
CC Photo by heartbeaz on Flickr
As 2009 draws to a close, I will remember it as the end of my 5-year love affair of giving a crap what my friends are posting on the Internet.
The idea of “social networking” exploded in the second half of this past decade, with MySpace becoming a household name, and everyone and their mother (quite literally) having a Facebook profile. It was extremely appealing: never stay out of touch with all of your friends, because they’re sharing their whole life with you, even if you can’t be there in person. I got caught up in the craze like all of us, but I soon discovered that, to me, at least, full-blown social networking was a passing fad. Perhaps I overestimated just how much I cared about every mundane detail of my friends’ lives. And considering all of the initial skepticism about Twitter, I’m probably not the only one.
Let me tell you my story, and how I came to this conclusion:
Continue reading ‘Unfriending The Internet: Confessions of an Antisocial Networker, and Why You Might Be One Too’






The FBI Doesn’t Think People Are Allowed To Post Pictures of its Seal on the Internet, So Let’s All Do It
Wikipedia has an article on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, much like all things that a large amount of people might desire encyclopedic information on. Naturally, because it makes sense to do so, the Wikipedia community put a picture of the FBI’s official seal in the article, just in case, you know, someone might want to know what it looked like.
So the FBI decided to send the Wikimedia Foundation a letter in which they demanded this image of the seal be removed because apparently there’s some federal law against depicting the seal of a federal agency in 18 U.S.C. § 701. Except that there isn’t.
Wikimedia’s attorney Mike Godwin (yes, that Godwin) wrote back to the FBI, informing them that:
Long story short, it is perfectly okay to post a picture of the FBI seal on the Internet, as long as you’re not doing it in order to claim that you are the FBI. So I’m going to exercise my right to do so, and I encourage everyone else on the Internet to join me.
Seriously, doesn’t the FBI have anything better to do?