Politics: September 2008 Archive Page

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail account was hacked, and some of its contents posted on the internet Wednesday. (Wired)

Was Palin's personal account fair game because she has been accused of using her personal account to conduct public business? If there really is damning evidence in that account, and a judge delivers a search warrant, I'm sure that Yahoo can pull the whole thing from a backup tape, even if Palin has deleted the account.

Seton Hill's e-mail servers go down every night from 2 to about 5:30, and I'm sorry to say that I'm often up that late, so I often use my Yahoo account when I am contacting other professors for research projects.  For along time my Yahoo account was much better at blocking spam than my university account, so I always use my Yahoo account to sign up for subscription-only content. 

I'm generally reluctant to use any e-mail account to give out grades or adjudicate disputes between student editors, and there's a boilerplate legalistic disclaimer that we're supposed to append to all our messages.  (I tack on that message where I explicitly say something about a grade or a student's performance; I don't add it to routine replies such as "Thanks for telling me how much you enjoyed my website.")

I'm looking for a current event that will be of interest to my "Writing for the Internet" students, and I wonder if this will fit the bill. But it might be a little too early in the course... we've had a brief unit on e-mail and we're talking about smileys now, but we're mostly focusing on hand-coding HTML.  Today we spent a whole class period on basic file management, since most of these point-and-clickers had never heard terms like "subdirectory," and I notice that once I start asking students to post their online work in directories ("JoeStudent/project1: and "JoeStudent/project2") there's often a bit of backsliding in the confidence level and an uptick in the tension level.

Well, I'll see how the media machine treats this story.

Great little vignette highlighting the perils of live TV reporting.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell demonstrates the perils of live television as she gamely tries to report from the Republican National Convention during the midst of a major balloon drop in this clip that's amusing the chattering class the day after the two-week convention marathon has come to an end.