers too and Matsushita is the latest to jump on this (particularly hot) bandwagon.
read more

Playstation 3 Delayed Well Into Next Year

March 2007 is the huge four month setback for all PAL editions shipped to Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia and it will only gall gamers further to learn Sony still intends to ship the PS3 to Japanese and US territories on its original 11 and 17 November dates.
read more | digg story

Samsung claims to have cracked 4G

We have all heard (and many of us tried) 3G but now Samsung is ready to demonstrate 4G running at up to 1Gbps..!
They're going to show this amazing technology by displaying:
32 high-definition broadcast TV channels
maintaining Internet access and video telephony. That's on 1 connection! and all simultaneously.
read more

Watch TV in 3D without having to wear special glasses

LG recently revealed the "Flatron M4200D" a 32 inches television projecting 3D video without needing glasses. The downside is that you have to be 4 metres away from the screen for it to work.
read more | digg story

YouTube stats revealed

The extremely popular video sharing site YouTube doesn't make a point of revealing its size, user activity, or demographics. But Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal pieced together much of that information by "scraping" YouTube for data.
read more | digg story

Incredible Photo of the Milky Way on a Summer Night

Simply astonishing
view it | digg story

Toshiba SED Blows Away LCD & Plasma

SED, or Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display, was first announced back in September 2004 and has been theorised about ever since. Co-developed by Tosh and Canon it is not an enhancement to either LCD or plasma but a replacement for both, a technology which promises quality beyond that of CRT yet on an LCD deep format.
read more

The charges against Israel's foreign minister on co-responsibility in war crimes dropped

Frank Aaen yesterday reported the Israeli foreign minister of Israel for warcrimes.
The prosecuter however denied to start a investigation with reference to, the fact that the foreign minister has immunity because of her ministertitle.

Blizzard's goal: Annual WOW expansions

Developer-publisher's "goal" is to add onto its massively popular MMORPG each year; Burning Crusade still set for holiday ship.
read more | digg story

Israeli foreign minister reported to the police by danish politician Frank Aaen

Danish party Enhedslisten's, foreign politics spokesperson Frank Aaen, today reported the israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni to the "state lawyer of special international criminal cases."
The minister is guesting Denmark, today and tomorrow and Frank Aaen hopes that the police will take affair.
Frank Aaen says:

- I think the minister should be held back, while it is investigated wether a charge can be made for co-responsibility in warcrimes.

- Amnesty International has determined that Israel has comitted serious warcrimes in the attack on Libanon and has encouraged for the responsible to be prosecuted.
It should be investigated if the israeli minister as a member of the government is co-responsible for the israeli warcrimes.

- The israeli attack on civil living areas and infrastructure, the use of mortar grenades and the israeli blockade, that stopped emergency help to the area are clear violations of the laws of war. As a fellow member of the Geneve-convention Denmark is obliged to procecute warcriminals if they are in Denmark.
link to original story (in danish)

PlayStation 3 tackles world ills

The spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 will be harnessed by scientists trying to understand the cause of diseases like Alzheimer's.
read more | digg story

See where the Internet lives

Take a tour of the data warehouse for the web - Equinix is responsible for holding massive amounts of data, including storage for popular sites like MySpace.com. Take a tour of the facilities, and see how much energy it takes to keep the Web alive.
show me | digg story

225 pranksters shop in slow motion at Home Depot

Improv Everywhere is at it again! This past Saturday, 225 people descended on Home Depot in Madison Square Park to shop in slow motion. This is the same flash mob group that organized the invasion of Best Buy with lookalike-employees, previously featured here.
show me | digg story

Apple Recalls 1.8m Laptop Batteries

I'm not sure if there is some kind of inside joke running in the industry where companies copy one another's exact behaviour, but after Sony and Nintendo both announced pink versions of their consoles within the space of a few days, Apple has now joined Dell in recalling millions of laptop batteries.
read more | digg story

Gmail Audio Player

Gmail has a built-in player for MP3 attachments. If you receive emails that include MP3 files (maybe a podcast or a public domain recording), you can listen them directly from Gmail.
read more

Windows Vista's Aero Glass reviewed

Windows Vista provides a host of new features, but the first thing that jumps out is the slick, sleek Aero interface. Here's a look at the advantages and disadvantages of the new interface and what's required to get the most out of it.
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The Mother of All Windows XP Tweaking Guides

The TweakGuides Tweaking Companion Version 3.2 is the complete system optimization guide for Windows XP users. It contains an enormous amount of detailed descriptions and resources together in one free 175 page downloadable PDF file.
Download

BREAKING NEWS: Company claims to have invented a technology wich creates free energy

Steorn recently put an article in the Economist claiming to have invented free energy, this means energy without consuming anything, redefining our very way of understanding the universe. Until now there was no doubt that the principle stating "energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form." was true. Steorn however comes with the following claims:
1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature). which very clearly would prove the previous principle wrong. Now they know that people will not believe until multiply third party scientists have proved them right; therefore Steorn decided to seek validation from the scientific community in a more public forum, and as a result have published the challenge in The Economist. The company is seeking a jury of twelve qualified experimental physicists to define the tests required, the test centres to be used, monitor the analysis and then publish the results.
If this comes out to be true the world economy would suffer big time; as there's a lot of money in the energy business.
But let's not panic till it's proven right, after all they probably just missed something..
Link to Steorn's statement

Video of the Playstation 3 user interface

IGN Weekly, the video podcast from IGN Entertainment has the first glimpse of the Playstation 3 UI

Too much video game violence?

Attorney/activist Jack Thompson, CEO of Game Daily, Mark Friedler and X-Play's Adam Sessler, debate the effect that violence in video games has on children.
Personally i think that it's up to their parent to decide what content their kids can handle to watch/participate in because all kids are different and can handle different amounts of violence..

