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I actually appeared on a PBS show before this Naveen Jain guy once. He was shady with Infospace, and he's shady now. Beware the Intelius.

Very thorough article about how the Wall Street system unraveled and who saw it coming a couple of years ago.

The Seattle P-I — operating one floor above Newsvine Global Headquarters — just evacuated because of an Anthrax threat. Helicopters, cops, fire, and medics are all circling the building right now. All Viners safe and accounted for.

"If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down," President Bush declared Thursday as he watched the $700 billion bailout package fall apart before his eyes, according to one person in the room.

A good sampling of Seattle's current tech scene.

MSNBC's own Bill Dedman gets recognizes for his excellent public safety exposé on defective firefighter safety equipment.

Filed under "recursion".

See, I don't know why people think this is a dumb idea. I would *gladly* sleep in an overhead bin. Much easier than sleeping while sitting up.

I remember the CRX HF. Didn't know it ran on a 58 horsepower engine!

Women with blue eyes should not be any different from those with green or brown eyes. Yet preference for blue eyes seems both universal and undeniable—in males as well as females. One explanation is that the human pupil dilates when an individual is exposed to something that she likes. For instance, the pupils of women and infants (but not men) spontaneously dilate when they see babies. Pupil dilation is an honest indicator of interest and attraction. And the size of the pupil is easiest to determine in blue eyes. Blue-eyed people are considered attractive as potential mates because it is easiest to determine whether they are interested in us or not.

Who would have thought that Jason Santa Maria's beloved Flap N' Snap could be potentially deadly for hemophiliacs. Scary!

Fascinating. A man just broke the world record for sleep deprivation by switching which side of his brain he used more periodically while the other side rested.

Newsvine launched in March 2006 as a new kind of community news site, one in which its readers suggest news stories, and even write them. The stories range from Iraqi bombings at an all time high to a principal throwing feces as students.

I don't know why I find ghost riding the whip so stupid/funny... but I do.

NEWS & INFORMATION Newsvine.com Today's Top Stories See what everybody is talking about right now, and add your two cents.

Good stuff here. Mika Brzezinski chooses not to read her lead story about Paris Hilton on the air in protest.

Rob Enderle is apparently under the impression that iPhones will cause accidents because of their lack of keyboards and that will lead to class action lawsuits. Rob Enderle is a tool.

For a long time I have felt the price of gasoline in the United States was way too low. Pretty much all economists believe this. Greg Mankiw blogged back in October about the many reasons why we should raise gas taxes.

I feel like an idiot. I always thought the Dvorak keyboard was a product of *John* Dvorak. Hence, I've always rejected it outright.

Does picking up food from the floor five seconds after you drop it really affect the cleanliness of the food? Yes and no.

Good ruling here in my opinion. Lead officer on a 100mph car chase and you should pretty much lose all rights to damages which occur to you during that chase. I can't even believe it got this far.

Our local NBC News affiliate paid a visit to Newsvine global headquarters today to film a spot for the 11pm news. Here it is... make sure to watch the video.

Ok, I wasn't going to pile on John McCain after this morning's prank heard 'round the world, but after a reader sent in a tip a few minutes ago, I just can't pass this up.

A good 13 hours after my faux "Contacting John McCain" graphic was finally pulled, the McCain camp has now replaced it with their own graphic. The problem -- as noticed by the sharp-eyed reader who sent in the tip -- is that the intern who created the graphic for the Senator either does not know how to spell "Group" or chooses not to proofread his own Photoshop work. See the image to the right -- a screen capture I took at 11pm Pacific.

I'm sure you're a good man, John McCain. I advise you to get your cyberstaff up to snuff quickly. It's going to be very important soon.

Also, maybe check out Virb. It's like MySpace for people with better taste.

If you visit John McCain's MySpace page (as of 9am PST Tuesday morning), you will notice an interesting announcement from him. He's apparently reversed his position on gay marriage as well as revealed a bias towards attractive lesbians.

Why would a presidential candidate make such an important announcement on his MySpace page?

The answer? He wouldn't.

But I would.

You see, John McCain's people commandeered my world-renowned MySpace design template and did a few things wrong:

1. They did not credit me for the template, even though the template explicitly requested credit.
2. They used my own unmodified imagery, specifically for the "Contacting John McCain" table.
3. As if #2 wasn't bad enough, the McCain crew is actually pulling their image directly from my server on each page load. So every time someone visits the McCain MySpace page, my bandwidth is being used to deliver part of the page! Bad McCain!

So...

Numerous people have written me over the last few weeks to tell me that McCain has been using my code, but up until I realized he was pulling images from my server, I didn't really care. A lot of celebrities including Ryan "Van Wilder" Reynolds and the beautiful Nelly Furtado use my code and I'm totally cool with it.

But then I read the article in today's Newsweek about how politicians are all setting up MySpace pages in order to "connect" with younger audiences. McCain's MySpace page is listed, as are the pages from several other candidates. I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.

Luckily, I had already set up a special .htaccess rule on my server which served my real "contact me" image if the image was referenced from my own MySpace page, and served up a sample image if it was served from anywhere else. This is the whole reason I even figured out what was going on. I had my real image in cache and upon loading McCain's page, the real image showed up (including my special note that said "NO REQUESTS FOR DESIGN HELP PLEASE"). Thinking it was weird that McCain would get any requests for design help, I immediately realized what happened.

So, the only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.

Abortion? The Iraq War? Probably too heavy to joke about. Gay marriage seemed like a more of a non-lethal subject to center the prank around.

So with a few minutes in Photoshop and a quick FTP, a new John McCain was born...

...and The Straight-Talk Express isn't just for straight people anymore.

Note: Before McCain fans comment on this, let me reiterate that this was a prank. I'm not politically inclined, I'm not anti-McCain, and I'd have a beer with the guy anytime. Election season on Newsvine is sure going to be fun though.