An email scam artist recently made a serious mistake: He mistook North Coast Journal cartoonist Joel Mielke for a fool. The scamming scumbag had somehow managed to hack into the email account of a man named Thom, who happens to have Mielke among his contacts. Pretending to be Thom, the scammer sent the following message: Hello, How’s everything […]
Technology
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Sure, Take Lassie To Work
Dogs are cute. Fluffy. Scruffy. Loyal. Irascible. Smart. Hard workers, sometimes. Slackers, usually. Heroes. Bums — good for stories! And, of course, Man’s best chums. Which is why most everyone in the whole snookered world will be tickled as fleas to learn that tomorrow, June 24, is Take Your Dog To Work Day. Except, uh, […]
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Smart Meter … or Electromagnetic Death Pod?
Will PG&E’s SmartMeters make you sick? Critics of the devices — which are currently being installed throughout the state — say they’re hazardous because they emit electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) and radio frequencies (RF) in sufficient quantities, they claim, to cause nausea, headaches, dizziness … even brain tumors. Last week, citing such fears, the Marin County Board of Supervisors […]
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Google Takes the Road Less Traveled
Plenty of us have spotted the all-seeing Googlemobile rolling through town the last few weeks, stealing the souls of everything in range of its roof-mounted camera orb. And say what you will about Big Brother and privacy and whatnot, I dig Street View. It’s fun being able to virtually wander city streets on six continents. […]
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Penis-free Pot Seshes With Randos
That’s the sales pitch for Seshroulette.com, a sort of Chatroulette for weed smokers looking to get faded commune with random, anonymous weed smokers on camera. Strictly medicinal, of course. (Cough-wheeeeze.) The site was created three months ago by one Dan “Chill,” a college dropout/Web developer from Playa Del Rey who nabbed his 215 for stomach-aches. […]
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Visual Blight or Gateway to the Future? (updated)
It took a Eureka ad hoc committee a year to draft “Wireless Telecommunications Facilities,” an ordinance that seeks to regulate the placement of cell phone towers within city limits. But it took only 30 minutes of public testimony to set it back at least another month. “We asked for an ordinance to protect the residents […]
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Humboldt Ranks in [Fake] Google Fiber Poll
UPDATE: Thanks to cyber-savvy reader Josh Mohland for pointing out this “Mega Challenge” site is a fugazi. In non-scamming circles, the deadline for responses to Google’s fiber bonanza has passed. Google’s “Mega Challenge for selected U.S. communities to battle for the title of Most Deserving City for Google fiber” — a nationwide contest in which […]
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Titus And Her Tweet Quake
PoynterOnline’s Julie Moos interviewed Caroline Titus, editor and publisher of The Ferndale Enterprise, about her leap into the Twitterverse on Jan. 9, after the 6.5 quake in Humboldt. Titus recalls how, once she’d made sure her family and a neighbor were OK, she went to town to do the usual reporterly thing of “chronicling the […]
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Ettersburg 2.0
You know a place is tiny when it doesn’t even show up on Google maps . Residents of Ettersburg and other itty-bitty SoHum towns, like Whitehorn and Honeydew, were starting to wonder last year if they were also invisible to Verizon, their land-line phone service provider. It took a community uprising over dismal service (and […]
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Wave of the future
Wave of the future: The pun is so obvious as to be painful, but give them a break — they’re just investors. This “premier financial website for actionable stock market opinion and analysis” tells you, yes YOU, how to make money from wave energy…specifically via Finavera Renewables, the Canadian company building a wave farm right […]
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Go Conficker
right? Anxiety over the computer virus known as Conficker is at a fever pitch today, especially among 60 Minutes viewers. News to you? Here’s a brief synopsis: A computer worm, apparently created by a group of young Russian hackers (yes, really…I know it’s April Fools Day, but yes, really), has infiltrated some 10 million computers […]
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An ironic post about the future
[ Enlarge ] The irony being that I’m posting this on our blog. Hug me, cold, bleak future.