Snakes On A Plane's Samuel L. Jackson

Kevin Pereira talks to Hollywood legend and star of Snakes On A Plane, Samuel L. Jackson

Beautiful subways from around the world

Many operators of metros, subways or underground railways want to attract more passengers with good station design. This often means extra effort and higher costs for the metro operators but it seems to pay when a metro is more than just a means of transport but something the residents can be proud of. I wish they had realised that in copenhagen where i live; we have the ugliest subway ever..
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Apply now to Cardinal Sin - The official Pure Pwnage WoW guild

The Offical Pure Pwnage guild - Cardinal Sin - has been created on Frostmane (US - Alliance) and is now receiving applications for membership and leadership positions.
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Pure Pwnage The Comic update

Popular internet show Pure Pwnage has just updated their comic with page 16
show me

Comic Con '06: Hollywood Update

Comic books and Hollywood work hand-in-hand and brings you the latest crossover news

Dell Recalls 4.1 million Notebook Batteries

You may have noticed the coverage Dell’s infamous exploding laptop (below) has garnered in recent weeks. Well, it turns out the incident may not be the horrific one off many believed as the mammoth PC maker has issued the largest product recall in its history.
read more

Major Blog Update

As you have probably noticed if you have been here before i have changed the design. furthermore i have entered the blogger beta, so expect more cool stuff to come. At this point i can't edit the html manually; but hopefully They'll open that soon. Let me know what you think of the new design by commenting on this post!.
Changelog:
New Design!
"Email this article to a friend" button added
"Links to this post" button added
Labels for new articles letting you find other stories with the same lables (if you think it would be cool if i tagged the old news stories as well let me know.)

Anti-bullying organization bullies Bully

Following “the release of a screenshot in which one youth kicks another” the presumptive group has publicly called for an unreleased, untested computer game to be banned. Its title – aptly enough – is 'Bully' and Bullying Online says its fears were raised the moment it was discovered the project had been dreamt up by Rock Star Games.

read more | digg story

Asus WL-700gE WiFi Router: Built-In 160GB Drive, iTunes, and Bittorrent

It has a built in network iTunes client, so it'll show up as an iTunes client to your PCs. And it has a BitTorrent client that can rip down 7 streams automatically (and 10 FTP or web streams at the same time.) That's with your PC off! All downloads is handled by the router. And there's a lot more.

read more | digg story

The future in gaming graphics

Raytracing is something that many of the 3d and modeling afficionados will be intimately familiar with. Rather than just approximating things, raytracing involves physics calculations of each ray of light from a source through each volume of space, based on the volume's properties of refractivity, reflexivity, transparency, and other things. This technique is the proverbial 'holy grail' of graphics, as it is no longer 'guessing' - things become as real as you want to be, depending on how you control the properties of the textures.

read more | digg story

Quad SLI Drivers Finally Public

Up until now Quad SLI has been the plaything of those rich enough to buy a pre-made system or daring enough to risk their rig with beta software, but now the stabilisers are on.

read more | digg story

Google warns on 'unsafe' websites

Google has started warning users if they are about to visit a webpage that could harm their computer.

read more | digg story

Happy Birthday World Wide Web!

15 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee publicly released his WWW project onto the Internet.

read more | digg story

Google: We won't sell music

The Internet search giant used a keynote slot at the annual NARM conference to quash rumors of a so-called "Gtunes" store--much to the delight of retailers attending the confab.
"We are not going to be selling music," said Chris Sacca, head of business development for Google.

read more | digg story

Virgin Launches TV Over DAB Handset

For those who didn't know, DAB stands for "Digital Audio Broadcasting". It was designed to enable higher fidelity transmissions with improved noise immunity and greater mobility; it was not designed to send TV. At least that's what I thought...

read more | digg story

Caterpillar Invasion

Pictures of litterally millions of small caterpillars' invasion of this town. Everything covered in their web.

read more | digg story

iPhone To Debut At WWDC?

Leaked onto the web yesterday were yet more pictures of the so called "iChat Mobile". Naturally these could be the work of a 14 year old acne infected computer wizz with too much time on his hands but nevertheless rumours simply won't die that WWDC (7 August) will be the event to mark the iPhone/iChat Mobile's public debut.

read more | digg story

The Ship review

The game itself is actually quite complex and it will take an hour or so before you really get to grips with it. Of all the people on the ship, one of these is your "Quarry" - the person you are targeting to kill. At the same time, you are someone else's target. Kill or be killed? But your Quarry is not the same person who is hunting you.

read more | digg story

How to Protect Your Eyes While Gaming

Flash graphics, rapid-fire movements, and long hours at the console result in health problems like muscle and eye strain. Common ailments resulting from gaming are: lateral epicondylitis, tendonitis, bursitis, and carpel tunnel syndrome among others. This article offers 10 tips to save your eyes.

read more | digg story

nVidia PureVideo HD - HD DVD Preview

nVidia and Cyberlink gave TrustedReviews an exclusive preview of HD DVD playback on a PC.

read more | digg story

Samsung Unveils 4GB Vista Flash Disk

Designed for use in conjunction with the (supposedly) impending Windows Vista operating system, the Samsung 4GB solid state disk (SSD) will serve as a high speed NAND flash cache for notebooks and PCs. It works using ‘Windows ReadyBoost’ a new Vista feature which works intelligently with the SSD to populate it with the data a user needs before they ask for it. It readies favourite applications and data in the background, accelerating everyday actions such as starting programmes and switching users.

read more | digg story

BenQ Shows First HD HDMI Monitors

This High Definition malarkey is all well and good but how many realise that owning a monitor with a 1920 x 1080 screen resolution is not the only requirement for HD viewing? An HDMI interface comes in very handy too and BenQ has just become the World’s first manufacturer to offer LCDs with one.
read more

Asus PG191 Gaming Monitor Review

Overall: 7/10
Image Quality: 7/10
Design and Features: 8/10
Value: 7/10
read review

Comic Con '06: Spider-Man 3 Update

All the info you so desire as G4TV's Blair Butler, visits with the cast and creators at Comic-Con '06

Test your popup blocker software.

