Alabama shuts Internet cafes

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Yep. Or should that be Yup? Anyway, according to the Mobile Register,

The Mobile County Sheriff’s Office and the Alabama Attorney general Wednesday shut down two businesses where patrons used computers to participate in Internet sweepstakes, authorities said.

No arrests were made in Wednesday’s raids, but at least 60 computers and other items were being catalogued and confiscated from Lisa’s Internet Cafe on U.S. 90, just outside Theodore, and Jackie’s Internet Cafe on Schillinger Road. Arrests may follow after a lengthy investigation, authorities said.

At the businesses, patrons could buy prepaid Internet cards enabling them to log onto www.hello-money.com to participate in games while their points were tracked on the debit type provided by the cafes, Sheriff Jack Tillman said.

Look on the bright side. Gambling is one issue on which the inhabitants of the Deep South see eye-to-eye with Osama bin Laden. What a country!

The Flickr phenomenon

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This morning’s Observer column…

Virtually every Tom, Dick and Harry has a digital camera. And if he doesn’t, there’s probably one in his mobile phone. Which raises an interesting question: what are people doing with all these cameras? The answer: snapping everything that moves, and much that doesn’t.

But then what? At this point, options begin to narrow. You can take the storage card into Jessops, push it into a slot and pay to have your photos printed. You can upload them to your computer and view them on screen in tasteful little slideshows, perhaps to the accompaniment of a track from your music library.

You can buy an inkjet printer, pay through the nose for paper and ink cartridges, and print them out. Or you can upload them to a printing service like Ofoto or Fotango, have them deduct money from your credit card and send back nice prints on proper photographic paper.

Alternatively you can put them on Flickr (www.flickr.com). If you don’t know about Flickr, it’s time you did…

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Keys, money and mobile phone

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Fascinating insights from a Nokia researcher. Excerpt:

A couple of years back I carried out a multi-cultural research project with Per Persson and a number of other colleagues to figure out what objects people consider to be essential when they leave home. We spent time studying 17 urban dwellers in San Francisco, Berlin and Shanghai and Tokyo with shadowing, home-interviews, plus 129 street interviews and numerous observation sessions. One of our screening criteria for in-depth subjects was that people had to own a mobile phone although during the screening process we made no assumptions about whether they considered the phone a necessity or not.

In the cultures we studied 3 objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone. Whilst this may seem obvious the interesting part of the study was in understanding the reasons why people considered these objects essential (largely survival, safely & security), why they were not always present (forgetting, awareness, making a conscious decision to be out of touch) and strategies people adopted to help them remember to take these objects. A lot of times money will be carried in a wallet or purse, but when it comes down to it, the money (cash and notes) are considered the essential objects before the other objects that are also contained there.

Full paper reporting this research downloadable from here.

The Web: bigger than we know. Bigger than we can know?

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From Search Engine Watch…

A new survey has made an attempt to measure how much information exists outside of the search engines’ reach. The company behind the survey is also offering up a solution for those who want tap into this “hidden” material.

The study, conducted by search company BrightPlanet, estimates that the inaccessible part of the web is about 500 times larger than what search engines already provide access to. To put that another way, Google currently claims to have indexed or know about 1 billion web pages, making it the largest crawler-based search engine, based on reported numbers. Using Google as a benchmark, that means BrightPlanet would estimate there are about 500 billion pages of information available on the web, and only 1/500 of that information can be reached via traditional search engines.

Hmmm… That was written in 2000. When it stopped bragging about the number of pages it had indexed, Google was claiming over 8 billion. Let me see, that’s 8 billion by 500, er 4,000 billion pages. Pardon me while I go and lie down in a darkened room. I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee realised what kind of monster he was unleashing when he dreamed up the Web.

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Rebuilding Iraq

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From today’s New York Times…

Last week Robert Stein Jr. was charged in federal court with a slew of crimes allegedly committed while he was a financial officer for the American occupation authority in Iraq. The affidavit in the case says that Mr. Stein accepted over $200,000 a month to steer contracts to an American businessman whose companies often did poor work and sometimes did no work at all.

The case is a painful reminder of the absolute dearth of planning for rebuilding Iraq after the war. According to reporting by James Glanz in The Times, Mr. Stein was convicted of a fraud-related felony in 1996 and also fired from a job in 2002 for falsifying payroll records and invoices. The American government then sent him to help oversee construction projects in Hilla and the Shiite holy city of Karbala, with $82 million in taxpayer funds.

There must be accountability higher up for this clearly bad judgment. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. Officials at the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction say they are pursuing 50 more cases and have already referred at least six more to prosecutors.