Two major newspapers are taking election fever to another level – the Los Angeles Times gives readers clicking on its electoral map each state's latest poll results and voting data back to 1988, plus the current electoral breakdown including "the all important undecided (vote)"; and, the New York Times does likewise plus information on candidate fundraising, Ralph Nader's push for ballot access, gubernatorial and Senate results, and general election results in each state as far back as 1960. "We did not do anything like this four years ago," said Los Angeles Times online business and politics editor Dan Gaines. "We were looking for something new that would be easy to use, and serve as an educational tool and inform people about what is going on in the election." The only kicker: you have to be a (free) registered user of either or both sites.
There won't be as many Netizens visiting party Websites as watching their conventions on television, of course, but there are reports of hackers targeting Republican-friendly Websites during the GOP's national convention this month. "We want to bombard (the Republican sites) with so much traffic that nobody can get in," said CrimethInc, a member of the so-called Black Hat Hackers Block, to Wired, which called them one of several groups planning to pass the tools to smother the Republican-friendly sites repeatedly – similar to distributed denial-of-service attacks. However, other activists are condemning the anti-GOP hack plans. "If you feel that you must shut up someone through intimidation or false accusations or any other method -- you are not relying on the superiority of the truth," The Pull, co-founder of the online political action group Hacktivismo, wrote in an e-mail cited by Wired. "People can not condemn censorship and then embrace it."
If lists of registered sex offenders are free, why would you pay for a copy? Fear and loathing, apparently. But a Mason County, Washington sheriff is looking into a California-based telemarketing company that's preying on fear and loathing to sell residents copies of sex offenders living in their ZIP codes. "They are trying to make money from something that is already free, by trying to scare the public into spending $19-20 for nothing," Mason County Sheriff's Detective William Adam said in a letter he circulated to the press, saying the United States Protection and Care Society's automated telephone solicitations for the lists are causing "a panic." Mason, Thurston, Grays Harbor, Kitsap, Pierce, King, Whatcom, and Lewis Counties in Washington have received the calls. Typically, Adam said, they warn sex predators have moved into those areas, before making the pitch for the lists that are already available through the Website of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.
We guess that, the next time you think about hitting eBay to buy yourself a little country post office behind an ancient general store – which still held World War II meat ration coupons in the bargain, had sorted mail for 52 people still in Union Pacific Railroad boxes, and the combination to the old safe scrawled on the wall – you might think twice. Just ask the Austin couple who did exactly that with the Vigo Park, Texas country post office. Months after they bought the place on eBay in 2002, the U.S. Postal Inspection service busted the post office and the couple, Kimberly and Tony Starr, and today the inspectors say only that a criminal probe is ongoing. Except that one report cites an unidentified investigator as saying the Starrs – who consider themselves victims of a clumsy bureaucracy which put them in charge of the mail without training or pay, as one report put it – aren't likely to face prosecution. If anything, Tony Starr told a reporter, what they did to provoke the raid – getting an undercover agent to buy postal money orders with a bad check – would be shown as doing just what he hoped: showing lax security at even the tiniest post office.
Los Angeles is wondering whether security is lax enough at Internet gaming parlors, becoming California's latest and largest city to crack down gaming cybercafe violence. Los Angeles now has an ordinance requiring the city's thirty Internet game parlors enforce the city curfew on minors and pay for in-store surveillance cameras. And the cybercafe owners in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the Golden State are none too thrilled. "There may have been problems with certain individual locations, but those could have been handled another way other than with blanketwide legislation," said iGames spokesman Ernest Miller, whose group represents about five hundred gaming cybercafes in the U.S. and overseas.