PopupTest.com provides a simple and independent source for popup window testing. Whether you are developing a popup killer software or you are thinking about purchasing one, you can use the sample popups to test the effectiveness of the application.

read more | digg story

AMD Slashes CPU Prices

It seems AMD is determined to steal all the headlines today. Just hours after it completed the purchase of graphics giant ATI for $5.4bn it has announced some of the largest CPU price cuts I’ve ever seen.
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AMD Snags ATI For $5.4bn

It could be argued that the two biggest rivalries in the IT industry were AMD verses Intel and ATI verses nVidia. Not anymore. Today the US CPU giant today officially announced its purchase of the Canadian graphics guru ATI in a deal worth a massive $5.4bn.
read more

Comic Con '06 Transformers Interview

Transformers Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura drops a bombshell about next years hotly anticipated film

Dark Messiah of Might And Magic revealed

Nate Mordo the brand manager of Dark Messiah of Might And Magic, talks about the game revealing some interesting stuff

Word verification for comments enabled

As some of you might have noticed there has been an increasing amount of anomynous spam in the comments section.
Just yesterday i received 53 spam comments all on different news.
This forces me to delete all of them manually.
And since i don't wanna have to delete 50+ spam comments everyday i chose to enable word verification. Hope it does not cause to much irritation for those of you who want to comment.

Democracy Player 0.8.5 Released (including an Intel-Mac Version)

A new version of Democracy Player, the most popular dedicated video RSS client, was released today. in this release: a new Intel-Mac version, stand-alone torrent support, fullscreen controls on Windows, and an advanced 1-Click subscription system. Democracy Player is 100% free/ open source and is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

read more | digg story

Blizzard reveals that all classes will be made available to both factions in World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade

the upcoming races in the expansion to World of Warcraft will have the posibility to play classes previously only available to the other faction - This should create more balance.

read more | digg story

Want to get your HDTV knowledge up to date? Read this!

If you're thinking of jumping on the high definition bandwagon, do yourself a favour and read this guide. It will tell you everything you need to know and more...

read more | digg story

Cool and Illegal Wireless Hotspot Hacks

It's been 3 months since the last article / tutorial by wireless guru, Dan Hoffman of 'Live Hacking Video' fame, and boy was it worth the wait. As always, he takes you step-by-step through some awesome wireless hacks and then shows you how to protect yourself from them. This will make you think twice before firing up your laptop in Starbucks!

read more | digg story

Sony PlayStation 3 Production Has Begun

Asustek Computer, one of the world's largest producers of computer components, has reportedly begun to ship Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles to Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. The fact that the consoles are being manufactured means that the hardware specs has been finalized and the launch will take place in mid-November.

read more | digg story

Autistic Highschooler Scores 20pts. in 4 Mins.

This was featured in the ESPYs as the best moment in the last 12 months. He had been the team manager for years, in charge of such things as water and towels, but was given a chance to play in the last game of the season; the crowd absolutely goes wild.
Unedited version: http://multimedia.democratandchronicle.com/video/
060303JmacVideo.html - watching this actually made me quite happy

read more | digg story

"They called me a child pornographer" Camping photos ruin family's life

"I took some photos of my kids naked on a camping trip. A drugstore employee called the police -- and my family's life became a living hell." This has just gone to far, i sure hope that nothing like this could happen in my country; and i hope for America and the entire world for that matter that a much more reasonable president will be elected the next time. I hope that everybody can see this is wrong.

EDIT: I found out that what i linked to, was barely a shortened version of the full article. I will still give you the option to read the shortened one, but i highly recommend reading the full.

read short story | digg story

Here is the full story:
Copyright 2006 Salon.com, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Salon.com

July 18, 2006 Tuesday

SECTION: FEATURE

LENGTH: 5454 words

HEADLINE: They called me a child pornographer

BYLINE: Jody Jenkins

HIGHLIGHT:

I took some photos of my kids naked on a camping trip. A drugstore employee called the police -- and my family's life became a living hell.

BODY:


Shortly before Thanksgiving 2004, I took my three kids camping in Mistletoe State Park near Augusta, Ga., with my best friend and his two kids. After six years in Savannah, my family was about to move to France for my wife's new job as an administrator for an American company. We had all been camping together before and figured the trip would be a great getaway from all of the packing, painting and stresses of moving, and would allow the kids to be together for one last time. Our wives decided to stay home to organize the packing and spend some quiet time together to say goodbye.

For us, camping has always been a back-to-basics experience. We pack in all food and supplies to our remote site and take out trash and whatever is not consumed. For toilets, we dig holes with entrenching shovels and cover our traces. We teach our kids respect and responsibility in the forest. And we teach them to have a good time.

During the three-day weekend trip, we fished and cooked kielbasa, hot dogs and marshmallows over an open fire. We pitched our tents near the tip of a small peninsula jutting into Clarks Hill Lake, where red clay beaches rimmed our site. We scoured the water's edge for mussel shells and arrowheads and skipped sleek stones on the water. The days were clear and cool, with high blue skies and wisps of moving clouds. Although the nights were cold, the weekend was as perfect as we could have hoped for.

The kids ran from one thing to the next with abandon, one minute scavenging wood for a fire, and the next returning breathlessly to tell us they had spotted a deer. At night, the tall pines sawed in the wind as my friend, whom I'll refer to as Rusty, melted aluminum cans in the campfire using a tin can as a crucible. His crude alchemy and the sudden sense of the world as laboratory lighted our imaginations as he poured the quicksilver-like liquid over the rocks ringing the fire. The kids grew excited and impatient, studying the metal-coated rocks and waiting for the aluminum to cool into odd-shaped medallions they salvaged as mementoes.

Later, after the kids had gone to bed in their tent and the cold descended, Rusty and I sat in our camp chairs, having a beer and warming our boots a little too close to the fire. I still wear that pair of Wolverines with the half-melted soles. And every time I put them on, I think of what happened when we returned from that weekend and how it changed all of our lives.

