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.

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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.

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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!

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[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.

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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…)