A quick search on Google news for “Twitter Terrorist” returns a ripe 138 stories. Each one of them are blaring that terrorists could use Twitter, a supremely simple Web 2.0 phenomina, to conduct and coordinate their evil doings.

A recent report from the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion (304th MI BN) has raised concerns over whether a number of relatively new communication technologies might be adding terrorist forces in the field. Although it stops short of recommending any sort of formal response, the intelligence operatives behind this OSINT (open-source intelligence, also known as intelligence gathered from public sources) point out that cell phone GPS support and micro-blogging services like Twitter could actually be used to facilitate military attacks against United States personnel.

Alright, I’ll play along with this notion. After all, terrorists could use the following sites to conduct their mean, nasty, terroristy doings:

• Seesmic: Using a 3G phone and a Netbook, totally wearable devices, Terrorists can stream their actions LIVE!
• MySpace, Facebook, Powce, Twitpic, Flickr, Plurk … hell any service that’s updatable from a mobile device, and some of these can even be done at once with broadcast services like HelloTxt and Ping.fm
• FriendFeed: Hell, why just have a feed, make a ROOM!
• Brightkite: Mix in some GPS with your messages to make for a truly accurate communication medium over mobile services.

For the love of God, Allah and Buddha, this is simply ridiculous.I don’t disagree that terrorists COULD use this stuff, hell, even kids planning a school shooting could leverage this for publicity and delivery of their message. It’s common sense, they’re social media (social-based marketing) platforms, and … THEY WORK.

Keep in mind, every communication platform on the planet can be used by terrorists. Encrypted cellphones, CB radios, foxes, pigeons, fax machines, flashlights, laser pointers…

What’s the matter Army? Haven’t found a way to tap Twitter like you do our phones? It’s easy, set up a query on http://search.twitter.com - if it’s working. MySpace went through the same bologna when it was suicide killers hitting classrooms. People are fucked up sometimes. Social Media is driven by people. Of course things aren’t always going to be cupcakes and cute unicorns bouncing about on the tubes.

Solution - Stop the people, not the tools, kiddies. You’d be just as hard pressed to concentrate on gun manufacturing over taking out hits on terrorist assholes looking to blow up a landmark.

Cheers. I’ll go wait outside for the white van to pull up and black bag me.

After a nice, long, unwelcome break brought to me in part by IX WEBHOSTING and their horrible service and terrible servers, the blog is back. I toned down the theme a little, in light of Halloween. Gotta make some more updates and changes here and there, but first!? I need to get my clients back on the ball with their sites.

It’s always good to have a site to test stuff on “live”, just in case… The results look good, so here we go with the client uploads. *crosses fingers*

I caught some wind on the web about “Blog Action Day” and the topic, World Poverty. To me, it’s important to know the facts - outside of the stories of poverty; to me my imagination runs with statistics, and I try to imagine what it would be like to be in the situation based on the following numbers:

1. 80% of the global population lives on $10(US) or less per day
2. The poorest 40% of the globe accounts for 5% of the global income
3. Based on enrollment data, about 72 million children of primary school age in the developing world were not in school in 2005; 57 percent of this measurement were girls.

Alright, that’s plenty to build on.

For story sake, let’s take some unlikely averages:  my rent alone costs me about $50 a day on average; my eating habits cost me about $6 to $10 daily, depending on where I eat, and what. Mixing in the Internet, electricity, cellphone and various bills on a daily average, I need an additional $12 a day to simply make payments. This is without a car payment, mortgage, HOA, or credit debt… Like most Americans hold today, since that would complicate this mess.

With these numbers, I’d need to clear $2200 roughly to sustain life.  So, to back up for a moment and imagine making due with $300 a month. Granted I’m in Southern California, so I’ll imagine being in the backwoods of Australia, since I’ve always wanted to go and kick it with Aborigines. I imagine being part of an undeveloped global sub-culture wouldn’t actually require too much spending money, so scratch the Aborigines, I’ll say, I’m trying to live in Sydney.

Let’s bring in the “childhood” factor. Money is the root of the problem, in this case, because at the point where making so little means so much, the priority is that you need to sustain. The catch 22 is, in order to do so, you need to work. Work comes from knowing, knowing comes from learning & thus the school factor comes into play…

What a mess.

I can imagine what it would be like to grow up without school,  and imagine where I’d be today if I hadn’t been educated. What would I have done with those 9 years I spent in college? What about the downward spiral of feeling left behind from society as the world moves on through the Information Age; me without a means of benefiting from that information?

The brutality of the human imagination probably can’t even muster the actualities tied to the true cases of this… and it’s the majority. The majority of our planet’s people live every day, sustaining life til the next, making due and pushing on. In that regard, it’s much like being a freelancer, pushing forward to make due and make progress. The difference lies in the eduction (and the root of it is lacking in the funding to do so):

Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.

That’s a huge chunk. 1/6th of the global population. That’s the entire country of China or India. Staggering statistics like these make it hard to grasp, and make it even harder to believe that one person can help.

The interesting thing is, on the basis of charitable donation, it is possible to help, you just have to make sure you donate to the cause that will distribute your donation fairly and accurately. As f**ked up as it sounds, there are non-profits out there that take advantage of other people’s misfortunes for their own short-term gain. You’ve seen this interesting human behavior if you’ve ever been part of any large group wherein a specific gain  can come from the blood of others (Corporate America is a great place to witness this).

The point of my post is this. Helping is possible, but you have to be careful. The facts are simple - people need our help. Try to imagine what it’d be like if you couldn’t afford the screen your staring at, or anything on the table around you, and imagine what it would feel like.

There are plenty of other factors in the World Poverty mess:
- Disease
- Death
- Famine
- War torn nations
- STD’s
- Sociological barriers
- Political corruption

Ever since the birth of advanced civilizations, the growing issue has been those left outside of it. As a result of the lack of all things we benefit from. The starting point is money, but the end result needs to be cultural shift to maintain life… Gotta start somewhere though.

Source

On May 5th, the new Children’s Museum opened it’s doors on First and Island in downtown San Diego. Walking by it you can see a VW Beetle layered with about a thousand gallons of paint and some great rooms for kids to explore and learn. I’ve always wanted to drag my nephews to this place, I think they’d love it.

Well, tonight - Sarah (@nomatophobia) and I were sitting at home, just wrapped up watching a Batman movie, and started to work a bit when we hear Pat Benatar, or what I thought was a cover band. Sarah’s savvy took her to the Google, and as a result - “IT IS PAT BENATAR!”, she said.

So we did what anyone spending a quiet night in, out of the chill, would do. Grabbed a sweater, put on our shoes, and did this:

Turned out, we caught the finale. Living in downtown is full of surprises, this was one of the more random ones.