As usual during the trip, we took several photos. Because I forgot my digital camera, I bought a disposable camera at a gas station on the way to the campground. I took pictures of the kids using sticks to beat on old bottles and cans and logs as musical instruments. I took a few of my youngest daughter, Eliza, then age 3, skinny-dipping in the lake, and my son, Noah, then age 8, swimming in the lake in his underwear, and another of Noah naked, hamming it up while using a long stick to hold his underwear over the fire to dry. Finally, I took a photo of everyone, as was our camping tradition, peeing on the ashes of the fire to put it out for the last time. We also let the kids take photos of their own.

When we returned on Sunday, I forgot the throwaway camera and Rusty found it in his car. He gave it to his wife, whom I'll call Janet, to get developed, and she dropped it off the next day with two other rolls of film at a local Eckerd drugstore. On Tuesday, when she returned to pick up the film, she was approached by two officers from the Savannah Police Department. They told her they had been called by Eckerd due to "questionable photos."

One officer told Janet "there were pictures of little kids running around with no clothes on, pictures of minors drinking alcohol," she recounted for me in an e-mail. "I asked to see the pictures and was told I couldn't. I explained there must be a mistake. I was kind of laughing, you know, 'Come on guys. There must be an explanation. This is crazy. Let me see the pictures.' The officer told me that he personally did not find [the photos] offensive and that he had camped himself as a kid and knows what goes on." But the officer also told Janet that "because Eckerd's had called them and that because there were pictures of children naked, genitalia and alcohol, they would have to investigate."

Janet asked the photo lab clerk what was on the photos and the clerk "replied very seriously that they were bad, that there was one that looked like a child's head had been cut off, one with children drinking beer and pictures of naked kids." As she drove to her house, Janet said, "I was in shock and felt sick to the pit of my stomach and was trying to process all of it." She called my wife, who was driving home, and explained what had happened. Sensing how bad this might become, my wife pulled her car to the side of the road and fought the urge to throw up.

Neither my wife nor I, Rusty nor Janet has a criminal record of any sort. Yet over the next several weeks, the Savannah Police Department and the Department of Family and Child Services (DFCS) investigated us for "child pornography" and then "sexual exploitation of a minor." We suffered the embarrassment of having DFCS interview our family, friends, employers and our children's teachers, asking them whether we were suitable parents and what kind of relationship we had with our kids.

During that time, my wife and I, our children and friends, lived in a kind of suspended animation, a limbo of unreality where our privacy was invaded and we were stripped of our sense of dignity and seemingly our rights. To be accused unjustly of any crime is a terrible thing. But to be accused of using your own children for pornographic purposes or sexual exploitation bears a special taint because no matter how highly people think of you, they don't know you in your most intimate moments, which forever leaves you open to suspicion.

Being investigated for child pornography is so grave that people might assume it has to be based in fact. And yet I would learn, as so many other horrified parents have, that it can begin simply by somebody picking up the phone. "It's not going to be a big deal," Rusty told my wife, not long after we all heard the news. But after Rusty's initial visit to the police station to explain the photos to the officers, our optimism began to wane. "It was evident the police did not view us as innocent until proven guilty," Rusty told me in a recent e-mail. "I sought out the officer in charge of the unit that investigates these 'crimes,' and when he finally agreed to meet with me he was rude, unprofessional, and very accusatory before hearing from anyone involved."

The police, however, didn't file any charges against us. But they had digitized six of the photos and sent copies to DFCS for further investigation, which is standard practice in such cases. The officers wouldn't let Rusty see any of the photos in the station, and so we had no idea what was on them, as we had allowed the kids to take photos of their own. One of the photos, an officer said, showed a child drinking beer.

After our case was turned over to DFCS, we began what seemed like an excruciatingly long period of waiting to hear what would come next. As the days ticked by, Janet told me, "It was impossible for me to function, concentrate or focus on work. I couldn't eat, felt sick and scared." My wife and I began to question even our routine judgment because of a sudden awareness of being observed by some unseen entity that seemed everywhere and nowhere at once. A hug or a quick goodnight kiss with our little girls and boy suddenly seemed questionable. Were my hands in the wrong place? Did that kiss on the corner of the lips of my 3-year-old look more than merely innocent to someone? A pat on the bum as our kids ran past suddenly seemed dangerous through our second-guessing, suddenly all-critical eye.

Each intimate moment entailed a profound searching, an almost paralytic invasion of our deepest privacy. We began to observe ourselves until each moment became one long scrutiny and the pressure it created in our daily lives grew and grew. We feared that if we were found guilty, our children would be taken away and put in a foster home. We worried about my wife's new job in France because we might have to stay in the U.S. to fight any charges. Everything was pure assumption because DFCS didn't communicate at all and so we were left to imagine the worst.

Our friend Rusty stood to lose his prominent job in government, which he had held for years, simply from the appearances of the investigation. "I waited in constant anxiety of the wildfire of whispers about my arrest for being a child pornographer, molester or worse," he said. "It was terrifying."

At this point, our children, who were already stressed by the upcoming move and leaving their schools and friends, were unaware of what was happening. Like Janet and Rusty, we tried to keep it that way by not discussing the case around them. But our kids knew by our blank stares and depressed demeanor that something was seriously wrong. As the pressure grew, my wife and I began to lose our tempers more often over small, simple things. I would explode when my daughter spilled a glass of Juicy Juice at the dinner table or overreact and deny everything when the kids would ask us if there was something wrong. And then I would be overcome with guilt and shame at my inability to take control what was happening to us.

At night, my wife and I lay side by side in bed in the darkness, staring up into the ceiling, unable any longer to find words in the face of the vast, voidlike possibility of losing our children based on pure accusation. It was a secret too painful to keep but impossible to talk about to anyone else. We felt ashamed simply by association with the charge. As a journalist, I have lived for weeks in terrible conditions in war refugee camps and been under fire on the battlefield. But those weeks of waiting and wondering what would happen to our family were by far the most stressful I have ever experienced.

