Below The Beltway

The Vatican Website, now in Latin:
[S]tarting today, in addition to its Italian and English and German and Spanish and Portuguese and French versions, the Vatican web site — and quite a sophisticated and attractive site it is — has just added a Latin version as well.
Hey, if this catches on, I may have to work [...]

A Saudi Arabian woman was the victim of another insane honor killing recently for the “crime” of having a Facebook profile:
A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged.
The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the [...]

Two stories in two different newspapers today highlight the extent to which our technological age has created a new kind of generation gap.
First, today’s New York Times reports on the ways that teenagers have turned to text-messaging to create a new zone of privacy from their parents:
AS president of the Walt Disney Company’s children’s book [...]

Apparently, you can never really leave Facebook:
Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract.
Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.
While the Web site offers users the option [...]

The battle for internet freedom suffered another setback today when Australian leaders announced plans to make filtering mandatory for all internet feeds:
Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says new measures are being put in place to provide greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites.
Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service [...]

Microsoft issued a security patch this week that crashes Internet Exploder:
December 19, 2007 (Computerworld) — Microsoft Corp. acknowledged late yesterday that security patches issued last week for Internet Explorer (IE) crippled the browser for some users, but rather than rework the fix, the company offered up a registry hack work-around.
The confirmation and work-around came a [...]

Yesterday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would impose strict reporting requirements on web site operators and public wi-fi providers:
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines [...]

Syria has joined the list of dictatorships realizing that the Internet is not their friend:
DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syrian users of Facebook said on Friday the authorities had blocked access to the social network Web site as part of a crackdown on political activism on the Internet.
“Facebook helped further civil society in Syria and form civic [...]

Because no matter how much spam my email address gets bombarded with, almost none of it gets through.

I’m still not quite sure how it is that anyone thinks that social networking sites Facebook or Myspace are going to make anyone money, but Facebook has been the subject of a bidding war of sorts between Microsoft and Google, and it looks like Microsoft won:
SAN FRANCISCO — Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has [...]