The transition screen recommends you set your privacy settings to "Everyone" and helpfully preselected that for you in every instance, no matter what your previous settings were. You can, of course, select your old settings again and go about your merry, but many users won't bother or won't understand and will unknowingly leave themselves open to identity theft and other nasty things as their personal info gets spread across the land.

Well, yeah.

That was almost certainly Facebook's hope. They want more stuff to be open to all searchers. The more easily findable content there is, the more valuable Facebook is to advertisers. And your Wall comments going public means they can take on Twitter in the highly competitive unprofitable-online-chattering field. They want money, they do, and are in the business of procuring more of it. Granted, it's a bit cheesy to default everyone to the most open and unprivate settings possible — better to leave everyone's settings as they were and then let people open up if they wish — but if FBers don't read the rules they can't really complain when they lose the game.

What does bug me (and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU) about the new policies are a) some of my profile info is now public whether I want it to be or not, and b) applications can access my info, even if I'm not using them (as long as one of my friends is) and spread it about.

The first might seem harmless. Your name will be out there, can't help that, but what's ther problem with your friend list or your fan pages? Turns out you can tell an awful lot about a person by the people they friend, and while I don't join anything I'd be ashamed of, for many people having your boss notice you're a member of, say, Closeted Gay and Heavily Armed Time Bombs With Bigoted Employers could cause problems in the break room.

And applications being able to access and distribute my data without my OK just makes men hate those endless quizzes and repetitive points games even more, which I would have bet was impossible if in so doing it wouldn't immediately add the bet to my status.

So the very first thing I did, after clicking Old Settings for everything, was to hit Settings > Privacy Settings and go over them with a fine-tooth mouse. Then I went into my profile and did the only thing I could to prevent some data from getting scooped by unscrupulous scammers looking for identity theft info: I removed it. If Facebook won't let me hide info, Facebook doesn't get to look at it either.

The only real answer when it comes to guarding sensitive information online is to not put sensitive information online. It would be nice if companies would actually safeguard it for you but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty they are companies, and they are not there for you.

Here's a quick rundown of what the new privacy settings mean:

This brilliant remix shows what happens when stalkery vampires come after a real girl. Or a real slayer, anyway.

Actually, that pretty well explains it.

Meatcards.com, a new startup offering business cards laser-etched onto strips of beef jerky — because, why not? — is offering sample cards to the first people to send decent live re-enactments of one of three classic Frank Frazetta paintings. But you have to be sincere.

The FIRST TEN NON-HALFASS PICTURES RECEIVED are winners. The definition of "non-halfass" is entirely, solely, and irrevocably up to the judges, and our judgment is final. And when we say "non-halfass", we mean it. You better have a halberd and a bikini and a RIGHTEOUS expression on your face if you're going for "Fire and Ice", and SOMEBODY better be in a bikini.

Since not everyone can hustle this up that quickly — it's a pain trying to rent a dinosaur during rush hour — they're also picking the five best entries submitted before 9 am next Monday, June 22.

Everything about this appeals to me, and I hope they display every entry they get. Go read the rules just to get an idea of the true, horrible scope of this contest. And if you enter, good luck!

Sony's having a contest to promote the new Blu-Ray edition of The Ghostbusters, and it can get you to Comic-Con! Just head here and enter for your chance to win roundtrip airfare, 3 nights at the Embassey Suites, 2 days for 2 people at the San Diego Comic-Con, and more! Or lots of Ghostbuster-related merchandise; shirts, hats, the usual.

You can also head to the main Ghostbusters movie site to put yourself into the team, or upload a video of your Ghostbuster tryout.

The Ghostbusters Blu-ray edition is coming June 16th.

"Save Hiatus" remains on — sigh — hiatus while Adam and I both deal with the parts of our lives that demand money, there's still places to get your whacky space fun on. I highly recommend "The Good Ship Chronicles," by Tauhid Bondia. It's the story of the ongoing reality show based on the Starcorp Delivery/Transport ship, the SS Gossamer. Captained by Hap Manning, the ship is the last stop for less-0than-stellar crewmen who have been transferred from other ships. Manning takes that as a challenge.

The various in and outs of daily starship life, combined with the regular holovision diary entries of the crew and the occasional event as someone else screws with them for ratings, leads to a hilarious webcomic. You got your overbearing and mildly delusional captain, your competent and long-suffering first officer, your openly racist and sexist counselor, your skilled doctor banished for haviung more integrity than sense, your feisty, sexy head of security, your overweight and wheelchair-bound engineer, your too-cool-for-starschool alien rep, your brimming-with too-much-information pilot, your intern who was killed in a tragic rescuing, and more.  The artwork's as good as any webcomic I've seen and the humor rocks. Go check it out.

Just come back when we're ready, OK?

So, last week two historical books — "Transgressions" by Erastes and "False Colors" by Alex Beecroft — quietly dropped off Amazon's bestseller lists.

Not because they stopped selling, mind you, because Amazon apparently instituted a new policy of removing the sales rankings from books with "adult" content. De-ranking a book doesn't remove it from Amazon, but it does keep it from showing up in Amazon's bestseller lists (cutting way down on sales derived from browsing) and there are reports that de-ranked books aren't showing up in regular searches with any consistency.

