Update 7/20/2010: New reports are emerging, indicating that much of the original information about the shuttering of Blogetary.com (see below) was incorrect. According to these new reports, Blogetary.com was shuttered by its ISP because of terrorism-related material on its blog network.

The Burst.net hosting provider actually made the decision to shutter the blogs, not the federal government, making this an example of corporate overstep rather than federal overstep (though no less inappropriate). Burst.net and/or the FBI should have contacted the operator of Blogetary.com directly so that he could terminate the account(s) in question. Blogetary.com should only have been shut down in its entirety if/when its operators failed to take action.

I have left my original entry regarding this matter available below. Note that while, in this particular instance, the Obama administration bears little or no blame for what happened, there have been other recent examples of federal Internet overstep and the core thesis of my article remains valid despite the incorrect details of this case.

From 2001 until the end of George W. Bush’s (R) presidency, we kept hearing over and over about how the Patriot Act and other anti-terror laws were trampling the Constitution and eroding our civil rights. When people said this to me, I would generally ask them to do something quite simple: present an example of somebody’s civil rights being trampled under those laws. Generally, people would trail-off or say something about Guantanamo (non-citizens captured on foreign battlefields don’t have rights under U.S. law) or military tribunals (the Constitution requires a ‘due process’ be followed; military tribunals have been an established means of due process for dealing with war criminals and enemy combatants since the earliest days of our republic).

With the changing of political administrations, many toward the ‘left’ of the political spectrum breathed a sigh of relief. Guantanamo would close, the Patriot Act would be repealed, etc., etc., etc. Obviously none of that happened, which isn’t a big deal since those things never proved to be an actual issue. But something very disturbing has started happening under President Barack Obama (D). His administration has embarked on an unprecedented effort to stem illegal file sharing on the Internet. I don’t object to this on principle; illegal file sharing is illegal and our laws must be enforced. I do, however, object to how the administration has gone about its enforcement.

You see, when I share a song, movie, or piece of software that I don’t have the right to share with others, I have committed a crime. Me. I can be prosecuted for it and, if I get caught, I should be. The Internet service I’m using to connect to the web, however, can’t. They didn’t commit the crime. The file sharing service I’m using can’t. They didn’t commit the crime either. The federal government, in enforcing copyright law, can’t seize or prosecute an ISP, file sharing service, or other provider for the activities of its users—in fact, Internet providers have explicit legal protection against government prosecution for the activities of their users. The courts have taken a broad view of what an Internet service provider is, including web sites like Amazon.com.

So I was quite surprised to find that the U.S. government has prompted the shutdown of a blogging web site called ‘blogetery.com‘ because some of its users were, presumably, committing copyright violations. Unless the operators of blogetery.com itself were breaking the law—and there’s no evidence yet that they were—they should have been immune from this kind of action. In shutting down the site, the government also shut down the blogs of all of its 73,000 users. This is akin to the government shutting down Verizon FIOS because three out of its millions of users were trafficking in child pornography; it’s a gross overstep of federal authority that tramples the rights of thousands for the transgressions of a few.

Having now established a precedent for seizing and/or shutting down web services because illegal activity happens on a network, what’s next? Can a city’s power system be shut down because a certain percentage of its users use that power to grow marijuana? Can a computer company be shut down because a terrorist uses its products to plan attacks? Can Google be shut down because somebody arranges to embezzle money with an accomplice over GMail? And if the government can do these things, how long before it’s doing them with ulterior motives? How long before a political opponent’s web site is knocked off-line [coincidentally, of course] when the government discovers its hosting provider has one user out of millions that posted an illegal copy of Avatar?

The civil rights advocates tilted at windmills for most of Bush’s presidency and, now that violations really are happening, I hope they’ll raise their voices again. So far, the silence has been deafening.

The site now integrates with the new WordPress 3.0 menu system, and I’ve also reworked my theme so it will work correctly with the WP-Super-Cache plugin. All this really means for you, my faithful readers, is that the site will now probably work faster for you in most situations.

Enjoy and, as always, let me know if you run into any problems!

So far, my experimental development version has…nothing all that great, at least from the reader’s perspective. I’ve added support for the new menu system in WordPress 3.0, which will make it easier for me to make changes to the menus when I need to (and make sure the Site Map and menu are always in sync). I’ve also hacked around on WP-Super-Cache so I can enable WordPress caching on my theme without screwing up the desktop vs. mobile versions, which will speed things up a bit for everybody when it goes live.

Other than that, I don’t really have much planned yet…so if you have any requests, now is the time. What do you love about the site? What do you hate about it? Let me know.

I was somewhat disappointed with the state of weather applications for WebOS (at least the handful that I tried), and I was also pretty disappointed with the mobile web experience on the National Weather Service web site. So, using free NWS data sources, I wrote my own weather application.

Right now it gives you a five-day forecast and lists out any current warnings, watches, and advisories for locations in the United States. By default, it uses the phone’s location services to get a forecast for your current physical location. You can change this in the settings to use a particular ZIP code instead. I have a number of future features planned before I call it a ’1.0′; you can see a list on the application’s page, along with some screen shots.

The app. has been submitted to Palm for inclusion in the App. Catalog, but that can take a while (assuming it gets approved). As soon as it’s available I’ll let you know. If you’re daring, you can download the source code today from the app. page and then package and install it using the Palm SDK.

