Internet

The surveillance state expands. The Patriot Act allows our phones to be wiretapped. Our email and Internet transactions leave a trail for some to follow. The police can access our GPS location data through our smartphones without a warrant. Retailers record our purchasing habits with painstaking detail. Apparently, Target studies those purchases to determine when customers are pregnant - in the second trimester, no less - for specialized marketing purposes. And now, there will be surveillance drones.

Baltimore's Afro-American newspaper has a rich photo archive - 1.5 million images dating from the Depression, World War II and the civil rights era up to today. But one of the nation's oldest African-American newspapers didn't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to digitize its historic images for the Internet age. Now, thanks to a little robot built by a former Johns Hopkins student, the effort has gotten a lot cheaper. Using off-the-shelf electronics, Thomas Smith, a 2011 Hopkins graduate, built Gado, a swiveling, motorized arm with a nozzle that uses vacuum suction to "grab" photos and place them on a scanner.

Yahoo Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., was once a high-flying Internet company. But now it's struggling to stay relevant. The company today announced it was laying off 2,000 people, or about 14 percent of its workforce. It was the biggest layoff in the company's history. It's also one of the first major moves by the company's new CEO, Scott Thompson, who took over in January. The L.A. Times notes that Thompson has to start engineering a plan to grow revenues, as its watched its share of online ad revenues dip in recent years.

At first, the video of a man being beaten and stripped in downtown Baltimore appeared to be just another tantalizing shock clip for the Internet. But in recent days, thanks to social media users as far away as California, it could prove instrumental in solving the case. Police have made no arrests in last month's attack, but they said tips were flooding in about the identity of the man shown punching a disoriented victim before others ripped off his clothes, took his belongings and humiliated him on the sidewalk outside a city courthouse.

A deeper look into this case and the law enforcement issues related to it appeared in Thursday's newspaper. Click here for that article.  There can, in fact, be a corrective mechanism when it comes to the mob mentality of the Internet.  This week, a video was posted online of a seemingly lost and disoriented man being swarmed by a group of young people, then sucker punched, robbed, and stripped naked of his clothing on...

News Roundup   •••• Like the Muppets and the Russians before them, the “Angry Birds” have taken to space. You can download the game now . I haven't reached the ending yet but I've already got a strongly-worded email to Rovio about it saved as a draft just in case. [ Rovio ] •••• Lawmakers in California and Virginia are proposing a bill that would require almost all video games to carry a warning label stating “exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior.” That makes me so angry I just want to go and punch a defenseless person and steal their coins.

Laurel police report felonies, arrests and property crimes. Prince George's County police report violent crimes and property crimes. Howard County police report major crimes, break-ins and car thefts. City of Laurel C Street, Unit block, March 16. A man made contact with a woman on Internet and agreed to meet her. During the meeting two males approached victim and placed knife to his throat, took his iPhone and money. The two males and the female all fled on foot in an unknown direction.

The flood of video images emerging from the besieged city of Homs and other rebellious towns in Syria have shocked the world with their depictions of President Bashar Assad's bloody crackdown on innocent civilians. The images, nearly all of them taken with hand-held cellphone cameras, were not made by professional journalists (most of whom have been barred from entering the country) but by ordinary Syrians caught up in the terrifying chaos of war. We rarely witness a conflict at such close range, or so intimately from the viewpoint of the participants, and perhaps for that very reason the fuzzy, slightly off-kilter immediacy of these images makes the suffering and death they record all the more gripping.

Game-show host Pat Sajak, who sent the Internet all aflutter this week when he acknowledged taping an occasional "Wheel of Fortune" episode while drunk back in his younger days, isn't fazed by his newfound online notoriety. "It's the nature of the Internet," Sajak said Friday, predicting that the furor over his remarks wouldn't outlast the weekend. "I think something else will be out there Monday. " Sajak, who splits his time between homes in the Los Angeles area and Severna Park, became a top trending topic on Google earlier this week after saying in an interview on ESPN2 that he and letter turner Vanna White would sometimes down a few margaritas between tapings.

A Woodlawn man watches online videos of Osama bin Laden, posts about jihad on his Facebook page, and — according to federal prosecutors — agrees to a plot to detonate a bomb at a military recruiting center in Catonsville. An Ellicott City teen is accused of using the Internet to solicit volunteers and money for a jihadist war in South Asia and Europe. A former Army private from Laurel comes across an Islamic website, becomes a Muslim and makes plans to join a State Department-designated terrorist group in Somalia so he can live under Sharia law. That soldier, Craig Benedict Baxam, is the most recent Marylander accused of finding his way to Islamic extremism online.