Charles Cooper says "the blogosphere" needs to get real about the line between church and state.

My response: The tech blogosphere was invented because of the sloppy church-state line at CNet and other professional pubs. They're the last people who get to preach this particular gospel.

Inside the tech industry, we all know what's going on there. In private, no one is confused. They always take the side of big companies over small ones, even when it's ridiculous to do so. The reason -- big companies advertise, they pay their salaries. And the little ones are too little to make a difference. Even if their products are standard-setters. Do they look out for their readers or their bottom lines? Of course, they throw the readers under the bus (a metaphor that should be thrown under the bus, btw).

Further, there is no such thing as "the blogosphere" and there's no way for the lines to be anything other than what they are. Of course, individual bloggers can do something about it. And of course we all know who Cooper is talking about, Mike Arrington.

Now this is going to blow Mike away -- I'm going to defend him. Not because he's my friend, even though he is, but because he's doing a bunch of things right, and before everyone goes too far, let's understand what that is.

Mike doesn't tell bedtime stories, or mask his position behind vague words. He comes right out with it, and tells you he's pissed off, or to pound sand, or worse. Sometimes I can't believe the things he says, but at least he's not dancing around it, like some other people do. (More on that in a bit.)

Mike gets stories that CNet doesn't get, that no one else gets. Look at the piece he did on Mitch Kapor's product earlier today. Compare that against the nonsense that passes for tech news done by the pros. They put reporters on the stories who have no idea what they're writing about, and you can tell. Or old school guys who only quote their friends, and haven't found a new trend or product in years. All they know is that IBM and Microsoft are important and that little companies are not. So it's a long time before a CNet hack gets to tell Mike how to do his job, even if he does act as a mouthpiece for a crappy Microsoft campaign (I wish he wouldn't do that).

On the other hand, Mike says he values loyalty above all else, but he turns his back on his friends far too often, and doesn't call some people on their hypocrisy when he really should. If he's really a gunslinger, he needs to take it out of the holster a little more frequently, and aim it at some people who aren't such easy targets. There's a lot of footsy going on in Mike's world that never gets reported. Why did he have a shot at the Kapor story and I didn't? Who's afraid of me and why? Mike, how about writing that story? No it's not my personality, and yes, I do invent a lot of the things that your friends build on. I don't want a statue in Palo Alto, I'm just tired of you covering up for the hypocrites, taking their money and deals, and paying lip service to loyalty, yet not practicing it yourself. I want the doors to open wide, and the self-dealing in-breeding to stop. It's making it really hard to make progress. Too hard.

The fact is that it's a fucked up little industry, and everyone needs to clean house. There are some pockets of brightness, and we need to help those shine, and we also need to shine the light on the dirty practices that pay your bills, but hurt everyone else. That's creeping into what we used to call the blogosphere, and that's the scary thing. It's not that Mike needs to become more like CNet, it's that Mike is becoming too much like CNet.

Charles, Mike, back to you.

In May, the conservative magazine the American Spectator made the claim that Democratic Senators were interested in bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, an old FCC regulation that required broadcast media to be "balanced" in its coverage of political issues. The rule was suspended in 1987, as it was seen as arbitrary and difficult to enforce, not to mention the fact that it would seem to be a violation of the First Amendment (although this hasn't been tested in the courts). It now looks like the magazine's report was more or less correct, as Senator Dianne Feinstein said this weekend that a legislative remedy may be needed to counter the influence of right-wing talk radio, which she blamed for stymieing attempts to bring about immigration reform. Leaving one's political views aside, it's disturbing that a politician would want to regulate speech because of a single issue. As for talk radio influencing policy issues, it would seem that that's the whole point of politically-oriented speech. What's more, the whole fairness doctrine idea is a throwback to the days when radio broadcasters really did have a monopoly. These days, with so many options, ranging from internet radio stations to podcasts and satellite radio, it's easy enough to tune out, if you're not satisfied with the point of view that you're getting.

mrnomas writes "What's to blame for the declining CD sales? Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more 'safe' (read: crap) music while independent musicians are releasing online? Is it because iTunes is now the third largest music retailer in the country? Or is it just that CDs are becoming obsolete?" Quoting: "Forbes.com [ran] an article showing that CD sales are expected to be down 20% in 2008 (slightly higher than the 15% drop initially predicted). Why such a drop? What's truly happening is a gradual shift away from physical media to downloadable formats. What this indicates, so far, is that US sales of digital music will be growing at an estimated rate of 28% in 2008, however physical sales will drop even further, resulting in a net overall decline.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: ThinkGeek is selling this sweet-looking DIY video-game console kit for $200. If your kids are going to spend the summer indoors getting pasty, at least they can learn a trade:

Written by best-selling game development author Andre' LaMothe, the included book is your complete guide to developing games, graphics, and media applications for the Propeller Powered Hydra Game console. The book assumes you have only basic programming experience. It covers all aspects of the Propeller chip from its architecture to using the Propeller Tool IDE for programming in both Spin and assembly language, with numerous demo programs to use as starting points for your own games.

