Now here’s an interesting idea. Officials in several cities in Mexico have outfitted the cities’ taxi drivers with government-provided pre-paid Grupo Iusacell cell phones, to be used to provide on-the-spot reporting of incidents such as accidents, fights, and crimes, as well as public hazards such as public lights being out, and water leaks. Dubbed the “Taxista Vigilante” program, by all accounts it is working exceedingly well.

While much of the world yesterday heard or read about the results of the U.N. probe into the conflict in Gaza, and how the U.N. has proclaimed that both Israel and Hamas are guilty of war crimes, an interesting technological fact was offered by Israel in defense of the allegations: in response to the claim that Israel bombed suspected Palestinian strongholds without regard for civilian life, an Israeli spokesperson pointed out that Israel had warned residents of Gaza by sending them MMS messages warning of the impending attacks.

Dr. James Heilman felt that it was time to demystify the psychiatric profession, and so, in his own effort to do so, he published the 10 ink blots which make up the Rorscach test, on Wikipedia. The good doctor’s action in making the Rorschach ink blots so publicly available on the Internet has lead to his being investigated, and facing charges of, well, making public that which psychiatrists wish to hold secret.

A court in France – which does not have no-fault divorce, so absent an agreement to divorce you must prove that one of the spouses did something bad – has ruled that text messages can now be used as evidence of adultery.

The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive is by no means your typical travel guide. And, it is by no means intended only for geeks. In fact, many of the places listed in The Geek Atlas are “must visit” places for any parent hoping to give their child even the semblence of a well-rounded education about science or technology, where each have come from, and where they are headed.

A Dutch boy who was mugged and robbed last year by a pair of 24-year-old twin robbers just happened to find an image of the moment before the mugging occurred, in the Google Street View on Google Earth.

Germany will be voting tomorrow on their proposed Internet censorship law, which would create a list of verboten websites (primarily dealing with the underaged in inappropriate situations) that will be targeted for official German governmental censoring. It was only a few months ago that Australia’s plan to censor websites that it deemed inappropriate or illegal blew up in its face, with the list of censored website being leaked to and widely published on the Internet.

It has come to light that none other than the Obama administration itself asked Twitter to please delay planned routine maintenance this week, so that the juggernaut of Twittering and Twitter coverage of the Iran elections and ensuing demonstrations and riots could continue without interruption.

We’ve been telling people for years not to put pictures of your children up online on the Internet. Nobody ever believes us that perfect strangers will not only find those pictures, but do inappropriate things with them. Now here’s a real-life example of this happening. In the instant case, Danielle and Jeff Smith are lucky that “all” that was done with the picture of their children is that it was blown up bigger than lifesize and used in an advertisement half-way around the world.

A website in Holland – Miljoenhuizen.nl – has been held liable for the summary that Google search turned up for its site. Yes, you read that right – they were held responsible for the fact that Google excerpted and concatenated text from their webpage in a way that suggested that the plaintiff, the BMW dealership Zwartepoorte, had gone bankrupt.

With just two days until the 20-year anniversary of the horrific massacre at Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government has censored and blocked Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Live.com and Hotmail.com, and even the new Microsoft Bing.com

The European Commission has sued the country of Sweden for failing to implement the European Union (EU) Data Retention Directive – a mandate of having in place data retention legislation aimed at codifying how and for how long an ISP must retain user data.

Twitter has boldly gone where no social media has gone before: space. More specifically, one of the current crew members of the space shuttle Atlantis, Mike Massimino, is Twittering from space.

An Irish college student has proven that journalists are using Wikipedia as a primary – and indeed only – source for their stories, without doing any fact checking whatsoever. By inserting and then tracking a fake quote in the Wikipedia entry for French composer Maurice Jarre, who died in March, 22-year old Shane Fitzgerald determined that even such august media outlets as the BBC are susceptible to the “it’s on Wikipedia, it must be true” fallacy.

The United Nations Educational Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) has unveiled the World Digital Library – a website onto which they are scanning ancient writings, pictures, and other media. And by ancient, we are talking antiquities – even now, in the UN WDL’s early stages, some of the earliest scanned images date from 8000 BC.