There are people that do things out of the goodness of their hearts and Steve Hunter is one of them. Steve along with many other politically conscious individuals have turned their PC’s into proxies so that people in countries without access to an uncensored web can surf in freedom. Unfortunately, he didn’t expect to become a censor himself…

Mr. X first visited CNN.com and a few other media pages, but when Hunter checked his psiphonode log again hours later, he discovered Mr. X had moved on to a search for nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears.

Then he spent five hours on hard-core sex sites.

“I was pretty pissed off,” says Hunter. “I trusted that, as a person in certain vulnerable circumstances, he would act accordingly and behave himself. He didn’t.”

Source: Forbes

Apple has banned access to MySpace at their retail stores, but not for the conventional reasons of keeping employees productive. The ban deals with loitering customers…

An Apple Store employee (who does not work in the Fifth Avenue store), confirmed to CNET News.com that this has been an ongoing problem. “MySpace is a big issue for the Apple stores because people come in, Photobooth themselves (using Macs’ built-in webcams), then stick their picture up on their MySpace account and loiter at machines for hours,” the source said in an e-mail. “It is especially troublesome at the flagships and high-volume stores, and for a while there was no official word on how to deal with it.”

In some of the Apple flagship stores where traffic is extremely high, having people hang out all day without buying anything is bad for business.

Source: CNET News

On May 15th, Japan’s powered by CISCO NTT East Network went down and disconnected millions of customers for over seven hours. It was estimated that over two to four thousand CISCO routers were at the cause of this fiasco. It’s definitely not a good time to be holding CISCO Stock.

Although it appears that CISCO routers were the culprit, NTT may still be considering an upgrade to newer CISCO hardware, given that the outage was partly caused by router capacity. Wow, they certainly are forgiving.

Source: Network World

This is one of those situations where you really have to scratch your heads. A judge is being asked to preside over a case where there is strong Internet based evidence against Terrorists, but claims he doesn’t even know what a website is…

“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”

It’s not a good day to be the prosecution…

Source: Scientific American

A study by Shop.org, an online sales tracking site has deduced that online clothing sales have overtaken online computer sales for the very first time. Well, considering some people are crazy enough to pay a few hundred dollars for a belt, I guess it was only a matter of time…

Shoppers spent $18.3 billion on clothes, accessories and shoes ordered over the Internet last year, according to the study conducted by Forrester Research Inc. Consumers bought about $17.2 billion worth of computer products online in 2006.

Source: Dallas News