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In a colossally stupid move, Best Buy triggers the Streisand Effect by issuing a take-down notice to a blogger who wrote about something they didn't like.

It turns out that this group called Improve Anywhere did a funny prank where they got about 80 people to dress in khakis and blue shirts and had them all enter a Best Buy and stand around. I heard about the prank last year sometime (and I saw the video).

Now they are selling joke t-shirts based on their famous stunt and Best Buy (not surprisingly) doesn't like it. Whether they have a real claim or not, I don't know (or care), but they've issued a take-down notice to the guys over at the Laughing Squid. Who's that? Well, the Laughing Squid is a blog, not unlike many other blogs online and the key issue here is that Best Buy is trying to surpress the blogger's right to cover information by saying that he's "promoting" the shirts.

Here's one for you Best Buy, I'm covering all his articles, and the original story, plus I'm promoting blogging! Oh horrors. I wonder what they'll do now.

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Facebook has been caught with a seriously nasty tracking and monitoring program that it's unleashed upon it's users.

Their new ad software broadcasts your current activities to your facebook friends. If you just bought a ticket to a concert, your friends might see an alert to that effect. If you just bought medication for your embarassing personal issue, they might see that too. But it gets worse:

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members' activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

Well this is different. I knew that posting online can have severe negative effects on the poster, but I hadn't considered the effect on the parents.

"Whether we're talking about dad's work secrets or problems between mom and dad with their relationship," Sgt. MacDonald said.

We asked him to show us just how easy it is to find incriminating posts. It didn't take long.

"Not only do I have to live with my nagging mom, my dad does drugs. This person, Tara, says her parents are lazy alcoholics," reads Sgt. MacDonald.

He says it's not hard for police, or employers, to uncover the identity of teens from the details in their profiles.

While drugs and underage drinking are likely problems that should be dealt with, some other things should remain private:

even innocent-sounding news can do damage. "They may be talking about how their father is losing a job, and perhaps a neighbor who's the mortgage broker for the father isn't aware that the father's job is in jeopardy,"