Included on the CD is all the source code and executables for all the included games, demos, tools and examples. Additionally, "Hydra Tiny BASIC" based on the "Tiny BASIC" specification originally published in "Dr. Dobb's Journal" in 1975 is included. With this classic version of BASIC you can write programs directly on the Hydra without the need for a PC! Simply load BASIC into the Hydra or on the included game cartridge and you are up and running with nothing more than your TV and keyboard.

Link (via Red Ferret)

Cory Doctorow: Boingo, a WiFi hotspot subscription service, has just rolled out flat-rate, worldwide WiFi roaming for $40/month. Boingo lets you login to other companies' WiFi hotspots all over the place (particularly in Europe, where the local tarrif can be through the roof -- one hotel I stayed in in Amsterdam charged €45 per 200 megabits of traffic). For some of these, Boingo subscribers have had to pay a hefty surcharge (it was more than $0.10/minute at the Paddington Hilton in London). With the new Boingo plan, it's one fee, everywhere.

I pay for a T-Mobile WiFi plan and it sucks. They charge gigantic roaming fees to use other T-Mobile WiFi hotspots around the world -- $0.14/minute in London's Starbucks! T-Mobile Italy charges US T-Mobile roamers more than they charge Telitalia roamers -- the company charges its own customers more than customers of the state-owned telco!

I've had a comp Boingo account for a couple months now and I've found it to be way more useful than my T-Mobile account. It works at more airports, hotels, coffee-shops, etc than T-Mobile does, by far. The only bummer was the roaming fees, and now that those are gone, this is a no-brainer for anyone who puts in a lot of road time. You can spend more than $40 on one night's WiFi in a hotel -- $40/month is totally worth it. Link (via Engadget)

teh_commodore writes "Scientific American is reporting that Google is now asking a Federal judge to extend the government's anti-trust oversight of Microsoft, specifically with regard to desktop search software. Microsoft had already agreed to modify Vista to allow rival desktop search engines, but Google says that this remedy will come too late — specifically, after (most of) the anti-trust agreement expires in November. What makes this political maneuver interesting is that Google went over the heads of the Department of Justice and US state regulators, who had found Microsoft's compromise acceptable, to appeal directly to the Federal judge overseeing the anti-trust settlement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've noted several times the disastrous mess that identity theft leaves its victims to clean up. The damage fraudsters do can have effects that linger on long after the standard post-data-leak offering of a year's free credit monitoring, particularly as credit bureaus don't make it easy to correct errors on credit reports and banks aren't always helpful. Payments News points to an interesting story from the SF Chronicle several days ago that describes how one identity thief was caught -- by her victim. The victim was in Starbucks one morning, and noticed a woman wearing a coat that looked exactly like one she'd seen in a security photo taken at a store when one of her credit cards was being used. She called 911 and chased the woman on her own for 45 minutes, then when a cop finally showed up, the thief was arrested. Given that more than six months had passed since the initial theft, it doesn't seem like the banks' investigators or the police were making much headway in their investigations, and without the victim's determination and a healthy bit of luck, it's hard to see the fraudster getting caught. Still, her conviction and subsequent sentencing aren't exactly impressive: a judge sentenced her to time already served of 44 days and gave her three years' probation. The fact that she was already on probation didn't really seem to stop her from committing identity theft in this case, so it's hard to be optimistic it will stop her in the future. With identity theft a problem that continues to grow, this tale is hardly confidence inspiring, and it's clear that much work needs to be done in both the prevention of identity theft, as well as the investigation and prosecution of those who perpetrate it.

Xeni Jardin: Snip from essay by David Barboza of the New York Times:

As an American journalist based in China, I knew there was a good chance that at some point I’d be detained for pursuing a story. I just never thought I’d be held hostage by a toy factory.

That’s what happened last Monday, when for nine hours I was held, along with a translator and a photographer, by the suppliers of the popular Thomas & Friends toy rail sets.

“You’ve intruded on our property,” one factory boss shouted at me. “Tell me, what exactly is the purpose of this visit?” When I answered that I had come to meet the maker of a toy that had recently been recalled in the United States because it contained lead paint, he suggested I was really a commercial spy intent on stealing the secrets to the factory’s toy manufacturing process.

