Um, what? And by that I mean to say, What the fuck?:

During a panel discussion at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, AT&T’s top lobbyist said the company was ready to implement new technologies that would allow it to inspect and filter Web traffic....

According to public statements, their rationale for playing traffic cop is to ferret out pirated content: sniffing through our digital packets for material that infringe on copyright.

But the technology can be used for other purposes, and the phone giant has shown that it has no qualms invading our communications to hand over our private records to government, or censor speech or block service “without prior notice and for any reason or no reason.”...

AT&T has also touted plans to become gatekeepers to the Web with public relations bromides about “shaping” Web traffic to better serve the needs of an evolving Internet.

Who the hell died and put AT&T in charge of deciding who should see what on the Internet?

UPDATE: AT&T calls editing Pearl Jam "an error." Right.

In case you thought you could trust globocorps to, you know, not fuck with the freedom of the Internet, newsflash: you were wrong:

Over the weekend AT&T gave us a glimpse of their plans for the Web when they censored a Pearl Jam performance that didn't meet their standard of "Internet freedom."

During the live Lollapalooza Webcast of a concert by the Seattle-based super-group, the telco giant muted lead singer Eddie Vedder just as he launched into a lyric against President George Bush. The lines -- "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "George Bush find yourself another home" were somehow lost in the mix.

"What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band," Pearl Jam band members stated after the incident in a release that urged people to take action.

There’s all sorts of links to more info on the dangers of letting the likes of AT&T control the Internet, and what we can do to stop it, at Huffington Post.

(Technorati tags: AT&T, Pearl Jam, net neutrality)

When a dictator tries to shut down the voice of the people, the people take the voice online:

You may recall my speaking of the hilarious NYC Blogger Summit I attended back in February (detailed here and here). One of the ringmasters that night was Sree Sreenivasan, dean of students and professor at Columbia Journalism School, who was shockingly uninformed about this thing called the Intertubes. And yet he is someone who is constantly called up to pontificate on “new media.” Jane at Firedoglake points out a Chicago Sun-Times article that couldn’t be more clueless about blogs, bloggers, and blogging. The money quote is from Sreenivasan:

Something about Rodney McKay on last night’s episode of Stargate Atlantis, “The Tao of Rodney,” made me think of LOLcats, which I can waste hours surfing and snorting Diet Dr Pepper out my nose at. It might be because Rodney is kinda like a cat himself, so adorably arrogant. Or just because I know David Hewlett is a big ol’ dork, too, and might think LOL Rodney is a funny mashup.

So I give you LOL Rodney:

(Screencaps from Gateworld.)

(Technorati tags: Stargate Atlantis, Rodney McKay, David Hewlett, LOLcats, LOL Rodney)

I was at my brother Ken’s place last night, and we were flipping around the tube, and we came across The Empire Strikes Back on one of the HBO channels. Shockingly, Ken had not heard of the saga of the Bespin Ice Cream Guy, so after Bespin Ice Cream Guy made his brief appearance, we Googled him, so I could show Ken the hilarious action figure fans have developed.

BICG Central seems to revolve around these two sites:

http://www.geocities.com/ocb75/
http://www.thecustomalliance.com/curto/willrow.asp

Look at those URLs. My shock at discovering Ken’s lack of exposure to BICG’s saga was nothing compared to learning that no one has registered any of these domains:

bespinicecream.com
bespinicecreamguy.com
bespinicecreamcompany.com
bespinberryblast.com
willrowhood.com

So I challenge geeks to steal these domains, and create a worthy tribute to one of Cloud City’s bravest and more ingenious citizens.

(Technorati tags: Bespin ice cream guy, unregistered domain names)

So I was at this “blogger summit” hosted by WNBC (the local NBC affiliate) here in NYC on Wednesday night. I figured it’d be a chance for a free drink and some free food and networking with other members of the rising hegemony of alternative noncorporate media types. It was only once I actually arrived at NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Center -- aka GE’s evil urban lair -- and met up with some blogging friends and we all started wondering just why the hell NBC had called us all together that I started to get a hinky feeling.

Also: it turned out there was no booze. That’s never a good sign.

My buddy Gabriel Shanks of Modern Fabulosity has the lowdown -- honestly, he says absolutely everything I wanted to say about this ridiculous shindig, so there’s no need to repeat it: just go read his reaction to the event. Then come back here.

I look back at the appallingly low number of postings here lately and all I can think is, Ugh. But marketing guru Eric Kintz suggests that maybe I’ve been ugh-ing needlessly. Maybe it’s not so bad if I’m not posting daily, as I’d like to be:

"Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging....

Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?

Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.

Oh, but when you read his 10 reasons, a whole bunch of them turn out to be variations on “You shouldn’t post stuff just for the sake of posting, cuz it’ll be crap.” Unfortunately, I’ve got lots of really deep and meaningful things to say -- I just don’t have time to say them. If only I could be one of Nancy Kress’s Sleepless, I’d get so much more done...

Wow:

More than one billion people in the world have access to the Internet, with a quarter of them with broadband, or high-speed connections, according to a survey.

The report by the firm eMarketer said the milestone of one billion was reached in late 2005, and that nearly 250 million households had broadband connections.

The firm estimates that of these people, 845 million use the Internet regularly.

I know this means that the vast majority of the people on the planet still do not have access to the Internet -- as well as other such coolnessess as clean drinking water and reliable birth control -- but still: a billion people. A billion people interconnected. It’s not like the moment, whenever it was, when a billion people first had access to a telephone. That represented potential connection: you could, theoretically, call anybody else who had a phone, but for the connection thing to work, in a culturally meaningful way as well as in a technical way, you needed to have a reason to call someone as much as you needed the number at which to reach him or her. You had to already know with whom you wanted to communicate and what good they might do you -- from the good of calling a distant loved one just to hear the sound of his or her voice to the good of, oh, calling a newspaper reporter to blow the whistle on some corporate or governmental malfeasance -- in order for the social exchange to be achieved. Calling a number at random and attempting to communicate with whomever answered was unlikely to do much for you, and would probably piss off the recipient of such a call if he or she were unwilling to speak with you, which would probably be the case.

Geeks are a diverse lot, so making generalizations is always tricky, but I think maybe it’s safe to say that one attribute that unifies geeks is a love of books. Maybe not all the same books -- maybe one guy collects tons of comic books and someone else likes 18th-century French poetry and that girl over there, she’s into contemporary murder mysteries and yet another reader simply must own every science fiction novel ever published in Eastern Europe. Bibliophiles are by definition geeks, and maybe booklovers in ancient times were the original geeks. And part of what geekiness is today is a desire to look at the world from all sorts of angles, news ones as well as the tried-and-true, and what better way to do that than with books?

Me, my library was somewhat diminished by a poverty-induced selloff a few years back -- thank god for NYC’s Strand Bookstore and its bookbuying desk; I actually raised the rent one lean month by hauling in boxes and boxes of books. But it’s growing again, slowly, and the composition, subjectwise, hasn’t really changed much: lots of science (biology, psychology, physics), mythology (of the comparative type, mostly), history (a lot of fundamental-interconnectedness-of-all-things stuff), science fiction and fantasy, classics, a fair selection of children’s books (ones with aspects of the fantastic). Smatterings of all sorts of other things. I have a litmus test for new acquaintances visiting my apartment for the first time: the ones who say, “Wow, have you read all these books?” are the ones who might remain acquaintances but are unlikely to pass into the realm of “friend”; the ones who immediately go to the shelves, grunting approvingly while noting the spines, and ask to borrow a couple are the keepers.