Legislators in California – that state of the eternal budget crisis – have decided that it’s a good idea to spend money trying to force Google to blur Google Maps images of what are known as “soft targets” for terrorists, such as schools, churches, hospitals, and government buildings, to protect them against terrorist attacks. Because you know, terrorists can’t find an address without Google Maps.

If Sebastian Boucher thought that encryping the data on his hard drive would protect him from prying eyes, he may have been right. But if the Derry, New Hampshire resident, who is originally from Canada, thought that it would protect his 5th Amendment right against self incrimination, he may have another think coming.

It’s no secret that Google is scanning entire books and putting them on the Internet. In fact, we reported their first wholesale scanning project – scanning books from five major libraries – more than four years ago. That lead to outcries and debates over whether Google’s scanning of books was copyright infringement, and sure enough, in what seemed like a New York minute, the Author’s Guild sued Google over that scanning.

The Google Streetview lawsuit filed by Aaron and Christine Boring, claiming invasion of privacy because the Google Street View van snapped pictures after going down their posted, private road, has been dismissed by the Court.

Yes, it’s true – we couldn’t make up a story like this. A 14 year old Wauwatosa, Wisconsin girl has been arrested for disorderly conduct after refusing to stop texting during math class, and then hiding her cell phone among her buttocks and claiming she had no cell phone on her. The girl, whose name is being withheld, but whose parents are named Brian and Lynn, is a student at Wauwatosa East High School.

Facebook has responded to the concern engendered by the new Facebook TOS with a post by none other than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself. In his comments, Zuckerberg tries to allay the fears of Facebook users by saying that even though the new Facebook TOS says that Facebook can use all user-generated content however they want, and forever, they wouldn’t really do so. Unfortunately, that doesn’t cut it.

An 18-year-old boy has been charged with blackmailing as many as 31 teen boys into having sex with him. Anthony Stancl – who calls himself Tony Stancil – of New Berlin, Wisconsin, tricked his victims by posing as a girl on Facebook, and having his victims send nude pictures and videos of themselves to “her”. Then Anthony Stancil told them that if they didn’t have sex with him, or let him perform a sex act on them, that he would post the pictures and videos to the Internet.

A new proposed Federal camera phone law would require all cell phone cameras to make a “click” sound when snapping a picture (to emulate the sound of a shutter snap), and would further require that there be no means of disabling the click sound. The proposed “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act”, introduced by Republican Congressman Peter King, from New York, is presumably aimed at reducing the instances of upskirting, and of people surreptitiously using their cell phone to snap pictures of credit cards and other identity-stealing activity.

A New York court has upheld New York’s affiliate sales tax law, dubbed “The Amazon Tax”, which requires that sales tax be collected for all sales originating in New York pursuant to a commission agreement (such as an affiliate program), regardless of the fact that the merchant is not actually in New York – such as Amazon.

A Federal court has ruled that an adult user of an adults-only website (in this case Sex Search.com) has no recourse against the site after having been tricked by an underaged user into believing that she was an adult when they had sex. The case against SexSearch .com by “John Doe” was brought after Doe learned the hard way that the woman with whom he was having sex was not 18, as she had claimed, but only 14.

Starting tomorrow, January 1, 2009, sex offenders in Georgia will be required by law to provide the state with all of their Internet usernames, email addresses, screen names, and passwords. Georgia joins Utah in this requirement.

The government of Vietnam is getting ready to clamp down on the thriving Vietnamese blogging culture. In fact, the Vietnamese government is putting in place new regulations aimed at curbing just about any form of free speech in Vietnamese blogs. The new regulations, approved this month, include rules that ban all posts that the government feels undermine the national security of Vietnam or that disclose Vietnamese state secrets. The rules, written by the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications, also ban any posts that contain “inaccurate information” that could potentially damage the reputation of individuals and organizations.

It’s no surprise that today’s teens are more advanced than ever. Not only are today’s teens more advanced on an academic level and a technological level, but they are more advanced on a sexual level as well. Everything from the Internet to cell phones offer teens a perfect outlet to express themselves sexually. Unfortunately, these same outlets allow teens to exploit one another sexually, leading to what amounts to criminal activity without the teen ever realizing he or she has committed a crime.

An Australian court has allowed someone to be served with notice of a lawsuit – by message on Facebook!

The case against Lori Drew, the woman who was involved in the creation of a fake MySpace character that eventually lead to the suicide of troubled teen Megan Meier, who was the target of Drew’s charade, has concluded, and the Internet is in an uproar over the verdict.