“How do I know you’re really from The New York Times?” he said. “Anyone can fake a name card.”

Link (via Romenesko)

DaveAtFraud writes "Tanya Anderson, the single mother from Oregon previously sued by the RIAA — which dropped the case just before losing a summary judgement — is now suing the RIAA and their hired snoop Safenet for malicious prosecution. (Safenet was formerly known as MediaSentry.) Anderson is asserting claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. A reader at Groklaw has already picked up that she is seeking to have the RIAA forfeit the copyrights in question as part of the settlement (search the page for '18.6-7')."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin:

I kind of love the way the new stuff from M.I.A. looks -- sorta like mid-90s websites, word salad spam, Pac-Man, and Nigerian gangsta rap all rolled up and smoked as one. Her recently redone website induces excellent epilepsy.

In the photo above, she's chilling between takes at a video shoot for the new single, "Boyz," with a bestickered MacBook Pro. Snip from Obtusity blog:

Though it's hard to believe, M.I.A. has taken the visual themes of 2005's Arular (seen everywhere from the cover art to the video for "Galang") and created something even more gloriously epilepsy-inducing for sophomore LP Kala. The vibrant collage of neon colors and cheap special effects found in the promo for new single "Boyz" (as well as her fantastic website) is a homage to everything from 80's video games to the advertising and film culture of Nigeria, Southeast Asia and Jamaica. But it's also a completely singular vision, and one that is impossible to pin to any particular movement or region of the world.

Link to post which points to her new "Boyz" video, more behind-the-scenes stills here. Who shot the stills, I wonder? No credit on the website. (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

Reader comment: Chris Hutsul in Toronto says,

I too like MIA's new webiste. But I like art collective Paper Rodeo's better: Link.

As you can see, her's is a blatant copy.

Xeni Jardin:

Text: Jasmina Tešanovi?, June 19, 2006
Photos: Peace performance in Belgrade. Images courtesy Women in Black.

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Another one off to the Hague. One more of the last five indicted was arrested two days ago and delivered.

His name is Vlastimir Djordjevic and he is particularly famous for his efficiency in burying thousands of Albanian bodies in a secret mass grave just a dozen kilometers from the center of Belgrade.

The sinister designed efficiency has always puzzled me in the history of local warfare. We Serbs are a sloppy, easy going people, not to say boozy and work-shy. Besides, we lived for years on end under a communist regime with guaranteed salaries and social security, which much promoted our dolce far niente attitude. The Yugoslav army was big, like a second nation in a multiethnic nation.

Then all of a sudden the same placid army turns into a death squad which is second only to Nazis. The bodies were transported in big refrigerator trucks and buried all over Serbia.

The press here is discussing why the indicted was somehow arrested in Montenegro. Did he really work as a construction worker there? Supposedly, he hid safely for years in Russia -- did he have a Russian ID? Maybe he was posing as a stripper, as one commentator put it angrily...

As if those details mattered. What matters is that people in Serbia still don’t know, or want to know, why he was arrested or what he actually did.

People prefer to follow the glamorous doings of Arkan's widow, Ceca, who had a glorious evening in the local Russian embassy, surrounded by Radicals. Our President Kostunica put in an appearance, much cheered by Putin's support against Kosovo independence.

Putin' s growing economic power in the western world is costing Serbia its chance for integration into united Europe. Serbia geographically belongs there, and, with the exception of Russia, all the great powers would like to lock Serbia into Europe for good so it does not create yet more trouble.

The Russian myth dates to Tolstoy' s hero from Ana Karenina, who left his beloved to fight a gallant war for Serbia. Of course he was committing suicide by proxy as he did this, and eventually, she committed suicide too. These adventures rarely end well.

Back in 1999, Russians didn’t veto the bombing of Serbia. The Russians are using the Kosovo issue in order to reclaim ex- Soviet territories with Russian populations. Serbs know that the Russians have their own great-power motives in exploiting Serbian troubles, but the myth does not allow them to say that.

Ratko Mladic, the number one indicted in Hague, was supposedly in Russia only two days ago. With two out the last five major criminals gone, Mladic may yet be caught, maybe even in Belgrade, where his books and T-shirts are bestsellers.

The Serb authorities from Bosnia hailed the arrests and promised that soon their own land will be war-criminal free. The President of Serbia, Tadic, did the same.

Carla del Ponte praised the Serbian government in the UN assembly for the newly cooperative attitude.

