Everyone thinks they have something to be proud about these days, and they will go through rather crazy measures to boost their ego.

Well, the law enforcement agency officials are watching.

A man from Wales was arrested after he stole sunglasses off of a charity worker, The Sun reports. He posted the video of the “Wild specs robbery” on YouTube, but the video is gone now. (Gizmodo has what’s left of it.)

The 18-year-old man was issued a formal warning and was released after questioning.

The Georgetown Hoya reported today that the university is considering a Google alternative to their internal mail system due to the Georgetown mail servers being unreliable.

The new system would run off the Google Apps for Education platform, enabling students to use … essentially, Gmail. Emails would be routed through Google’s server, preventing issues such as bounced messages or internal downtime or outages.

Will this have any ramifications to academic freedoms that students in well-known universities are entitled to? Will this be a breach of security or violation of privacy? We all know that Google does a good job based on data, but will Google be doing more than just “hosting” email?

Granted, from a system administration standpoint, Google Apps for Education does sound tempting. But it is an entirely different issue if the data that resides on a student account is “used” in any way.

Having just graduated from college myself (I still maintain my college email account having previously worked at my college computing), I know that I need not be concerned about the security of my college email account. The only people who would be able to access my account are those who have root access to the server upon which my mail resides. I know that my university isn’t data mining my mail, looking for ways to optimize for the “best user experience,” which is something that Google takes pride on offering to the public.

After reading maybe 30 or so blogs (of the 100 or so SEO blogs I have subscribed to in the last month) announcing that Danny Sullivan will be heading up Search Engine Strategies through 2007, I realize I jumped into a pretty saturated “everyone knows everyone else” search engine market. And at the end of the day (I only can blog during the evenings when I am at home due to policy), I realize that if I am to contribute something new to the table, it’s likely that I’ll stumble upon my “unique” voice sooner or later when reading someone else’s opinion.

While I think there’s nothing wrong with the 30 blogs that say pretty much the same thing (or link to each other as is the case in some instances — they’re all posted at approximately the same time, after all), my unique approach, given that I’m pretty new in town, will require something drastically different. As such, I will be bringing Techipedia a little broader for awhile to its intended arena: “Anything Tech.” I took a narrower approach for awhile as I experiment through writing my blog, but I feel as if I’m somewhat of an echo since headlines are the key to a successful thread. Success would mean that my blog needs something different — so I’m not approaching my blog like I do others by skimming the threads in my feed reader and thinking to myself after reading the title, “Hey, I saw a similar topic already; let me skip this one.”

Is YouTube caving in too soon?

On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in San Francisco to issue a subpoena requiring YouTube to turn over details about a user who uploaded dialog from the movie studio’s “Twin Towers,” according to a copy of the document.

YouTube promptly handed over the data to Paramount, which on June 16 sued the creator of the 12-minute clip, New York City-based filmmaker Chris Moukarbel, for copyright infringement, in federal court in Washington.

…YouTube chose to turn over the data, rather than simply remove the offending video from its site…

Why did YouTube give up so easily?

Let’s hope that under Google’s auspices, there will be change of heart and users will be protected. But they still should take the necessary steps:

To be sure, Google, which hopes to close the YouTube purchase by year’s end, has already taken steps to reduce the copyright liability it will inherit from the private firm.

With all of Orkut’s failures, there’s still nothing that Google is doing to drive its visitors to the site. Obviously, the plan is to give it a slow and painful death.

With my 5 friends and inactivity on my account, I’ve received a flurry of emails in the past 2 days notifying me that someone (unnamed, usually just a hyphen) has signed my wall. I decided to sign onto my inactive account and witnessed a bunch of unnecessary (and, in most cases, not even in the English language) spam with links.

I deleted the spam, but I’m certain there will be more as time progresses.

I’m surprised that Google, which is so good about combating (or at least acknowledging) spam on Gmail, decided to let their social networking site suffer this fate. There is no requirement to be someone’s friend to sign their wall, which is a prerequisite to post testimonials on Facebook and MySpace. And it’s also a shame they did nothing to make it popular, because Orkut is pretty fast (unlike MySpace) and would have had potential back in the day.

Well, at least some people are utilizing it for personal gain.