On the advice of my wife's mother, a former Florida public utilities commissioner, we contacted Mills Fleming, a local lawyer who was also a childhood friend of my wife. We needed expert help navigating the accusations. He told us that when he contacted the Office of Child Protection at the Chatham Department of Family and Children Services, the agency was surprised and annoyed that we had retained a lawyer. We were shocked it wasn't routine.

But that was the least of his revelations. We soon discovered that we had no right to retain a lawyer on our children's behalf. DFCS would become protector of our children and judge as to the validity of the charges against us. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty had been turned on its head: the burden had been placed on us, not the legal system, to prove our innocence. Our most basic right and instinct as parents -- to protect our children -- had been usurped by a single accusation.

Over the next few weeks, our only communication with DFCS was through Mills. He told us the agency would call on Thanksgiving and announce what they were going to do about our case. We had planned to leave for the long weekend but stayed home and waited for word from DFCS. They never called.

Afterward, I spent the days taking the kids off to school and preparing the house, climbing up nearly three stories on a ladder to paint. At times I became so lost in an absorbing daydream of sorting through the events that I almost stepped right off the ladder. Terrified at my complete lack of awareness, I would force myself to focus. I would dip my brush into the paint and drift off into the possibility of what might happen if a police officer or sheriff's deputy appeared at our front door with papers to take our children. As I stroked the brush along the boards, I became lost in intricate, heated conversations that led to arguments that devolved into helpless anger. We had no understanding of the process and the DFCS bureaucracy seemed some large, amorphous beast threatening us from just beyond our view.

I began to feel dangerously angry. When my anger and fear were such that I was having difficulty coping, I called my brother in North Carolina, who knew nothing about the charges. He is two years older than I am and we have always been close. I thought he might help me put things into some sort of perspective. I wanted to call him numerous times but I hesitated because of my shame. I wanted to solve this on my own.

But now I felt I was starting to come apart and feared I might do something that could wind me up in jail. I had no choice but to call. But he wasn't home and when his answering machine came on, the sudden realization of what was happening to me, and the reason I was reaching out to him, caused me to simply break down and cry. I hung up without leaving a message and he told me later that from the crying on the phone, he was certain someone close to us had died. As Christmas approached, our lawyer felt that the DFCS investigation into sexual exploitation of a minor was running aground because the agency began airing the possibility of charging us with a lesser crime. Now they wanted to hit us with "endangerment of a child," the result of letting the kids be near an open campfire. The suggestion seemed absurd, given that nearly every weekend of the year, parents across the country go camping with their children and roast marshmallows over an open fire. My wife, our friends and I felt that DFCS was on a fishing expedition, but one with potentially dangerous consequences.

The agency had requested to interview our children at the Children’s Advocacy Center, a safe haven used for questioning children who have been sexually or physically abused, or have witnessed violence. But we resisted because we were not allowed to have a lawyer present and we had heard horror stories from teachers who had witnessed sessions of children being fed leading questions and being directed what to answer by caseworkers. We requested that any interviews be taped. DFCS relented and switched the meeting to the Office of Child Protection.

The change in venue and charge against us was seen by our lawyer as a stand-down. He felt DFCS realized it had a weak case and the interviews were essentially a procedural hoop the caseworker had to jump through to satisfy bureaucratic demands in order to exit the case. I was angry at what appeared to be an absurd game with our lives. But Mills told me I had to get a grip because my anger could undermine our case. Although I heard him, acting accordingly was another matter.

Finally one weekday afternoon, my wife and I, our friends and our kids, convened at the Office of Child Protection of DFCS to be interviewed. We had still not been charged with anything and the investigation remained open-ended. When I picked the kids up from school, I explained on the drive back where we were going and why. I struggled because while I wanted them to know everything that was stake, I didn't want to frighten them. They were full of questions. They wanted to know who these people were, why they wanted to talk about our camping trip and what kind of questions they would ask. The questions were the same ones I had myself and yet hearing the children pose them brought back all the absurdity of the situation and my anger quickly surfaced. I blurted out, "I don't know! I don't know! But these people can take you away from us!"

"They can take us away?" one of them asked.

"I don't know!" I yelled. "I don't know anything!" And when I looked in the rearview mirror I could see tears running down their faces as they began to cry.

The Office of Child Protection was housed in a new building, recently relocated from downtown Savannah into a poor neighborhood. Directly across the street was Hitch Village, one of the city's most notorious housing projects in a city that in several recent years has been ranked among the most dangerous metropolitan areas in the country. As we stepped into the elevator -- all dressed in our best, all combed and neat because we knew now how much appearances mattered -- our families suddenly seemed so vulnerable.

The waiting room was neat and sterile and empty except for us. No window. No attendant. No one to tell us what to do or expect. We weren't even sure if we were in the right place. But after a moment we decided to sit in the chairs that lined the walls, a surveillance camera with its wide-angle lens staring down on us. Magnetic strip readers were mounted beside each door along the hallways and from time to time someone would emerge from one door, slide their card through a reader on another and quickly disappear into it. I was struggling to find some calm and balance, but I didn't trust anyone's judgment anymore and was seething at this moment so lacking in logic.

When our caseworker, Patricia Oney, finally appeared, the amorphous bureaucracy that for weeks had haunted us suddenly had a face. That she appeared gentle with the kids and intelligent and caring gave me a small ray of hope. She explained that we would go one at a time, beginning with the kids, and she and our oldest daughter, Sophie, disappeared into the maze of cubicles hidden behind the card-reading doors. As we were soon to learn ourselves, the interviews were not recorded on video or tape.

Sophie has a keen memory for details and when she returned, and our son went in, she recounted the questions that had been posed. They ranged from whether she could distinguish between "good touch" and "bad touch" to whether, after the kids went to bed while camping, the fathers made sounds outside the tent that, in the words of my daughter, "sounded like things they shouldn't do."

