As if all of us were asking for it, the far right people over at the local U.S. Government “Bar and Hot Right Wings” have cooked up a new means of spreading the good word of crazy. The Tig Wigs from the best conservative web design groups present to you, the uniformed and apathetic reader, Conservapedia.

With such wonderful and extremely hilarious entries like Porn, Homosexuality, Marriage, Evolution, Hot Carls, and unfortunately not this, whats not to love? At the very least, this site is a one-stop source for ridiculous theories, mal-contrived values, and awkwardly attractive conservative babes. Without Conservapedia, some Liberal-Haters would starve.

The only immediate problem with all these “-pedias” out there is that there is no Moderapedia. Since Conservapedia was made to show that Wikipedia was too liberal, where is the online user-edited encyclopedia for Moderate or Middle of the Road politicos? The first one to make it gets the site traffic (not it!).

Try it out and tell us what you think! Enjoy it quickly, since sometimes they get a little trigger happy:

Joining the company of modern democratic governments that utilize technology to streamline elections, the Philippines will begin implementing an internet-based voting system. In order to ensure that their results will be secure and untampered, the Philippine Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the International Foundation for Electoral System have requested the aid of local hackers as well as those that hail from across the world.

The voting system that they are attempting to break was created by the Spain-based Scytl Consortium, and cost the Philippine government $452,000. Starting July 10, Comelec will begin public testing of their newly-made voting system, using over twenty-five thousand absentee voters from Singapore as guinea pigs. Scandalous.

While the polls will be merely survey questions with no valuable or important data, the hackers have until July 30 to crack the system, providing both the developing firm and the Philippine government insight and information about possible security flaws and logic holes. As far as reputation and safety for the voting system go, Comelec commissioner Florentino Tuason Jr. claims:

“When Scytl presented the system, everybody was impressed on the security features. It is covered by international patent and it has been declared secured by no less than Switzerland and everyone in the global community should respect that decision,”

And this is not the first time the Scytl’s Consortium’s software system was put to use, already “being used in countries such as the U.S., Switzerland, and Belgium.” Whether or not this system will work in the Philippine’s population depends on how well the tests go, and how much difficulty hackers have to go through in order to crack the security.

[Via AHN]

Earlier this week, the porn industry waited as the vote for the approval or denial of the much discussed .xxx domain loomed overhead. The plan has been torn apart several times by opposition, including both religious groups and porn moguls, and the final vote was a 9-5 decision against the creation of a domain specifically for internet nakedness.

While this is the third time that this domain has been rejected, ICM Registry’s president and chief executive Stuart Lawley claims that his company is “extremely disappointed by the board’s action today,” and went on to say that the decision “is not supportable for any of the reasons articulated by the board, ignores the rules ICANN itself adopted for the RFP (request for proposal), and makes a mockery of ICANN bylaws’ prohibition of unjustifiable discriminatory treatment.”

Either way, creating a domain centered around kids instead of a domain that is designed for pornography seems like the best plan, and the argument over the proper way to protect children from the internet may go on for quite a while. The choice is as simple as this: make a red-light district for adults to visit (which is rather hard to control since there will probably still be .com porn sites) or create a place for kids to enjoy within one domain, allowing for a much more streamlined method of blocking and protection.

I’m just happy that this got pushed back down, since this whole plan is a poor way of dealing with underage porn viewers.
(Time to dance)

As millions of people across the United States begin to gear up for the intense discussions and arguments that will arise during the primaries and eventual presidential election that will come in fall 2008 (inset_name_here FTW), one particular vote has been largely forgotten.

This week, there are plans to vote on the controversial .xxx domain, which, if passed, will create a brand new domain solely designed for online porn (and ultimately not affecting what you do at night ;)). While religious groups argue that creating a .xxx domain will not only legitimize large online pornography circulation, they claim that doing so will also essentially double the amount of porn, since most major sites will probably keep their .com address as well (isn’t this a good thing?).

