If there's one thing that's becoming increasingly clear, it's the importance of our ability to access information. Whereas in halcyon days gone by you had to lug your tools and equipment around with you, it's more likely today that your marketability depends on the specialized knowledge base you command. For me, it's what I know about language, government, and publishing that defines my capacity to enable you to communicate your objectives to others. If you want to write a grant proposal, navigate federal red tape, or write a novel and get it sold, you'll be looking for someone with my skill set. Maybe you're a lawyer, a programmer, or a professor, but whatever you do, it's very likely that you share with me a knowledge base that expires in stages—each component or area of expertise we lay claim to is constantly turning into a pumpkin in the driveway and the only mechanism of remaining viable as a useful node in the network is to continuously upgrade and retool that which we know. Which is where the gatekeepers of information enter the picture.

When Fangs Sink Deep

In the San Francisco Bay Area, there aren't that many daily papers and those that are still around fight tooth and nail for survival. There's the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Examin—er, no, scratch that last one.

The Examiner went belly up on Friday as workers arrived to find pink slips waiting for all. Here's chief photographer Dino Vournas leaving with all of his belongings, finally a photo-op himself after all these years.

The villains here are, of course, the Fangs. James Fang and his mother Florence took over the paper when the Hearst corporation was forceably divested of the paper back in 2000 as part of an anti-trust deal stemming from Hearst's acquisition of the Chronicle. From almost day one, it was clear that the Fangs knew next-to-nothing about publishing and their chaotic and dictatorial management style made it utterly clear that the Examiner was living on borrowed time. The only thing keeping it going was a weird proviso in the takeover contract that awarded the Fangs a $66.7 million subsidy from Hearst, which was paid in installments spread over three years. The Fangs, for their part as the World's Worst Gatekeepers, burned through the money like Great White playing in a tinderbox roadhouse. They ought to be wrapped in newsprint and beaten with rubber truncheons for destroying the livelihoods of so many talented people, as well as the paper that showcased writers like Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Mark Twain and, until recently, Hunter Thompson.

Sound Bites

And it sux, too, when it's attached to a pop-up browser ad. According to this report in the Chi Trib, advertising shills like Otherwise Inc., Abstract Edge, and itraffic have figured out that your eyeballs are so battle-fatigued by the relentless march of unwanted onscreen adspam that you almost don't even see it anymore, so they're helping out by adding screeching, blasting, and screaming effects to the pop-ups in order to make them exponentially more irritating. Here's Abstract Edge's CEO and Gatekeeper of the Pornographically Offensive, Doug Stone, with the pitch for noise:

"People are going to begin to expect it. Five years from now, surfing the Internet and going to a Web site without sound will be analogous to watching television with the sound turned off."

Just Helping Out

That's what Microsoft says about its new technology called Windows Rights Management Services. I don't like the looks of this at all, but it's going over gangbusters with the ubercorporations.

The new technology, announced Friday, would let companies decide who can see, copy, print or forward e-mail and other digital materials. Access to documents could even be set to expire, so older files would remain encrypted and unreadable by anyone.

Gotta Stop This

We're talking about Pennsylvania's strategy for protecting its citizens from the evils of online child pornography. The "Virtue, Liberty and Independence" state's attorney general, Mike Fisher, has been instructing ISPs to block subscriber access to "at least 423 Web sites around the world."

Of course, since lots of sites rely on virtual hosting and redirect servers, this means that one suspected kiddie porn page on a server can take down a big chunk of the Web with it when Gatekeeper Fisher decides it's time to apply a little censorship.

In one extreme case, a single Web site, www.a000.net, shared its numerical address with 970,411 other sites.

Get 'Em While You Can

For right now, this would be replica badges. But figure that anything that a terrorist could conceivably exploit to advantage is going to become harder to obtain.

Here's New York congressdude Anthony Weiner (D-Queens and Brooklyn):

"There have been apartment push-ins and robberies all over the city because of people wearing the false badges, which are generally made a little cheaper but can look dead-on."

Ravenalia

[Update] The Raven now has a search function over to the right in the navlinks section. Powered by Google. Our thanks to Xian at RFB for making this a lot less painful than it could have been.

2:12:22 PM