im furious.
the house passed (409-2) a bill that requires any operator of a non-password protected wi-fi access point to "report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000."

it gets better. check out the definition:

The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly "lascivious" poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting." (Yes, that covers the subset of anime called hentai).

so, if you have an open router, whether you are a single person or, say, a business offering free wi-fi, you now have to not only sniff all your traffic, but look at each file coming through your pipe. by hand. because by these definitions, there is no way at all to even begin to guess what might pass and fail. hell, my drawings, because they are nude figure drawings, might not be covered. shit, even stills from everyone's favorite hentai movie, urotsukidoji*, are up for this now.

so you get to watch and look at every image coming through your router. and then try to guess which ones might be inappropriate. so you can report them to avoid trouble and 300,000 dollar fine.

oy. seriously. this is insane. and the dems pushed it through. wtf is going on here?

house vote on illegal images sweeps in wi-fi, web sites

* wikipedia tells me this:
"The three OVAs [original video animations] were later edited into a western theatrical version known as Legend of the Overfiend, with much of the more explicit material being removed "
which means the movie i have seen several times over the years and joke about a lot as a watermark in storytelling is actually watered down. seriously. i didn't think this could get more explicit. and yet, it is. i must now find and watch the original ova's to see what i have been missing all these years.

sunday morning when i opened the hotmail screen minimized on my desktop, i was surprised to see about a third of the characters were IN CHINESE.  literally.

i found this curious, but figured a weird quirk.  logged out, closed browser, reopened, went to log into my account.  nada.  zip.  zilch.  hotmail essentially tells me that my password is not my password.

i'm not sure what the hell happened and by this point, thanks in particular to msn's spectacularly un-prompt customer service, i am feeling pretty god damn hopeless.  and helpless.  when i tried to answer my "secret question" in order to request a password reset, the question came up alternately as (and i quote) "??????????????" or, even better, IN CHINESE.

i am so fucked!

not only are there maybe 80 email addresses in my book that i doubt i have saved elsewhere, but also significant, cherished, or interesting emails i've held onto for years, including ones from my mother.

'do not reply'do i give up hope that this will ever get sorted out, suck it up, and get a gmail account?  or do you think there is plausible reason to keep hope alive?

ok, seriously.

i really really hate people (men) who use their cell phones in the bathroom. yes, answering a call or talking while whizzing is awful. but i especially mean the people in stalls that you can hear clicking away on some smartphone. i don't care if you are emailing, reading news, selling stock or playing a game — stop it. its disgusting.

is this a man thing? do women do this too? can we just all agree that it isn't ok and stop?

paul pope gets it right: "All the iPhone is is a retarded Mother Box."