ICM Registry, the main company behind the push for adoption of the .xxx domain, believes that creating this new domain will allow parents to block porn in a much simpler manner than before, by simply blocking the string ‘.xxx’ from the URL field. Of course, this argument is more off-base then the people who visit AdultSheepFinder.com (probably OKFW-ish). Everyone who has ever taken a crash course in Internetology knows that the actual word representation of a domain address is just an alias, and one can simply use the actual IP address to navigate to a specific web site (providing that the site is on a dedicated server, otherwise it gets more complicated).

Besides the opposition from the porn industry and religious groups, which is ironic at least, there are representatives from the Free Speech Coalition that suggest creating a domain directed towards children’s websites would be better. Using this method seems much more appealing, since blocking .xxx isn’t completely safe and blocking everything but a kids domain would be relatively simpler.

With the vote to happen within the next few months or even this week, the decision will surely be against creating a .xxx domain. Personally, creating a kids domain seems like a better plan altogether, since the ICM Registry company is really only trying to make some quick money. What do you think?

[Via technnewsworld.com]

An Istanbul court ruled to block the famous viral-video web site after a group of supposed Greek fanatics posted a video that claimed that the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was a homosexual. The court faxed the decision to Turk Telekom, the largest internet provider in Turkey, on Tuesday. Turk Telekom first removed the video from YouTube, and later prosecutors convinced the company to block YouTube entirely.

While the political video has been effectively deleted from YouTube, duplicates or reloaded versions may arrive in the future. There has been a large response of videos that either claim that the Greeks are all gay or that Ataturk was not a homosexual. Either way, the blockade will remain in place until the government of Turkey says otherwise.
(more…)

The year might not be 1984, but Big Brother plans on spying on you all the same, even if they have to push things back a bit. On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security extended the deadline for the implementation of its Real ID program from 2008 to 2013. Somewhere Winston Smith breathed a sigh of relief.

Real ID is a digital identification card, which will be required in all 50 states and will effectively replace the state driver’s license. Don’t get too excited, though, it’s not going to wipe that DUI off your record. The purpose of the cards is to create a national database, cataloguing personal information on all 240 million licensed drivers. Seems just like your driver’s license, but on a national scale, right? Well, not quite. Hang on, cause here is where things get a bit totalitarian.

An imbedded barcode will make each ID scanable, purportedly to check it against the database. Never mind that it could essentially be used to keep tabs on where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. An additional concern is that the information contained on the ID will not be encrypted … at all. Scanning it would be all it would take to make a record of your personal information. Yes ladies, that scary bouncer at the bar would no longer have work to quickly commit your address to memory. He’d already have it saved to disc. The cards may also include radio frequency identification technology as well. At the present time though, Homeland Security isn’t quite sure which sort of unsecure data collection they would rather go with.

So far there’s no getting around this either. Under the Real ID Act, which was passed by Congress in 2005, all states are required by law to implement the program. Individual states have until Oct. 7, 2007 to provide their compliance plan to the federal government. However, citing privacy concerns, several rogue states are currently drafting legislation in direct opposition to the Act and its measures. The price for keeping your information private could be costly though. The penalties for noncompliance include disallowing residents of that particular state to use other forms of identification to board planes, enter federal buildings or collect federal financial assistance.

[Via cnet]

In the United States, voting for the next president or state congressman that deserves to be in office seems like an obvious choice for most. While many adults from the age 18-25 do participate in the presidential elections as well as other processes that elect public officials, the majority of people within that demographic simply do not vote.

Estonia has found one method that may increase the amount of voter turnout by a large margin. Instead of lowering the minimum voting age, as some politicians in the U.S. are suggesting, the Estonian government decided to employ convenience. By allowing citizens to cast ballots online for the parliamentary election, they increase the odds of voter turnout by giving busy or lazy voters more options.

The government doesn’t expect to get a huge number of online voters, but does expect an increase of participation over 2005’s two percent. Hopefully, after a few more years, the United States voting system will start to adapt to the internet as well.

[Via Yahoo]