Available now from the Palm App Catalog! Click here.

The U.S. government’s ‘do not call list‘ is one of the most useful things our federal government has done in decades, and it essentially eliminated the telemarketing calls when I signed up. I have yet to figure out any way of eliminating the others.

Probably 2/3 of the physical postal mail I receive is junk mail, and I see no way of stopping it. I get tons of spam email, though the vast majority of it is filtered out by my service provider and what little makes it through usually gets caught by the Thunderbird mail client.

And it extends even further these days. This web site is powered by WordPress, and spammers target the WP blogging and CMS platform for comment spam. I use a plugin called ‘WP-SpamFree‘ to stop the majority of this behavior, but the numbers are absolutely mind-boggling. Since I switched to WordPress on April 1, 2008, the plugin has blocked an incredible 40,023 spam comments…that’s an average of over 750 spam messages per day. Recently, as many as 20 per day have been making it past WP-SpamFree only to get caught by Akismet—a second spam blocking plugin I run on the site.

This isn’t a huge inconvenience, but I’ve taken the steps to keep it under control. If a user had installed WordPress without knowing about the plugins, they might have very quickly been buried in an avalanche of gibberish advertising.

A constant source of fascination for me is that enough people buy things from these spam messages to justify their existence. I think you have to be particularly stupid to buy something off a shady-looking WordPress comment or email message, but people do it! Why?!

The cost of all this spam must be astronomical—maybe not to me directly, since I have tools to block the mess, but certainly to the Internet services that must transmit all that data and ultimately pass their costs on to the rest of us. I’d be curious to know what percentage of Internet traffic is stupid, unsolicited commercial messages. I’d also be curious to know why the government consistently does nothing about the mess, despite it actually being a legitimate federal concern (interstate and/or international commerce).

By default, the plugin does the same thing it’s always done: when it’s activated, it moves the WordPress gallery CSS styles out of the body and into the head so it won’t break XHTML validation.

Version 2.0 gives you some additional flexibility though. There are two new options the plugin adds to Settings > Media in your your WordPress admin:

• First, there’s a check-box that lets you disable the default styles entirely so you can control the gallery styles with your WordPress theme CSS, if you prefer.
• Second, you can modify the default CSS styles to your liking right there in your WordPress admin.

Hope you like it. As always, contact me if you find any bugs or issues!

This weekend is our big travel weekend: Melissa and I are going to New York, NY. Lots of you might be surprised to learn that, while I’ve traveled all over the United States, I’ve never been to New York City. It should be an interesting experience. I hate crowds of people, and I don’t like rudeness, so it should be a great time ;-).

Melissa has a thing up there, which is why we’re going now, but we’re also making a long weekend of it as an early anniversary trip. We’re taking the train up this afternoon (so it’ll also be my first time on Amtrak) and staying until Tuesday.

I will try to post some stuff now and then. I’m not sure if the hotel has Internet access or not, but Verizon has kindly made mobile hot-spot free for Palm Pre Plus owners with a standard data plan…so up to five computers can surf over the phone’s 3G connection. Now I can be online anywhere without having to pay for access at hotels that aren’t enlightened enough to offer free Internet. Nice.

I’ve dropped official support for a number of smaller, rarely used browsers like K-Meleon, Konqueror, and BeZilla Browser (based of Firefox 2). This doesn’t mean the site won’t work in these browsers, it just means I’m not officially supporting them, I don’t test in them, and any issues affecting users of these browsers will get less attention than issues affecting supported browsers.

I’ve added support for two new-ish WebKit-based browsers, Arora and its distant Haiku OS cousin, WebPositive.

Lastly, I’ve initiated official support for Apple’s new iPad tablet computer (now that an emulator is available free from Apple). The iPad, which launched on Saturday, runs a variant of the iPhone operating system. Right now, it’s supported as a mobile browser (mostly because it’s tough to use the full site’s drop-down menus on a touch-based system). I may change that in the future to default to the full site, if I can come up with a better way to handle the drop-downs. It seems silly to send my stripped-down mobile site to a device like the iPad, which has a screen resolution comparable to that on ‘netbooks’ and small notebooks.

If you have an iPad, let me know whether you prefer the full site or the mobile site. Thanks!

As always, a full list of supported browsers (and screenshots of the site in each) is available on the About the Site page.

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No, I’m not abandoning Mac OS X (or Ubuntu Linux, for that matter). While Windows has not been my primary operating system for a long time, I have pretty much always had a copy of Windows around either on a secondary computer or in virtualization environments. I need it to do cross-platform web site testing, run some mobile emulators that only work in Windows (primarily BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile), and a handful of other ‘occasional’ tasks.

I’ve been running Windows 5.1 (XP) for ages as my pet Windows and, like most of you, I skipped version 6 (Vista) entirely. Now that Microsoft has a stable, functioning version of Windows on the market, XP support is finally starting to fade away. Microsoft has already announced that the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 will not run in XP, and the development kit and emulator for Windows Phone 7 will require Vista or higher too. If I intend to support these platforms (and I do), I need to upgrade.

Plus, I’m getting more and more tech support requests from friends on Vista and 7, so it’s about time that I got more familiar with the newer platform.