When our son returned, he didn't want to talk about what happened except to question why he was being asked about good touching and bad touching. One after another the kids went in. Eliza, our 3-year-old, had wispy, bright-blond hair. As she disappeared behind the door, I couldn't help wondering what it was they might ask her and, given what had happened so far, how it might be construed. We sat in the waiting room, trying to occupy the remaining kids while waiting. There was a gravity to the moment that the children were aware of and everyone was mostly quiet. As each of the kids reappeared from their interviews, they seemed relieved.

When my turn came, I followed Oney back to a cubicle where an assistant sat with pad in hand. As we sat down and began to talk, the assistant seemed to take notes. But as it went along, I noticed she hardly wrote anything. Though I was tempted to call her on it because it seemed absurd that this might become the official record, I didn't want to antagonize them and remembered the lawyer's intuition that DFCS was looking for a way out. But I was thinking about how accurately she had noted what the children had said.

Oney's main concern seemed not to be with the photos or with our behavior as parents, but rather if I had any questions about what had happened and about the process as a whole. Although I had nothing but questions, I refrained from asking them. I wanted to put the camping trip in context. Because the police had only sent six photos to DFCS, and not the rest of the roll, Oney had never gotten the full story.

Also, by now, I had seen all of the photos, including the six in question, as the police had allowed Rusty to take them home with him. There were explanations for each one. The photo of a child whose head had been "cut off" was simply one where a child's head fell outside the border. The photo of a child drinking beer was actually one of Rusty's daughter carrying a broken beer bottle she had found and planned to put into her makeshift xylophone.

I began explaining to Oney that by camping, our aim was to take our kids out of their normal routine and to teach them to appreciate not only nature, but the luxuries our daily life afforded. As I told her that we dug holes for latrines and covered our traces, Oney, who said she had never been camping, seemed genuinely surprised. When she asked me about the danger of my son drying his wet pants with a stick over an open fire, I explained that when I took the picture, I was no more than a few feet away and he was safe.

As I felt my anger rising, I told her I couldn't believe anybody would find a photograph of a 3-year-old making her way into a lake to skinny-dip titillating. I had wiped my daughter's bottom thousands of times, and for me that photo was nothing more than trying to capture a fond memory. I acknowledged the difficulty and necessity of her job, but explained that for me this was clearly a case of the system gone astray, and I was angry that it had gone as far as it had.

Oney responded by asking for the names of friends, family, employers, teachers and any others she might interview to discern what type of people and parents we were. We decided it was best to call everyone in advance so they would know to expect a call. I watched my wife break down and cry on the phone with one of our children's teachers, ashamed at having to explain why DFCS would be calling.

Janet felt the same way. "I was so embarrassed having to tell [my youngest daughter's] teacher," she wrote. "I was the room mother for the class, did lots of things with all the kids and was very involved at school." "Can you imagine telling your boss, 'I'm being investigated for child pornography and child endangerment?'" Rusty wrote. "This was incredibly embarrassing and increased my fears this would get out beyond our control."

Oney had told me she would be paying a visit to our house. Our lawyer said she could look anywhere -- in our drawers, closets, attic -- without a warrant or without specifically stating what she was looking for. So before she came, we scoured the house top to bottom, looking for anything that might arouse her suspicion or interest.

On the mantel in our living room was a handmade book of photos done by a friend who is a professional photographer. Besides mundane photos of the kids, it contained a few of my wife in the nude when she was several months pregnant with Eliza. We hid it. I scanned the book titles on the shelves, never having thought until now of their having questionable contents. On the refrigerator, we had 1950s-style magnets with humorous sketches of a man holding up a mug and saying, "Beer: Makes you see double and feel single," and another of a man holding up a condom and saying, "I'm just two people short of a ménage à trois." They had been given to us years before as a gag gift from a friend. We hid them. We realized we no idea what could be deemed unfit. My wife was born in Haiti and she had a beaded voodoo flag hanging up in our room. I took it down.

Janet and Rusty went through the same nerve-wracking process. On the day Oney was to show up at their house, Janet noticed her neighbor's 3-year-old son playing naked on the swing set in their yard. Janet was so paranoid that Oney would show up right then, "that I panicked, went to the neighbor, and told her that I was having a visit from DFCS and could she please remove her naked son from my yard. I was upset that I was put in the situation that I had to tell her."

My wife and I decided, given my anger at the situation, it was best that I not be there during our home visit. So I drove around the neighborhood and sat in the car until Oney left. In the end, she didn't even search the house. She told my wife the investigation was closed, that the case against us was unsubstantiated and no further action would be taken. My wife said Oney seemed apologetic but offered no apology. The same scenario was played out at Janet and Rusty's house. Despite the fact that the case was unsubstantiated, a record of the accusation and ensuing investigation will be kept on file for three years -- in case, we were told by our lawyer, other complaints should be filed against us. Our children's records will show the incident until they are 21 years old. Shortly after our case ended, we moved to France and I slipped into a depression. Perhaps it was something akin to the helplessness that victims feel. Or perhaps it resulted from suddenly being released from the constant and intense pressures of moving, combined with the fear and anger we had been feeling for so long. But I felt violated and exposed and vulnerable. In the mornings, we would awake and prepare our children and then hurry them to school. And on many days when I returned home, instead of getting to work writing I would go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet and cry uncontrollably.

For months, I felt as though I was moving almost unconsciously through daily life, numb to the world and yet overly sensitive to everything. Finally one day, six months later, unable to bear the sense of helplessness and unjustified shame about what happened to us, I sat down at the computer and began to write about it. And I began to feel something shift inside me, a subtle but distinct change from a sense of powerlessness to taking back some sort of control of our lives. I wrote in a fury, and when I sent the story to my wife, she sat in her office and cried. I sent it to our friends who had gone through this with us. Although seven months had passed, they still had not come to terms with what had happened. Rusty's boss had been understanding, but they said their children still talked about it in the most unexpected moments. "My youngest daughter will say, 'Why did they think that, Mommy?'" Janet said. "'Why did they think we were drinking beer and doing things wrong?'"

