The console is not meant to directly compete with the latest, powerful devices like Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or the Wii. Rather, said Zeebo CEO John F. Rizzo, it is targeted at consumers in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil and Eastern Europe who generally can't afford the latest high-end consoles, or the games published for them. In many of these countries, cell phone service is more readily available and cheaper than wired broadband.

Zeebo hopes that by improving on systems like Mega Drive and offering wireless downloads of games, it will attract the emerging middle classes of India, China and Brazil to modern video games.

Syria’s use of a kangaroo court to criminalize even the mildest forms of dissent and free speech

"All new technologies hit this point," says Mike Butcher, editor of the new media blog Tech Crunch Europe, who has been using Twitter for almost three years. "You always have these old crusties who have been on it for a while, and then a generation of 'newbies' turn up as if it's something they have just invented." The scale of the exponential boom in Twitter's popularity, however, is "really unusual", he says. Far from killing off the site's popularity among early adopters, he argues that "the power of any network grows exponentially as the number of people using it grows." A world in which many more people are tweeting, and those tweets are fully searchable, would potentially allow a real-time search facility of "the consciousness of the planet".

How many photos of you are there on Facebook that you’re completely unaware of? Israeli-based Face.com will help you find them with ‘Photo Finder,’ a Facebook app that uses facial recognition to help members locate untagged photos of themselves and their friends.

Face.com claims to be able to perform facial recognition on all one billion photos currently uploaded into Facebook every single month using only a few machines.

The IDF say 1,166 Palestinians were killed during the conflict, of whom 709 were "terror operatives". A Palestinian rights group says the toll was 1,434, including 960 civilians, 235 fighters and 239 uniformed police.

The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.

for candidates like Mr. Paul, Twitter is an organizing tool rather than a glimpse behind the curtain.

the truth is, they are a brand.

The government's approach to the issue of privacy is not unlike a rat hooked on heroin. It just can't get enough of our personal information.

The government promises not to look at the content of messages themselves, and restrict itself to who communicates with whom. This seems ludicrous. If two terrorist suspects are emailing each other frequently, on Facebook or anywhere itself, it's difficult to believe security services won't try to discover the content of the messages. Somewhere in the legislation – either in an amendment to RIPA or a clause of the communications data bill – there will be a power, in 'exceptional circumstances' to read content. And 'exceptional circumstances' tend to become much less exceptional than originally intended.

“It’s a very dangerous network because it’s all centralized,” he said, “not only on a technological level, where it goes through one set of servers — but it also goes through one set of business interests that’s anything but transparent.” Danger may sound a bit overzealous for a Web service that barely existed two years ago, but for a media landscape in the middle of a profound shift, two years can be the span between eras. Twitter is becoming a major source for news, commerce and free expression and, as with a free press itself, defenders don’t want a few profit-motivated individuals making all the decisions about how it should evolve. Like Facebook and YouTube before it, Twitter is now transitioning from a freely available, much-loved Web service to a well-funded business venture looking to cash in on the audience and cachet it built in its freewheeling early days.

Both critics have installed their own smaller, open-source micro-messaging systems outside of Twitter’s domain. Laporte calls his the Twit Army. The software they’re using was developed by Evan Prodromou, a developer in Montreal. Prodromou is the force behind Laconica — an open-source, Twitter-like system that anyone can install; hundreds of administrators already have, creating a dispersed, decentralized network of Twitter clones that can all talk to one another. Prodromou compares the state of micro-messaging to the early days of consumer e-mail. In the early 1990s, the e-mail world was dominated by proprietary dial-up entities like CompuServe, MCI and Prodigy. But because those systems were competitive, they didn’t connect to one another, and you could send messages only to people inside your own service. “I couldn’t send you e-mail and you couldn’t send me e-mail,” Prodromou explained. “We were on these separate islands. Making the change to an open standard for Internet e-mail has meant e-mail has become ubiquitous. I think that’s where we’re at now with microblogging.”

It was interesting to know that I was some people’s only source for the news.