Rest In Peace, T-Mobile Sidekick

It wasn't my first Smartphone - the Kyocera 6035 running PalmOS was that - but the Sidekick may have been the best pre-iPhone smartphone. It provided the killer e-mail experience of a Blackberry at about 1/10th the cost, and also offered excellent texting, good-enough web surfing, and a real App Store years before Apple. It was the T-Mobile Sidekick. And it's best feature was full cloud integration - years before anyone else got it right - your contacts, e-mails, photos, everything was always available online from any computer. But that cloud service goes away starting today, relegating a titan of smartphone usability to being just another Android phone.

Rest in Peace, Sidekick. You will be missed.

Egypt hits their Internet Kill-Switch

The Obama administration has been trying to pass a law giving the President an "internet kill-switch" to allow him to effectively shut down the internet in the case of a national crisis. Presumably, this is to allow us to resist an attack being coordinated over the internet. But as civil liberties groups have reminded us time and time again, the most-common use of such "kill switches" has been to stifle dissent.

Now, Egypt has flipped its "internet kill switch" in an attempt to disrupt protests convulsing the nation. These protests - like the ones in Tunisia last month and Iran last year - have largely been organized over social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) which allowed protesters freedom to communicate outside of traditional means.

Before we give our government the power to shut down such a powerful communication medium, we need to decide if there are enough "good" uses for such power to offset the many, many potential "evil" uses for it.

R.I.P. Geocities

The Nomad's very first web page was on Geocities. "The Nomad's Wanderings" was a regurgitation of the various Star Wars Episode 1 rumors that were out and about before the premiere. I checked, and no - it no longer exists (although I am sure an enterprising person could find it on the Wayback Machine). I loved that little site, even though I was pretty much the only person who ever read it. So it was with sadness that I read today that Yahoo is going to permanently shut down Geocities. Then again, I have not had a reason to visit a Geocities page in years, so it was not a shock.

Rest in peace, Geocities. You'll be missed.