The United States Postal Service (USPS) is in deep financial trouble, in large part due to the advent of email, and online bill paying and other services. Now, in what can only be described as the Post Office taking a page from election year partisan smear campaigns, the USPS is attacking the Internet as dangerous and unreliable, and touting postal mail as safe and good for business. “A refrigerator has never been hacked,” starts the television advertisement, which is primarily aimed at businesses.

The Hacktivist group ‘Anonymous’, most recently best known for its role in attacking sites that withdrew services from Wikileaks after the infamous Wikileaks leak of the U.S. State Department documents, has announced that they intend to hack Facebook and take Facebook down – apparently permanently – on November 5th. (November 5th is Guy Fawkes Night (or Guy Fawkes Day, depending on your bent) in the U.K., honoring the day that, back in 1605, Guy Fawkes was caught beneath the House of Lords, guarding a cache of explosives intended to be used to assassinate King James I.)

Retail giant Walmart is now offering streaming video rentals right from its website. Having acquired the VUDU streaming video service last year, Wal-mart is now mainstreaming (pun intended) its streaming service by making it available front and center on the Walmart.com site.

Barely two years ago, networking giant Cisco purchased the Flip video camera (by buying Pure Digital, the makers of the Flip camera) and folded the Flip USB video camera business into the Cisco brand. This week Cisco has announced that they are killing the division, and killing the Flip camera, and a lot of people are pretty unhappy about it. Fortunately, the Flip camera is still available for purchase (links below); unfortunately, it won’t be supported. On the other hand, the Flip camera is so darned simple and straight-forward, it doesn’t need a whole lot of support.

Usually it’s the feminists who are outraged by the actions of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons, but this time he’s raised the ire of the animal rights activists, including (but by no means limited to) PETA (which stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). It’s not hard to understand – in this day and age people are more likely than not to be upset by the killing of an elephant, let alone by the braggadocio posting of a video of the deed. And despite the timing, the GoDaddy elephant video is no April Fool’s joke – it’s all too real.

If you think that politics makes for strange bedfellows, take a look at the effort to raise public awareness about cybercrime. Because we’ve seen no stranger pairing than the partnership between rapper Snoop Dogg (of Snoop Doggy Dogg fame) and Internet security outfit Symantec, of Norton Antivirus fame. In their “Hack is Wack” (“wack” as in “wacky”, even though we think it should be “Hack is Whack” as in “we’re going to whack those hackers” – but what do you expect from someone who spells it “Dogg” instead of “Snoop Dog”?) contest, average Joes and Janes can submit a rap-like anti-cybercrime message of any length under two minutes, in the hopes of winning a prize that includes a tricked-out laptop, a trip for two to LA to meet with Snoop’s management, and two tickets to a Snoop Dogg concert. Woof.

In an Internet law ruling that is not only the first of its kind, but that may have wide implications – indeed worldwide implications – for Internet law, privacy law, and Google and any other sites that host images, three Google executives have been sentenced to 6 months in prison by an Italian court, over the public posting of a video of a disabled boy with Downs syndrome being subjected to bullying by four bullies, in Turin, Italy. The three convicted Google executives are Google Privacy Director Peter Fleischer, Senior VP David Carl Drummond (formerly director of Google Italy), and George De Los Reyes, a retired Google financial executive.

Blockbuster Video has announced that users will be able to watch thousands of movies from the Block buster catalog on their cell phones in the near future. Part of Blockbuster’s On Demand service, Blockbuster says that compatible mobile phones will have “on-the-go download access to Block buster’s digital library of thousands of current BLOCKBUSTER OnDemand movies.”

A rash of seemingly pointless spam (no links, no payload, no effort to get private information) is making the rounds, each one inquiring about the cost to get some form of music download, and each coming from a fake Gmail address, such as d12treskey@gmail.com, petersons.production@gmail.com, winstonfinancial@gmail.com and petrov.gazprom@gmail.com.

Microsoft has announced the new HD Zune (“Zune HD”), which features HD video (along the lines of high definition TV (HDTV)), as well as HD radio. In the portable MP3 player wars, this leapfrogs the Zune ahead of the iPod Touch, with the Microsoft Zune being the first to market with HD video and the first to market with one of the first portable HD radio receivers anywhere.