Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been “pursued across three continents” by Western intelligence services. Ellsberg compared the Obama administration’s threat to prosecute Mr. Assange to his own treatment under President Richard M. Nixon, reports The New York Times. (Julian Paul Assange, born 1971, is an Australian internet activist best known...

If you’ve read either Ron Beasley or my ramblings you’ll know that we think that the problems that society faces are structural in nature and only going to get worse due to peak resources, demographics, deflation, etc. In light of this belief I am growing increasingly involved in ground up movements to address these issues at their foundation, which is working towards moving back to local structures...

While the Right kicks NPR and the rest of us tend to think of it as defined by Morning Edition and All Things Considered and Fresh Air, Bill McKibben (writing before Juan) takes a look at the rest of NPR in The New York Review of Books: The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful...

John Batelle has a fascinating post exploring how our identities are presented on the web. He begins by noting the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape: The Dependent Web is dominated by companies [Facebook, Google, and increasingly Twitter] that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends”...

First there was Wide Open*. Then there was Red Blue America. Now, there’s Matter of Opinion. From its About Us page: Matter Of Opinion (MOO) is a new bi-partisan concept designed to draw as many people as possible into the political discussion. MOO launches weekly survey-based conversations that explore a variety of politically-charged local, national and global issues…issues that (until now) are...

This year we’ve seen the end of the browser and the death of the web, and the end of the mouse, possibly even the death of the desktop tower. With the introduction of the new MacBook Air we’re seeing the death of the disk. No, not yet the hard drive (though the Air doesn’t have one; it uses flash memory instead). The optical drive. MG Siegler: When you get your MacBook Air and you open the...

Commenting on a political issue recently, a TMV reader said, “Kind of like taking a vacation in the eye of a hurricane.” It so happens that my family and I, along with tens of thousands of other tourists, did exactly that five years ago. Today is exactly five years since hurricane Wilma dealt a devastating blow to the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, in particular striking the resort of Cancún with its full...

LATER: Exactly as expected. Maybe the most noteworthy element… Facetime for the Mac. How so? Apple has flipped the playbook putting mobile tech in PCs…… Let’s start with the facts. Apple announced last week a special “Back to the Mac” media event for today at 1 PM ET at their Cupertino headquarters. In it they promised “a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac...

The company is making tech news today for a $20 million round of venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Evernote has earned 5 million users worldwide in less than two and a half years (up from 4 million mid-August 2010). They still have over $9 million raised last year, and promise: We’ll build more features, fix more bugs, add more devices, expand into more countries, and make Evernote indispensable to more...

A family launches a space balloon…it goes all the way up there…they get it back. And there is this INCREDIBLE FOOTAGE.

The man who found order in the chaos of the universe, Benoit Mandelbrot, has died. Mandelbrot, who had joint French and US nationality, developed fractals as a mathematical way of understanding the infinite complexity of nature. The concept has been used to measure coastlines, clouds and other natural phenomena and had far-reaching effects in physics, biology and astronomy. ……. His seminal works,...

Jacob Weisberg may not believe that (I do) but he calls Thiel out on this: The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for American universities which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they’re worth and hinder what really matters in life, namely starting tech companies. His scholarships...

Columnist Mario Antonio Sandoval of Guatemala’s Prensa Libre has a suggestion for how the United States could help compensate Guatemalans for the experiments U.S. doctors and scientists performed on unwilling Guatemalan subjects in the 1940s. In George W. Bush’s time in office, Guatemala President Alvaro Colom pushed hard for ‘Temporary Protected Status’ for Guatemalans in the U.S....

Posting articles like these is no pleasure. But part of the practice of journalism is to alert the public to things they might not want to see or hear, and which, in our judgment as journalists, they ought to see or hear. Global reaction to how the United States government intentionally infected unknowing Guatemalans and perhaps even American troops – is one such occasion. Over the past 24 hours we have...

He’s exactly right when he observes that the Right is better at it than the left — “see Matt Drudge, aggregation; Rush Limbaugh, talk radio; Sarah Palin, Twitter” — and that the policing of disinformation should serve as a strong model of journalism. But when he observes that “recent disturbances in politics and the media feel like symptoms of a larger epistemological, even...

According to the President, lifting the moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is “safe” because now we have rules about worst-case scenario planning and a requirement of third-party verification (McClatchy). The rules are only two weeks old so (a) how the heck have the companies had time to develop worst case scenario plans and (b) how have third party companies had a chance...

When you think of Internet censorship, countries that spring to mind might range from China to Iran. But I doubt most people, most Americans anyway, associate the U.S.A. with Internet censorship. Perhaps you should. Reading about COICA, S. 3804 (bill text), Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, I could not help but wonder about its linkage to ACTA, the global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement....

The limits of the tech fix exposed: “At 0729 Mountain Time [1429 GMT] on 5 October, BI Incorporated experienced a problem with one of its offender monitoring servers that caused this server’s automatic notification system to be temporarily disabled, resulting in delayed notifications to customers. The issue was resolved approximately 12 hours later at 1925 [0229 GMT Wednesday],” BI said in...

John Gruber, again, this time on the bureaucratic language Microsoft used to announce the Windows Phone 7 today, “Who talks like this? This bureaucrat-ese is intended, I suppose, to sound serious. But it just sounds like bull$#@t.” The press release is titled, “Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone: The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want...

And they drove it from Mountain View, CA, to Hollywood Boulevard. Google says their self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles: Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process...

John Gruber and Dan Benjamin diss the name Windows Phone 7: Benjamin: Most absurd name for a device ever… Gruber: They should not have called it Windows, It’s as if they called the iPhone the Mac phone… I think it’s stupid. Benjamin: It’s a mistake. Their marketing critique sent me back to the now classic video, Microsoft designs the iPod package: It turned out the video was produced...

I love honey. I used to gift honey, especially from Germany, to my close relations on my return from my travels abroad. Now I have stopped gifting honey and even stopped eating it. My friend Sunita Narain, an indefatigable public-spirited person, tells us that even health-conscious companies, in this case from Australia and Switzerland, “do not check antibiotics in products they export to our world.” If...

ReadWriteWeb Biz points to Mike Blumenthal, a blogger who specializes in local search, on Google’s poor Better Business Bureau rating: The bulk of the issue apparently is the fact that Google has not responded at all to 47 complaints. They were not judged on whether they satisfied the complaint, not whether they complied with their agreements… to a large degree, just whether they have responded…....

Sometime last night, I discovered that Robert Scoble had added me to a new group he’d formed on Facebook. “Cool,” I thought. And then I went to bed. I woke up to a choked inbox.

Tectonic shifts among the tech giants… Miguel Heft says The iPhone Has a Real Fight on Its Hands: Phones powered by Google’s Android operating system are now the most popular among smartphones in the United States, according to new data released by Nielsen. In the six months ending August 10, Android phones accounted for 32 percent of the smartphones sold, Nielsen said. By comparison, iPhones accounted...