What about the Russians?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jasmina Tešanovi? is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanovi? on BoingBoing:

- Milan Martic sentenced in Hague
- Mothers of Mass Graves
- Hope for Serbia
- Stelarc in Ritopek
- Sarajevo Mon Amour
- MBOs
- Killing Journalists
- Jasmina Tešanovi?: Where Did Our History Go?
- Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide
- Carnival of Ruritania
- "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
- Faking Bombings
- Dispatch from Amsterdam
- Where are your Americans now?
- Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
- Slaughter in the Monastery
- Mermaid's Trail
- A Burial in Srebenica
- Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
- To Hague, to Hague
- Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties
- Floods and Bombs
- Scorpions Trial, April 13
- The Muslim Women 
- Belgrade: New Normality
- Serbia: An Underworld Journey
- Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
- The Long Goodbye
- Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
- Slobodan Milosevic Died
- Milosevic Funeral

Xeni Jardin:

As dalek cakes go, this banana-caramel one with moving platform is a doozy. Link.

Like so many Rodent-American actors before him, "Dramatic Chipmunk" got his start in Japanese TV, trying to out-squeal the ladies. Video Link to clip from the program "Mini Moni," jump to about 2:43 to see his television origins.

Gigantomongous grasshoppers, known locally as "lubbers," invade Florida city: Link. Some children are afraid to play outside, according to news reports, and who can blame them? The money quote:

"It's like trying to stop the wind," said David Shibles, a horticulturist with the Polk County extension office. "If you find them, you need to kill them."

Washington Post runs four-part series on why Dick Cheney is the evilest vice president ever: Link (via Threat Level).

Ever wondered what an authentic LA lowrider car show looks like? Link to LA Weekly photo series shot yesterday. Includes Mexi-kitsch transformer cars, Aztec titties, velvet motors, and a golden tricycle. When I die, I intend to scoot around in heaven on one of these.

Gold statue of David Beckham statue placed on altar at Buddhist temple in Bangkok: Link. Not the first time, actually -- happened back in 2000, also. Earlier stories of a Beckham idol at a shrine on Japan's Awajishima Island are said to be apocryphal, but he was immortalized in chocolate, in Tokyo, for World Cup 2002: Link.

Rediscovered photo of Laugh Out Loud Cats' creator: Link. (Previous posts: 1, 2, 3)

"Where the Wild Things Are" garden, recreated IRL: Link, and here is MOAR.

China's Three Gorges Dam is said to be changing weather patterns throughout the region: Link.

Wil Wheaton recently welcomed Gene Roddenberry into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Link.

"The Cloud is a speculative design for a resort city elevated 300 metres in the air above Dubai and supported on slanting legs resembling rain." Link.

Washing machines in concert: Link.

(Thanks, Eric, Avi Solomon, Joel "Gee-Man" Johnson, Mark Mauer, Chris, Ape Lad, José Leitão, Alex, Kier Smith, John, Marco, Matthew Sokoloff)

Mark Frauenfelder: Pinkblocks has an item about a 16-year-old girl who is going to court to fight for her right to wear a "purity ring" to school, which forbids jewelry.

(Photo from Wikipedia)

A sixteen-year-old girl took her fight for her right to wear a ‘purity ring’ to the High Court. Her school has determined that her chastity ring was jewelry and therefore under the normal school rules, not allowed. Her ring represented her vow to abstain from sex. One would imagine she would abstain until marriage. It doesn’t actually state in the newspaper report when the deadline of her abstinence would expire.

To some extent this young girl has some justification in making her request. There are other forms of apparel that are allowed, which show off religious allegiance. Of these a more obvious one is the head gear worn by Muslim girls and women. These scarves are permitted in schools in the UK. What would one then say is the difference between a narrow ring, and a full-on head covering. If she were to wear a head scarf as an image of her vow, would that be allowed then?

Link

There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not Dell can return to its glory days. The return of Michael Dell as CEO and the company's insistence that it doesn't view direct sales as a religion have been viewed as positives, but what matters is whether the company executes. To that end, the company recently announced that it would have its computers available for sale at Wal-Mart, which is trying to become a bigger force in consumer electronics. According to one analyst who has queried several stores, Dell's Wal-Mart sales are looking brisk, with the boxes selling out at several locations. Clearly, this is just a start of a longer-term push, and the lack of a retail strategy has by no means been the company's only problem. It's done a lot of damage to its image, which it needs to recover from. Still, for such a beleaguered company, it's at least showing some signs of life.

Mark Frauenfelder: A driver allegedly zonked on cocaine tried to elude police by driving through a cornfield. The moron ruined the farmer's crop, as seen in this photo. Link (Thanks, Joel!)