CNET News reports that President Bush is collecting millions of recordings of telephone calls, even calls made within the continental United States. If I recall correctly, Microsoft recently got in trouble for helping China to suppress an outcry from an anti-communist Chinese citizen who wrote his feelings and views on his blog.

China plays big-brother too much. Daddy Bush says “No no.”
But when Bush wants to play big-brother, it’s okay? One of those “Do as I say, not as I do.” type things?

CNEW News reports that Adobe ( which bought Macromedia :( ) wants to take Flash “outside of the browser”. That doesn’t make ANY sense to me. Flash is already viewable on multiple platforms outside of the browser. That’s why they have a standalone player. Need more than a standalone player? THAT’S WHAT MACROMEDIA CENTRAL IS FOR.

I don’t understand the big deal here. It’s been done before. I hope they’re not just releasing some bloated mega-product that takes ten minutes to load and takes up 150MB of your RAM at all times.

CNET News reports that Microsoft’s next browser, IE7, will neither change a user’s IE6 default search engine, nor prompt a user to change their search engine upon the first run. Why should they? I’m all for Google being a great search engine, but IE7 is Microsoft’s product, and dangit they have a right to put whatever search engine they want as the default. Google is already the default search engine for Firefox and Opera, and probably other browsers as well. If Google has their default, why can’t Microsoft have theirs? It doesn’t matter if Google didn’t ask to be the default in those browsers (maybe they did, maybe they didn’t) — what matters is that people can change their default search engine if they’d like. People CAN change their default in IE7, as well as the other browsers. Google is living in its own crystal-clear illusion in this battle, and they don’t even know it’s not real.

I installed the latest version of Akismet once upont a time. It ate several comments (two of them actually valid) that were posted to my blog. People e-mailed me saying, “Where is my comment?” BAD Akismet.

Spam Karma 2, however, does the job nicely, and doesn’t eat things It merely stops them from being seen until I approve them or delete them — like a good spam catcher should. Thank you, SK2, thank you! Spam Karma even sents me “caught spam” reports every once in awhile. I feel like my blog is my own again…