Apparently you can add comments to any website (or beside any website) as long as you don’t mind sending google a list of all the websites you visit. These comments can be seen only by other sidewiki users.

The potential for tracking makes me uneasy. However, any application that makes large companies and governments cringe because they fear what the people may say is great in my book.

http://pharmexec.findpharma.com/pharmexec/Marketing/Sidewiki-Whats-Pharma-to-Do/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/637271?contextCategoryId=47505

http://inventorspot.com/articles/twitter_google_sidewiki_wikileaks_cant_be_gagged_33720

It comes in google toolbar and firefox addon flavors, but the addon has bugs.

Google’s official blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/help-and-learn-from-others-as-you.html

A bunch of pi**ed off site owners arguing with google:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?tid=65cd1ca77affd341&hl=en&fid=65cd1ca77affd341000474c549416254

Maybe after google popularizes it another company will remake it with a friendlier privacy policy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/oct/28/costs-piracy-filesharing-mandelson

Lord Mandelson’s proposals to cut off “persistent” file sharers do not make financial sense, according to estimates of its cost put forward by those who would have to implement it.

British Telecom and Carphone Warehouse estimate that running the enforcement system would cost about £2 per broadband line per month – a total of £24 per broadband line per year. With 17.6m broadband connections in the UK as of September, means it would cost £420m annually to run a system to defeat a problem the music industry complains costs it £200m per year.

Lord Mandelson said that “ISPs and rights-holders will share the costs, on the basis of a flat fee that will allow both sides to budget and plan.”

If the costs of running the system are equally shared between rights-holders and ISPs, that means that ISPs will have to push up bills for the majority of law-abiding customers who do not download illegally, while the rights-holders spend as much as they claim they are losing.

A man got the minimum sentence of 14 days in jail Thursday for possessing child pornography — stories about sex involving teen girls and incest he wrote himself and never tried to publish or share.

Judge Hugh Fraser called the facts in the case of Michael Jay Thomas “rather unique” because it dealt only with written material.

Thomas, 43, pleaded guilty to one count of possessing child pornography. The 10 stories found on a computer hard drive are now sealed.

“We don’t have real, live victims in this particular case,” defence lawyer Catherine Huot said in sentencing submissions.

Thomas has to submit a DNA sample to the national registry and will be a registered sex offender for a decade.