Quiet Friday Morning: Department of Justice, SideStep’s Travel Guides, More
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Written By Reprise Media | June 2, 2006 | Share This
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It’s the end of a short week, the summer haze is descending, and the feeds are quiet as all get-out. Here’s a few stories we managed to bump into:
“We’re just gonna need you to go ahead and retain some records for us, mmm-kay?” The Justice Department is asking ‘net firms to do it a couple of favors. Detlev Johnson points to a Bloomberg Story detailing meetings that began last week between the Attorney General, the FBI Director, and the likes of Google, AOL and Microsoft. Uncle Sam says that the firms’ failure to retain records about emails and web searches for a “reasonable amount of time” is hindering investigations into child pornography and terrorism cases - not that they can force private companies to comply, but they’re saying it would be a big help. Privacy advocates, obviously, are thrilled.
If you want something done right…get some qualified help In late April, we covered a new activities search function implemented by travel vertical SideStep. We liked it in general, but lamented its inability to locate any worthwhile activities within the nation’s capital. Well, it apparently still can’t, but SideStep is, uh, side-stepping that difficulty with their new Travel Guides beta feature (hat tip to Brian Smith). It’s packed with tourism information about numerous worldwide destinations, furnished by content partner Frommer’s, and even includes one or two things to do in DC.
“Hi, this is Yahoo!, any messages for me?” Philipp Lenssen, the blogger behind Google Blogoscoped, has written a book called 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google, a compendium of “Google-related games, oddities, cartoons, tips, stories and everything else that’s fun.” We’re keen to read it, and we tried to come up with a couple ways ourselves: 1) short-sheet Google’s bed; 2) stuff pennies into the space between the door and the jamb of Google’s room…hmm, maybe we’d better hurry up and read that book.
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