Gearfuse

I am shocked… SHOCKED about the recent revelation that Obama has not authored any of his 418 tweets posted to his Twitter account, @BarackObama. Doesn’t he have a free second between ruling the free world and meeting with world leaders to fill us in about… oh I don’t know… what he’s eating for lunch, maybe?

While in China, Obama was quoted as saying “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.” Right, right, net neutrality, blah blah. But you’ve NEVER USED TWITTER?! And I voted for this guy?

Link

I’d hit it and then take it to a buffet in my Ford.

The real “American Beauty” looks more like this than Mena Suvari. Mena’s got a monster forehead anyway. You ever seen that thing? The size of a damn billboard.

Link

Overlord Obama has officially announced our new commander-in-geek. Vivek Kundra was proclaimed our new president of everything cool and internet-y (along with the FCC head), or the U.S. government’s Chief Information Officer if you want to get “technical” about it. See what I did there? That’s called a “pun.”

Kundra has been known to encourage open sourcing and accessible coding, as well as documenting the governments doings on the interwebz. You know, that whole “transparency” thing we’ve forgotten about in the last, oh, decade or so, give or take two years.

Link

Barack Obama clothing is everywhere these days. In order to give your even more Obama wardrobe options, UNDFTD teamed up with Geoff McFetridge to make this shirt featuring likenesses of the Democratic Presidential candidate.

UNDFTD’s Obama shirt is part of a voter registration drive. They’re releasing the shirt at an event in Las Vegas on October 4th. It’s a pretty cool shirt, but I can’t help but think that it looks a bit like a ripoff of Pharrell’s last album cover.

Link

In a terrible attempt to stay partisan, we’ll just point you to the link on the iTunes store where you can download a Obama/Biden ‘08 iPhone application. It has campaign news, an Election Day ticker, donate button and plenty of other information. You can even call your friends to get the word out. Anyone used it? Decent? Since McCain has admitted he’s out of touch with technology, I doubt we’ll see an iPhone app from him anytime soon.

Link

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin may be working the whole naughty librarian vibe, but she’s apparently having a little bit of trouble with the internet. After John McCain revealed that he had chosen the Alaskan governor as his running mate, editors discovered that several new users had spent hours leading up to the announcement making 30 flattering edits to Palin’s Wikipedia entry. While some Wikipedians gave the pro-Palin editors awards for their work, many others made accusations of internet sock-puppetry. Editing on Palin’s page has since been restricted.

(more…)

Apparently, people may have actually listened to Vince and sent out fake Vice Presidential pick announcements in advance of Barack Obama’s VP selection. Obama generated a lot of buzz for the decision by telling the press that he’d announce his choice via text messages and email blasts to his supporters.

Joe Biden was named as the Vice presidential candidate this morning, but before the news actually broke there were tons of hoax emails. CNN reports there were scams claiming that Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, and Kathleen Sebelius had been chosen. One of the e-mails came Friday morning from “obama08campaign@aol.com” and reached many prominent Washington reporters. I wonder if the pranksters behind these announcements were actually hoping to influence the selection process or if they just did it for the lulz.

Link

Everybody knows it can be dangerous to have porn on your computer at work, but now it seems like none of your files are safe from prying eyes. Thanks to some recent court rulings and new policies at the Department of Homeland Security, any traveler crossing the US border can have their laptops and other electronic devices seized and examined by the feds.

There are tips for encrypting your data online, but it seems like old fashioned password protection is still the best way to go. Still, even that’s not a sure thing. For the time being, it’s probably not a good idea to have anything on your computer or camera that you wouldn’t want to share with the US government while traveling abroad.

Next time I cross the border I plan on bringing nothing but a flash drive stocked with explicit pictures– of my fat white ass. Search that fools!

Link (via)

[Photo: Nat'l Archives]

Each day, as I read the news and write pieces on technology, art or even just my blog, I’m almost always listening to National Public Radio. More specifically, I listen to my hometown NPR station, WHYY 91 FM from Philadelphia, PA. WHYY offers a unique listening experience that’s really unmatched on both traditional and Internet radio. With shows like Car Talk, All Things Considered and Fresh Air (which is produced in Philadelphia) in addition to a wide range of news, music and politics, I feel informed and never out of the loop.

If you’ve got some time and want to hear fresh, new content, I suggest streaming WHYY online from WHYY.org. I just open it up in iTunes and leave it on for days, usually falling asleep to it. Let us know in the comments if you have a favorite local NPR station. If you do, we’ll be sure to include it in the post so people have other sources of radio to check out.

Link

We’ve all heard enough about the presidential election in the recent months, but of what constructive use does this give us? Sure, we have a better idea of who could be running the free world for the next 4 to 8 years, but come on, we need some LOLz in our life! A change of pace from all of the politics stuff.

Thanks to some creative uses of Photoshop, we can now magically guess what our next president will look like in 4 years, by the end of their first term. We can see from past recent president’s that this job ages you a few decades in a fraction of the time. The stress just comes with the territory. So forget where America will be in four years, and rejoice in the fact that whoever is running the place will be much uglier than when they began. Hit the jump for the two other usual suspects. (more…)