If Donald Trump is a “Possible Republican Candidate” for President Then So Am I

donald trump republican presidential candidate
Donald Trump uses a patented circular-breathing / arm-pumping technique to add heft and bounce to his billion-dollar hair (AP photo)

Attention-starved real estate tycoon and reality television superstar Donald Trump is going to run for president in 2012, according to the media.

Visibly embarrassed after being shamed by The President, The Donald, and The Public at large after seeing the clamp come down on a far-right fringe group called The Birthers, the media establishment gladly passed the mic off to Trump on Wednesday.

“I am so proud of myself because I’ve accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish,” an elated Trump said to a crowd of people cheering, no doubt in anticipation that the billionaire would hand out a thousand-dollar bill with every handshake.

And with that, the 64-year-old businessman who has erected major skyscrapers bearing his name in the majorest of cities became the frontrunning candidate to win the 2012 Republican Presidential primary.

Many media outlets reported that The Birthers stated an intent to scrutinize the document but failed to reference the group’s conclusion as posted on birthers.org Wednesday: “…[f]orgery or not, now we can debate the true meaning of a natural born citizen.” Whatever that means.
In today’s media climate, when even the New York Times mistakes an Onion parody cover of Teen Beat featuring President Obama as the real thing, we’re calling on Donald Trump to fill the L.A. River aqueducts with naturally flowing spring water, fund the salaries of laid-off LAUSD teachers and while he’s at it, to find life on Mars.

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Sony Sued for Letting Hackers Break Into PlayStation User Database

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Photo by pajamo via LAist Featured Photo Pool.

If you’re a Sony PlayStation user, you probably noticed that you couldn’t connect to the gaming console’s online network for the past ten days or so. Most figured it was probably just a network outage. But as we learned Tuesday — one week into the outage — Sony deliberately pulled the plug on its online network as well as its streaming and on demand content services on April 20. PlayStation’s unencrypted user database was breached, allowing hackers access to info entered by the network’s 77 million users.

If you are one of the 77 million Sony Playstation users with a PlayStation Network or Qriocity account, a class-action lawsuit was filed on your behalf Wednesday.

The lawsuit (full text), filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Kristopher Johns, 36, argues that Sony was negligent in allowing the hacker intrusion, which the plaintiff claims never should have occurred in the first place.

“Sony broke its contract and violated its customers’ trust,” Caleb Marker, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said to the Wall Street Journal.

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Happy ‘Wear Your Birth Certificate to Work’ Day

In honor of the release of what White House officials claim to be President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate, intended to put an end to the “silliness” that is the “birther” argument, I present you with this T-shirt.

Be proud to be an American… and to have an American president!

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My Phone Knows Everything About Me and I’m Cool With That

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Andrew Hyde gets around. The iPhone Tracker app confirms this. (Photo via flickr).

Andrew Hyde sold all of his worldly possessions last August and began a trip around the world. He makes no secret of this — its detailed on his website. We’re well aware that personal information becomes vulnerable whenever we agree to the terms of service of yet another fun geo-location mobile app as it typically utilizes information from the phone’s positioning to track real-time location. But this week, geodata geek and author Pete Warden released an open-source iPhone application that exploits a file in iPhone 4 (or iPad 3G) containing all recorded geographic data in the phone’s history.

The information is available without a password to anyone with access to a laptop that the iPhone in question has synced with, notes Hyde. iPhones and iPads on iOS 4 record approximate the data based on the devices distance from the cell tower it is connected to at any given time. Is this something to worry about? Not really. Unless you’re a criminal with a bullshit alibi — data from cellphones and other mobile devices have been used by authorities for years.

Thanks to a California Supreme Court decision in January, no warrant is required for authorities in our state to search cell phones or mobile devices of arrestees.

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