Apparently a tourist from New Zealand picked up a $9 MP3 player in a thrift store in Oklahoma and discovered a few weeks later that it was full of US military data including soldiers names, cell phone numbers and mission briefings.

According to CNN, “The files included the home addresses, Social Security numbers and cell phone numbers of U.S. soldiers. The player also included what appeared to be mission briefings and lists of equipment deployed to hot spots in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Scary stuff. Yet another reason why high quality encryption should be built into pretty much every electronic gadget that we carry. Unfortunately it is usually an afterthought or difficult to use.

What information do you carry around with you every day that you really wouldn’t want to lose? (hint: check the pictures on your cell phone.

What do you get when you take several million people and cram them together at a single event? Beyond all the normal jokes about lack of bathrooms (and in case of this week’s inauguration frozen toes) you get no mobile single. The New York Times is reporting on all the preparation that the various mobile companies have taken to make sure that everyone who wants to text, call, twitter or email send photos of the Obama inauguration can do so.

“The largest cellphone carriers, fearful that a communicative citizenry will overwhelm their networks, have taken the unusual step of asking people to limit their phone calls and to delay sending photos. The carriers are also spending millions of dollars to temporarily and substantially upgrade their networks in Washington.”

My bet is that everyone will ignore the plea to limit use and will watch the inauguration with their phone either bolted to their head or held out in front of them taking pictures. Heck, even Obama is likely going to be tapping away on his Blackberry. It will be interesting to see whether they actually get a signal.

I guess this was to be expected but a Chinese government research group is now reporting that China surpassed the United States in total Internet users in 2008.

“The number of Web surfers in the country grew by nearly 42 percent to 298 million, according to the China Internet Network Information Center’s January report. And there’s plenty of room for growth, as only about 1 in every 4 Chinese has Internet access.”

Of course, the majority of these users see the cleaned up version of the Internet that is presented by the great firewall of China but it is still pretty impressive. I wonder what 2009 and 2010 will bring?

The New Zealand police recently used Facebook to get out the message, or specifically the pictures, of a would-be safe cracker they captured on a security camera.

“The Queenstown police are calling it their first Facebook arrest. The police department created its online presence on the site just two months ago, said Constable Sean Drader.”

It is really interesting to see law enforcement embrace Web 2.0 to improve their ability to catch criminals. I wonder when the first police department will go up on Twitter? It would be the Internet version of the police scanner.

This kid is a texting maniac. Apparently Reina Hardesty managed to create a 400 page long AT&T bill while on winter break.

“She messages a core of “four obsessive texters” - all girls between the ages of 12 and 13 - on her LG phone. Reina had a karaoke birthday party, and while other people were singing, she was texting her best friend sitting right next to her. She even texted her friends to brag about the high number of text messages she had logged when her parents got the statement. Her texting soared last month because “it was winter break and I was bored,” Reina told her parents”

LG should grab her as a spokesman for their phones. They obviously can handle the abuse.

Apparently the police in France have got a lot more to do rather than walk up and down the street looking for parking violators so they have made their parking meters intelligent so they notify them when a car overstays its welcome.

With the exception of eliminating that feeling of relief you get when you get back to your car, you are over your time yet there is no ticket, this seems to me to be one of those ideas where the only comment is “about time”. I’d rather have the police out catching bad guys as opposed to checking meters. Now if we could only convince the meters to email us when they are getting close to being out of time so we can add money virtually and avoid that mad dash outside in the middle of a meeting to feed the meter. Better yet, just have the meter read an RFID tag on the car and bill me for the time used.

Welcome to Web 2.0…parking meter style.

The blogsphere has been going crazy the last few days speculating on what Steve Job’s “hormonal imbalance” and decision to skip the MacWorld keynote means for Apple and more importantly all the cool toys they release a couple of times per year.

I think xkcd has the best take on it though:

This is pretty amazing - the Air Force has actually formalized a “counter-blogging” process that they deploy when a blogger writes something that is negative concerning Air Force or the US government.

Wired did a full article on this process but suffice it to say, the Air Force is treating blogging like everything else they do - with a field manual!

Sometimes the web absolutely amazes me. A year and a half ago I was playing around with a new video camera and my wife took some video of a baby squirrel that we had living in our back yard. For fun I ran it through iMovie and put it up on YouTube.

That video has 15,000+ views and 69 comments. Absolutely amazing. It also demonstrates that some people have a lot more free time than I seem to.

I generally feel that I’m hooked into the buzz out there as I spend a good hour or so each day reading blogs, commenting and trying to keep up with the massive amount of change that happens online and off each day.

Then ReadWriteWeb comes out with their list of 10 mobile social networks to check out and I haven’t heard of even a single ONE of them! Who has time for all this? I barely even manage to keep my Facebook status even remotely accurate.