In his Salon Machinist blog, Farhad Manjoo shows how to read any article in the Wall Street Journal online (one of the few online papers that charges money for a subscription) for free. As a bonus, he includes an explanation about why this is ethical (though he admits it's "slightly deceptive"). — Read the rest

Farhad Manjoo of Salon says,

The AP has a good scoop today. It found that Comcast directly intervenes in communication between two peers on a P2P network, closing down connections on BitTorrent, Gnutella and other systems.

Snip from that AP story:

Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Link, by — who else? — Ape Lad.

While we're at it, Salon's Farhad Manjoo has an interview with one eyewitness who seems to believe that the tasered student, Andrew Meyer, may in fact have been a bit of a troll, egging cops on for an "overreaction that would make him a viral video star." — Read the rest

A decision from The Federal Communications Commission today is seen as a partial win for Google and other entities that favor greater competition in the wireless voice and data market. Snip from NYT story:

The agency voted to approve rules for an auction of broadcast spectrum that the F.C.C.

Oh, alright, soylent green it ain't. But Pepsi will soon begin disclosing on Aquafina bottle labels that the beverage is, in fact, no more than filtered tap water — Aquatappa. Specifically, the labels will refer to a "Public Water Source." — Read the rest

Farhad Manjoo of Salon.com's Machinist blog says,

There have been lots of stories lately about the inefficiency and environmental damages caused by bottled water, but Charles Fishman has the definitive piece in Fast Company. You'll never want to drink Fiji again.

Farhad Manjoo says:

I just posted an item in Salon about a crazy Chicago Alderman who wants to ban a new radar detector that alerts drivers to red-light cameras. He's afraid that if people can learn about upcoming cameras, they will — you know — stop at the red lights.

Farhad Manjoo has a story on Salon today about what amounts to a new censorship policy at Flickr. He says,

They're blocking users in Germany, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong from turning off "SafeSearch" — meaning people there can't see anything that users have flagged "moderate" or "restricted."

Photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair shot the photograph above for NPR "Day to Day" (I'm a weekly contributor to this radio program), and the image won third place in World Press Photo, the most prestigious photojournalism competition in the world. — Read the rest

Farhad Manjoo says:

I'm not sure if this is a serious solicitation, an odd scam, or some kind of parody of the news business, but an "author and physics researcher" is selling (for $3.5 million) a flash drive that he claims contains "fact-based verifiable research that details the evidence for a major newly discovered national political-religious controversy in the United States."

Salon's Farhad Manjoo has a long feature today about new, net-based peer-to-peer loan services. These services, like prosper.com, encourage borrowers to post personal accounts of their financial situations — the kind of material that doesn't show up on a credit report, like the fact that you accumulated your debt going through school and are about to graduate into a good job — and then allows individuals to act as lenders by putting small sums together in a syndicate to make the loan. — Read the rest

Farhad Manjoo says: "My Salon colleague Katharine Mieszkowski has written a wonderful article about what to me was a little-known phenomenon — wealthy pet-owners who spend hundreds of dollars a month buying their dogs and cats raw meat. And not just any meat, but "but sustainable, antibiotic- and steroid-free meat and bones from cows, pigs and poultry raised and slaughtered on small farms." — Read the rest

Image: Inside the Astrodome (Jacob Appelbaum)

Snip from a NYT piece — the GOP sees opportunities:

Republican leaders in Congress and some White House officials see opportunities in Hurricane Katrina to advance longstanding conservative goals like giving students vouchers to pay for private schools, paying churches to help with temporary housing and scaling back business regulation.

Farhad Manjoo wrote an interesting piece about the newly-launched Huffington Post for Salon (said one of the people quoted in the article).

"One thing that works well with politically oriented sites is the sense of outrage: We gotta do something now!"

President Bush has a treasured iPod full of songs that were decanted into it by a media strategist. This makes him: a downloader, an INDUCEr, a Darknet user and an infringer. Who'd a figgered the prez for a copyfighter?

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist in the 2004 campaign.

David-Michel Davies recently went to India, and has chronicled his trip in his new blog. He discovered a treat there, called paan.

Specifically, Paan is made by taking a betel creeper leaf, adding some ingredients — the masala– and then folding it up into a triangle for chewing/consumption.

As promised, Wired News has run an extensive, in-depth followup to the Reuters Broadcast Flag story it ran last week, soliciting comment from the activists who've been working on the issue since its earliest days. This coincides with a feature by Farhad Manjoo in Salon today, too. — Read the rest

G1V3 UP! W3 0WN J00! Okay, that's probably not *exactly* what the SMS spam allegedly issued by the CIA this to military leaders throughout the mideast said, but that was more or less the point. According to this story by Jack Kelley in USA Today, and this one a day later by Farhad Manjoo in Slate, the CIA has been bombarding Iraqi generals and other officials with mobile phone text-messages, e-mail, and voicemail encouraging them to abandon their support for Saddam Hussein in exchange for — well, not being killed by the United States. — Read the rest

I'm all for enthusiasm in reportage, especially when the reporter is covering new gadgets, a subject near and dear to my heart. That being said, Farhad Manjoo's Wired News story of IBM's research-center open house reads more like a press-release than a news story. — Read the rest