We had to minimize the myspace window for long enough to read about Attorney General Tom Reilly's latest effort to protect the kids. A couple of months ago he was hot on keeping predators away from children on myspace. This month the AG and gubernatorial candidate is taking issue with the terms and conditions of Xanga. To be honest, Friendster was the new hotness when we first got into the whole internet-as-social-network thing (well, alright, we had a .plan file on our VAX and dabbled in IRC before Windows 95). We missed out on the livejournal revolution (our avatar sucked so we just abandoned the stie). And with all the time we spend trolling YouTube, Flickr, and Myspace there isn't much left over to have gotten into Xanga. That and we've never been much of a diarist. Not that there's anything wrong with that. There are many users who make one of their online homes at Xanga. With a minimum user age of 13 there is an opportunity for kids who aren't old enough to vote, and some of them not even to drive, to grab a spot on the web and share a whole lot of information about themselves to the online community. Where we take careful steps to keep stuff off our myspace profile that we wouldn't want our employers to see, the concern isn't the same for the younger set. Tom Reilly is hoping to win favor with the voting age population by taking on the Xanga policies to add safeguards for kids. Protecting the children is always a popular election year issue. Our suggestion – go after myspace Tom. A 30 year old who is friends with entirely too many 14 year olds for anyone's good.
Results tagged “attorneygeneraltomreilly”
Two days after the I-90 connector tragedy, answers are starting to surface. Unfortunately, none of them are what you’d want to hear. Given the history of mismanagement surrounding the Big Dig project, it should come as no surprise that problems were discovered as early as 1999, when at least five bolts in the connector failed routine testing.
Bostonist can hardly open the paper these days without seeing another story about Attorney General Tom Reilly's intervention in the investigation of a car crash in Southboro. Our first inclination was to tune the whole thing out and wait for it to blow over, but with each passing day, we fall further and further behind - we're getting the feeling that some time soon, we're going to find ourselves needing to know and totally unprepared, like that time in our senior year of high school we wrote a detective story on the back of our Trig. test because we didn't know any of the answers (Sorry, Mrs. Doulis). So, we decided to go back over the news and brush up on Drunken-teen-car-crash-gate (yeah, we hate the -gate suffix, but it's fun when you stick it on something long and unwieldy).
. . . OK, that part about the steel cage match isn't true . . . yet. But Secretary of State William Galvin, whose heart never really seemed in the race, is now officially out of contention for the governor's job, which will be open in 2006 assuming Mitt Romney decides to make a run for the White House (and who knows, really? Yesterday, after all, he weighed in on a matter of pressing concern...
Remember when the SJC ruling allowing gay marriage was still brand new, and the Governor wanted to use some legal procedures to keep it from going into effect, but Attorney General Tom Reilly refused to play along, saying that the court's decision was the law and it had to be respected? "How principled," Bostonist thought to ourself at the time, "Reilly is admittedly against gay marriage, but he respects the role of the courts...
Since Bostonist can’t read German we’ve got no idea what they’re trying to get across to us, but we may be a target. Some have speculated that bloggers may be the targets of the latest spam attack. We’ve been reading some blogs that have actually even helped us understand what the spammers are talking about with their statements in German. The latest attack seems to be hitting GMail users worse than others. This is perhaps because GMails spam definitions haven't kept up and the Sober.Q messages are making it to the inbox. Google might not keep our mail safe but with Google's language tools we can find out what our spam is saying.
George Santayana said that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But George Bernard Shaw said, more astutely, we think, "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." As exhibit one to illustrate the latter point, Bostonist offers Attorney General Tom Reilly and his bold promise on Sunday that, if elected governor, he will not raise taxes. Bostonist seems to recall that back in 1988, a certain Republican candidate...