I set out to answer those kinds of question myself. As I did, I discovered there are simply no uniform standards for police officers, teachers, child-care workers -- or photo lab employees -- to tell lewd and illegal photos from harmless family pictures.

Following passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, established in 1974, states established laws that required police, lawyers, social and medical personnel to make "good faith" reports of perceived child abuse or neglect. It is an important law, having arisen out of the fact that one in 10 children brought to hospital emergency rooms were victims of physical abuse. But the law, under which child pornography falls, contains no provision for training personnel to identify abuse or pornographic photos. As a result, false and damning allegations have risen by the thousands in the past three decades. In fact, in most states it's a misdemeanor for law enforcement officers and health providers not to report.

In Georgia, state law defines sexual exploitation of a minor, which includes pornography, as "knowingly to employ, use, persuade, induce, entice, or coerce any minor to engage in ... any sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual medium depicting such conduct." Yes, no charges were filed against us. But that somebody could interpret our camping photos as knowingly pornographic, and cause the state to investigate us for intending to exploit our children, was what was so agonizing.

Dr. Douglas Besharov, a child abuse expert at the Maryland School of Public Affairs, and the first director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, estimates that out of the nearly 3 million child abuse reports made every year, seven in 10 of them are without merit. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 60 percent of child abuse or neglect reports are "unsubstantiated." While there are no separate statistics concerning child pornography, there have been dozens of cases similar to ours documented in recent years.

For instance, in Dallas in 2003, as the result of a complaint by an Eckerd drugstore employee, a 33-year-old woman was charged with "sexual performance of a child," a second-degree felony punishable by 20 years in prison, based on a picture of her breast-feeding her 1-year-old son. Although the district attorney dropped the charges in the case, the parents had to fight for weeks to get their two children back from the Dallas County Child Protective Services.

I realize no one would argue with sincere efforts to protect children from harm. As a parent, I know all too well the real dangers our kids face on a daily basis and I applaud any efforts to make their world a safer place. But our experience underscores the harm that is being inflicted on children and parents by investigations based on uninformed definitions of pornography or abuse.

"If we get down to the bottom line, there is no clear-cut definition," said Dean Tong, who wrote "Elusive Innocence, Survival Guide for the Falsely Accused," after being jailed and then spending 10 years and $150,000 to clear himself of abusing his young daughter. Now a forensic consultant in thousands of false-accusation cases across the country, Tong told me that even most police officers are not well enough trained to interpret the law, let alone photo lab employees. Tong said that when facing the slightest doubt, law enforcement officers "err on the side of the child," noting the potential results: "I see families stripped and ripped apart in the middle of the night."

I called Lt. Harry Trawick of the newly consolidated Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department to ask about my own case. He is the former head of the Special Victims Unit, which deals with child pornography. "A lot of times [photo lab employees] don't know what pornography is," he told me. Although he wouldn't comment on any specific case, Trawick said the department is "fairly aggressive" in investigating reports of child pornography and that, "generally, our officers are going to act with an abundance of caution" in favor of protecting the rights of children. He said the department has made a number of important convictions based on reports from photo labs. He added that he's unaware of any training programs that photo lab employees are required to undergo to identify child pornography and said the employees often call the Special Victims Unit for an explanation of the law.

But Helene Bisson, director of public relations for the Jean Coutu Group, which operates the Rhode Island-based Brooks/Eckerd drugstores, told me that employees had "videos we have to view and information sessions," though she wouldn't specify the depth of training involved. "As far as Eckerd's is concerned we do have very strict guidelines," she said. "It's Eckerd policy to report all incidents of child abuse and child pornography."

"With all due respect, they don't have a freaking clue," said Tong. "I'm not saying most of these cases are witch hunts," he said. It's just that without strict guidelines for identifying child pornography, photo lab employees must resort to "their subjective discretion and opinion," and that's the root of the problem. "If we required the same concern for accuracy in reporting child abuse as other types of crimes, we would see far fewer innocent people falsely persecuted," Tong has written. At the very least, a pair of trained legal eyes -- either those of a lawyer or a public official with specific expertise in child pornography -- should look at the evidence and make an informed decision before starting this demeaning, costly and painful process.

Besharov also said that the current law should be amended to grant immunity to those who in good faith deem a situation not to be child abuse or pornography. That way, those who report cases of abuse of questionable merit, simply to err on the side of mandatory reporting laws, might feel less pressure to do so. In our case, maybe the responding officer, who initially commented that he didn't find the pictures pornographic, would have dismissed the case at the drugstore and not reported us to child services.

It has been over a year and a half since the day we got the call from Janet. Time has finally granted me some distance from the terrible ordeal, and my wife and I have become lost in the immediate demands of life in another language and culture. We live in a small village of about 400 people, what a French friend jokingly refers to as the "bled," the Moroccan-Arabic word for the "boondocks." The surrounding countryside is mostly farmland and in the searing summer heat the air smells of rosemary and lavender. The fall brings out the truffle hunters and wild boar. My wife's commute to work is about two minutes up a steep, stone-paved street that has been worn shiny by centuries of foot traffic. From her office perch high up on the hillside, you can look out across the cherry orchards covering the valley and hear the shouts of the 30 or so children playing in the village schoolyard below. Our kids among them.

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A great tutorial on installing an Apache (and all the trimmings) webserver on your own computer, and what benefits it brings. It's designed for people who wouldn't normally consider doing it, and wouldn't know where to start.

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Probably the worlds most secure instant messenger

CSpace is a open source instant messenger which works on "peer to peer" technology. (this means it does not connect via a global server) CSpace supports text chat, file transfer and remote desktop. All users create 2048-bit RSA keys for themselves, a user is uniquely identified by his RSA public key. This is the definition of a secure IM

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How to tweak Windows XP for gaming

Here are some great tips on how to tweak Windows XP for video gaming.

