Don't be fooled by cheap pranks on the Internet tomorrow—save your gullibility for the really good ones.
Danger Will Robinson! Tomorrow is April 1, 2010, which also happens to mark the Internet’s annual April Fools’ Day “celebration,” wherein many popular sites of all stripes will report all manner of craziness. While we’re all for the classic pranks of yore, which were a valuable opportunity for the traditional media to let off some steam (George Plimpton‘s Sidd Finch article for Sports Illustrated remains a classic.), the Internet’s pranks, by virtue of sheer volume, can be a bit much. While some, like ThinkGeek‘s annual reveal of crazy products that later become real, the massive numbers tend to make the Internet even more unreliable, as usually-reliable sites become much less so. Sometimes things even get started a couple of days early. How long before there’s an April Fools’ Week?
Citizens of the Internet: consider yourselves warned.
Don't fall for this dreamy stare, colleges! He's already seeing four other schools!
Though he pulled out of his gig as UCLA‘s commencement speaker just one year after his 2008 graduation, James Franco‘s thirst for knowledge is remains unquenchable. The Yale Daily News reports that the Spider-Man frenemy has been accepted to Yale‘s PhD program in English. All of this would be well and good, if not for the fact that the article also reveals that Franco is currently enrolled in MFA programs at both Columbia University and Brooklyn College, as well as New York University film school.
Despite Fanco’s no-doubt-honorable intentions, with so many schools and classes to attend, one or more of them is bound to get hurt. And while we won’t weep when he ends up ditching Columbia and/or NYU for the shiny newness of Yale, we can’t help but feel a little sorry for Brooklyn College. While the other schools have seen their fair share of celebrity students, Franco was a big get for Brooklyn, which hasn’t had much to crow about since Alan Dershowitz graduated in 1959. Yale, Columbia and NYU could all easily move on from the loss of Franco, who’s just another notch on their celebrity student bedposts, but Brooklyn College might never recover.
It’s time to do the right thing and settle down, James. Didn’t you learn anything from your star turn in 2000′s Whatever It Takes?
How much will it cost us to finally get this guy to read our emails?
Remember that time about, say 10 or 12 years ago, when there were all those ridiculous web sites that purported to be able to make money by delivering things to you in less than an hour with no delivery charge? Or by selling you an “Internet currency” promoted by Whoopi Goldberg? Or even by paying you to surf the Internet? At least one of these ideas has mounted a return to our beloved interwebs in the form of Attention Auction, which Michael Arrington has written up over at TechCrunch.
While Arrington admits that the site is buggy and poorly functioning (we’d also like to add that it’s frighteningly amateurish-looking and filled with broken English), he also talks about what a great idea it is and that Google should integrate it into Gmail. Really, Michael? As important as we all fancy ourselves, we don’t think there are enough folks out there who will pay for us to open their emails.
Continue reading ‘Michael Arrington Wants to Email Like It's 1999′
They might stop making new Volvo wagons, but older models like this one will transport hippies and hipsters alike for decades to come.
Yesterday, the fine folks over at Jalopnik got their hands on a Volvo memo revealing that the automaker was going to be exiting the station wagon business it has dominated for the last 50-odd years by 2011. Today they have a touching retrospective that brought back a lot of fond memories of sitting in that “way-back” rear-facing seat and waving at cars behind us.
It’s not all bad news though. There’s no time like the present to get your hands on a Volvo V70 or V50 wagon. These babies are the last of a storied breed (in the US at least, they’ll still be available in Europe for a while), and thus destined for collector’s item status. Maybe. Regardless, they’ll be missed, so pour out one of whatever they drink in Sweden (Punsch? Glögg? Ikea?) for your old friend the Volvo wagon tonight.
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse will do whatever he wants with your text messages. Because he can.
Today’s New York Times has an interesting story that points out that, well, no one really regulates text messaging. Unlike voice calls, which by law are protected from interference by phone companies, text messages are completely unregulated, which has led to cases like the one highlighted in the Times article, where Catholic Relief Services had the plug pulled were threatened with having the plug pulled on their Haiti relief text code by Sprint-Nextel for no apparent reason. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and indeed, the FCC has been petitioned to rule on the legality of interfering with and blocking text messages as far back as 2007, but it has yet to make a rule.
If this bugs you, the fine folks at Public Knowledge have set up a page that will take most of the work out of encouraging the FCC to take action and protect your text messages.
UPDATE: John Taylor of Sprint Media Relations has commented to assert that the New York Times story contains a few errors, notably that “that Sprint has not and will not block the short code used by the marketing firm retained by Catholic Relief Services.” We’ve updated the post a to reflect this.
Mount Everest. If you look REALLY closely sometime in May, you'll see the Juggle flag on the top.
When Vail, Colorado couple Brendan and Kristine Chalk attempt to summit Mount Everest in May, Juggle will be right there with them.
In flag form.
Juggle is sponsoring Brendan and Kristine as they attempt to become the youngest American married couple to reach the highest point on earth, 29,035 feet. The pair and their team recently left the US for Nepal to begin the acclimation treks that will have them prepared to summit during the three weeks in May when reaching the summit is possible. When Brendan and Kristine reach the top, they’ll fly the Juggle flag, and of course, we’ll have pictures as well as updates, so stay tuned.
Good luck, Brendan and Kristine!
Obey...
It’s the fourth week of the month, which apparently means it’s time for another Woot-off over at woot.com.
(We should really see these things coming by now.)
It's a China vs Google showdown!
Well, that was fast. Less than 24 hours after Google stopped censoring search results in China by rerouting their Chinese search engine to Hong Kong, China has responded by blocking results from “sensitive” searches. What does this mean? It’s too early to tell, really. It may be a strong hint or a demonstration of power by the Chinese designed to force Google to reconcile with the government. After all, in the long term Google doesn’t want to be left out of one of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets.
More interesting though, is the possibility that this situation will quietly become the new status quo. As things stand now, Google gets to claim it’s not censoring results for users in China (it’s the Chinese government doing the censoring, with Google just another victim). Google also (so far) gets to continue its less controversial offerings, like maps and music, within China and continue to run a Chinese R&D operations. Meanwhile, the Chinese get to continue to censor the Internet the way they always have. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Google's China office isn't really this empty. There are still people there doing R&D and selling ads. For now, anyway.
Not unexpectedly, Google followed through on its threat to uncensor its Chinese search engine today, though in an interesting way. Instead of just opening up google.cn, they redirected the site to google.co.hk, their Hong Kong site, which now offers searches tweaked for mainland China in simplified Chinese.
Google apparently thinks that since the new searches will technically be conducted in Hong Kong, the Chinese government will be cool with this arrangement. Based this only-slightly-incomprehensible statement from state-run China Central Television, though, they’re not, which means at any minute, Chinese Google could be no more.
Sometimes, this Internet is a little more fragile than we think.
Despite its best efforts, Basketball was unable to conquer all of Google Trends and lies defeated.
Despite signs of rallying once games tipped off this afternoon, the NCAA basketball tournament could not rally to claim all twenty spots in Google Trends’ hot searches. Instead, the most basketball-related terms we saw at once were 14, largely as a result of the surging number of searches regarding Jesse James‘ alleged mistress, tattoo model Michelle “Bombshell” McGee. The NCAA’s cause was not helped by the relative paucity of upsets today (Ivy League champion Cornell knocking off Temple), as opposed to yesterday where we saw 3 seed Georgetown fall and 2 seed Villanova needed overtime to stay alive.
Sorry, basketball, it didn’t work out this time. But like all the losing teams are surely thinking, there’s always next year.
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