Alex had a rough night Monday night.

Western Union has ceased sending telegrams [via kottke and david singer].

Interesting article at the ACLU: Eavesdropping 101: What Can The NSA Do?.  The administration argues that the only people who are targeted are those who are in contact with Al Qaeda.  That implies that they know who these people are.  If they do know who they are, are they going to do better than in 2001 when they had various bits of information?  I suspect not.  Just my jaded lefty view I suppose.

I think I've linked to this before, but the ACLU has a fun demo of what happens when everyone has access to all of your data all the time: Not Just Pizza.

I'm getting frustrated with Bloglines.  If you peek under the covers you see that it loads massive Javascript structures.  So massive that when I try to edit my blogroll Firefox frequently complains that the script is taking too long to run.  I am surprised they haven't implemented some Ajax-y functions to transfer XML data back and forth instead of creating these Javascript files.  I also find that I want to read my news  / feedstream in a different way.  I want to be able to sort by date across all the posts or the posts within a given folder.  I'd like to have different slices of posts...eg, be able to categorize feeds multiple ways.  For example there are several VC blogs I read which I've filed in my "Finance & VC" folder.  But several of these VCs are in New York, so I'd like to pull them up with a view on New York blogs.  I haven't looked at any other web based services yet (I do have a Google reader account, count me unimpressed; I've tried Rojo and Kinja on their initial launches, perhaps it's time to review them again).

A MMPORG gaming guild, The Syndicate, has obtained a trademark on its name for all things related to online gaming.  It's interesting because it's yet another crossover between the gaming world and the real world (cf. my interest in the crossover between the game-world economies and real-world economies, the exchange for gaming world credits for real world dollars).

For some reason, it's news that the NPR show This American Life is moving to New York.  I have been walking by their Brooklyn studios daily for the past year or more.  Maybe that is just an outpost and this is a separate team moving to NYC.  I feel a little bad, I don't listen to the show, but I've been mostly off-radio unless I manage to remember to turn on the Sirius receiver (which gets two NPR channels, so I now have no excuse, do I?).