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Ever wondered what that song In that commercial was?

Now you can find out! This website has the song title to many commercials from 1996-2006.

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Exclusive Call of Duty 3 gameplay video

GameVideos has an actual gameplay video taken from the highly anticipated WWII Call of Duty 3, for both of the next-gen consoles, pc and wii. I can't wait to try that out myself; enjoy!

Did your cellphone get wet? Throw it in the oven.

Did you jump into a pool by accident? Maybe putting your cell phone in the oven at 50 degrees celsius or 125 degrees fahrenheit. for five hours may make your wet cellphone work again.

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Amazing photographs of water

A professional photographer takes beautiful pictures of water in many forms.

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38 Full Length Movies On YouTube

This index includes Ace Ventura, The Chronicles of Narnia, City of God, The Crow, Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings (1 & 2), The Omen, The Rock, Top Gun, Underworld: Evolution, and more.

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Massive Pure Pwnage update

Updates on the Pure Pwnage World of Warcraft Guild, United Kingdom Fan meet, subtitles for episode 11, Xfire footage with the crew, new fan pics, mailbag update, and a new comic page.

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A Conversation with an MSN Encarta Bot

Below is an actual conversation a user had with the new MSN Encarta bot with the fancy AI...

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Microsoft watches your IM conversations.

Microsoft filters out any MSN/ Windows live messenger messages containing "download.php" or "gallery.php". The messages are silently discarded without any indication being given that they have been blocked. To see a list of legitimate URLs that are now unable to be sent through MSN, put allintitle:download.php into Google. Many are Free Software downloads.

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Supreme Court decision could expose Bush to war crimes prosecution

"The real blockbuster in the Hamdan decision is the court's holding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict with Al Qaeda - a holding that makes high-ranking Bush administration officials potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes Act."

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Crack Windows account passwords

Ophcrack is the fastest Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003 password cracker. Download, burn and crack, it's as easy as that. Ophrack 2.1 comes with a GTK+ Graphical User Interface and runs on Windows as well as on Linux.

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Is Bush a War Criminal Due to Supreme Court Hamdan Ruling?

Andrew Sullivan takes a moment to consider this pressing quesion: Is our president a war criminal?

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PS2 Vs. PS3 Side by side graphics display.

A side by side view of how much more realistic next generation PS3 graphics are compared to last generation PS2. NBA Live 2007 is the game of choice to show new features and some pretty cool physics.

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Blizzard Allows Character Transfers in World of Warcraft for 25US$

"The Paid Character Transfer feature allows you to move characters to other realms and even from one account where you are the subscriber to another account where you are the subscriber, subject to certain restrictions. The cost of each paid character transfer is $25.00 USD per character."

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Find things in google that you shouldn't be able to.

This site explains some google searches that will let you find things such as passwords, vulnerabilities, printers, cameras, etc.

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Google the ISP with 2^96 IPv6 addresses

Google has 79 billion billion billion IPv6 addresses, is buying up massive amounts of dark fiber, and building a massive data center. Just what is Google up to?

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Computer kept together with Coathangers

Yes! this is a picture of all the components of a working computer suspended and held together in a hanging style!

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New Windows Vista mouse cursors

Download the new Windows Vista mouse cursors. Works excellent under Windows XP, and are alpha blended. comes with a readme.txt file in english that explains how to use them.

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Referees chief says standard best ever at World Cup

The head of FIFA's Referees Committee denied accusations of poor officiating at the World Cup finals on Friday saying the standard had never been higher.

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Amazing art talent from a 11 year old girl

A internationally recognized 11-year-old prodigy, considered the only known child binary genius, in both realist painting and poetry. Selected as 1 of 20 most accomplished visual artists in the world. Started at age 4, make sure you check out the gallery!


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20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA

80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S, and the vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

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Video of George Bush Singing "Sunday Bloody Sunday"

Take clips from speeches, add audio and video editing, and you have a hilarious music video. If the message of the sond wasn't entirely in opposition to Bush, this could almost make you like him

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Reinstall Windows XP and keep your files without moving them off your drive

This how-to will demonstrate how to keep all of your data while reinstalling Windows without copying it off of your hard drive. This will only work if you have a Windows XP CD or a real source to install it from, NOT a manufactures "Restore CD" which reloads all the junk it came with.

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Beijing cracks down on Disco music, links it to drug use.

Beijing Police have written up a ''responsibility agreement'' that is used to strongly encourage nightclubs and karaoke bars to delete Disco, dance music and " ''Other forms of vulgar entertainment" from karaoke machines in private rooms.'' Police are also planning random drug tests for employees of night clubs.

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Bill Gates is learning from modded Xbox systems

It looks like Bill Gates may be paying close attention to the modding scene. Here's a story about him being impressed by a modded Xbox and everything it could do.

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The 30 Best Games for the Summer

Thirty titles that could keep the cash tills ringing through the long hot months.

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Xfire E3 Video: Episode 2 - FPS Shootout

Follow Ezra, Terran and Johnny of Rufus Cubed around the E3 floor as they check out the latest FPS offerings. This video also features two original songs, "Booth Babes" and "Headshot Newbie Blues," and a cameo appearance from a special internet superstar.

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MediaCoder - A universal audio/video transcoder

MediaCoder is a free universal audio/video batch transcoder, putting together a lot of excellent audio/video codecs and tools from the open source community into an all-in-one solution, capable of transcoding among different audio/video formats such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, AAC+/Parametric Stereo, DivX, Xvid, MusePack, WMA, QuickTime, and RealAudio.

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Dvorak: the Golden Age of the Internet, enjoy it while you can

"How many people realize that we're living in a golden age, the Golden Age of the Internet? It won't last; golden ages never do. Some of it will remain, but there's evidence that much of it is headed for the trash heap of history."

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