More newly stripped books followed, lots of them. When asked about this by various puzzled authors, Amazon's rep said this: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Defensible. Annoying, but defensible. Only… there's still an awful lot of adult material on Amazon with sales rankings. Most of their adult material is still ranked. Nude photography books, explicit romances, everything by Chuck Palahniuk. In fact, judging by what has been deranked, it seems that someone at Amazon is defining "adult" as "gay."

"Transgressions" and "False Colors" are both gay historical romances. The vast bulk of what has been deranked has been books with a homosexual theme, even when the books in question had no explicit sexuality whatsoever. The sex scene in the 1928 lesbian classic "The Well of Loneliness" consists of exactly this: "And that night they were not divided." Steamy!

Biographies. Books on lesbian parenting. Young Adult books on coping and understanding and diversity. Books on gays in the military. Books on Harvey Milk. MetaWriter is listing as many as they find.

And the Twitterverse has gone wild. It's a habit of Twitterers speaking on a common subject to include a "hashtag" to make searching easier. In a matter of hours the subject #amazonfail became the most popular trend in Twitter's search, outstripping #easter, #masters and #pirates almost immediately. Calls for boycotting have gone out, petitions have begun, and plans are afoot to googlebomb Amazon to bring up a new definition.

Some of the tweets have been hilarious.

EKSwitaj: Ulysses has retained its sales rank; I can only assume this is because no one at Amazon has read it. #amazonfail

annaholmes: Anais Nin has no ranking; Henry Miller does. #amazonfail

drivebysmiting: GAY BOOKS? ON MY INTERNETS? I love when someone on the internet does something stupid, because I love e-drama. #amazonfail wins today.

Personally I suspect Amazon was trying to make their searches more family-friendly and have discovered the ham-handed insanity of trying to block anything solely by keywords or tags, and I hope it gets cleared up soon. E-mails and calls to Amazon have not received any answers beyond "it's being referred to our IT department" and "please stop calling." But in the meantime, if you've ever wanted to watch an activist uprising in action, check out #amazonfail . T-shirts to come in five, four, three…

Update: According to Publishers Weekly, Amazon said that "a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the
process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new
adult policy."

Pretty much what I thought, if only because I didn't think Amazon would be so heavyhanded. Not because of any particular free speech ideals necessarily, but because this sort of thing costs them money and goodwill. Although if no one had complained, who knows. Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me a bit now to see a big "We Love the Gays" GLBT books sale coming up at Amazon any time now….

On April 10, for some reason, the Amazon sales rankings for two highly-promoted books disappeared. Those books were False Colors by Alex Beecroft and Transgressions by Erastes. They're both historical romances: One is about high seas adventure in the 1700s and the other is a sprawling epic occurring during the English Civil War.

Oh, and they're both homosexual romances. Which, apparently, freaked out someone at Amazon. Or possibly someone Amazon is listening to.

Over the next few days many more authors found themselves stripped of their rankings. Mark Probst, author of The Filly, asked about this and received this response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Well, huzzah for Amazon and their excellent protection of the children, even for those of us who want no such protection and are actively angered that it exists.  Because we are not being protected from adult content, you see, all the usual sex-soaked bestsellers and romance novels are fully ranked. (So are vibrators.)

Amazon is protecting us from adult gay content. All of the books being unranked (MetaWriter is keeping an updated list here) are  written for and by the GLBT community, even those books with absolutely no explicit sex involved. James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, all stripped.

The Well of Loneliness, written in the 1920s, is considered the first openly lesbian-themed book in the English language. The disgusting, anti-children, filthy sex part? Exactly one line: ""And that night they were not divided." My god, how did the country survive?

Award winners. Books on health and lifestyle. Books on homophobia and lesbian parenting and the military gay ban. Books on Harvey Milk. Young Adult books on coping and understanding. All of them being blocked from Amazon's bestseller lists because there weren't enough pairs of in and out plugs involved.

Well, Amazon, I'm not going to join the rapidly growing wave of outraged people complaining about this apparently homophobic filtering. No, no, no! I applaud your new moral code! I only ask that you be even handed in its application. Clearly all "adult" works should be removed from your bestseller lists.

I demand you remove the Twilight series from your top ten bestseller list.

Hey, that's five of your top ten books cleared out right there, leaving room for more wholesome fare. But how can you filter tender, non-explicit books of male romance but condone brutal necrophiliac sex that leaves the girl bruised, battered and ultimately dead? (That's in Book #4, Breaking Dawn, by the way, currently #2 in total sales ranking.)

Sure, you could just create an opt-in filter, the way Google does for image searches, so children can search uninfected by reality and Amazon's formerly excellent service can continue unimpeded for the grownups. But no, I demand that you remove the sales ranking for any book that includes the slightest hint of interpersonal relationships no matter what the context or writing quality, leaving the bestseller lists for safer things, like cookbooks.

Anyone agreeing with my "Block Twilight" idea should write connect-help@amazon.com or Jeffrey Bezos at 1200 12th Avenue South, Seattle, Washington 98144-2734, 206-266-1000.  Let's get this bestselling necrophiliac smut out of our faces!

Oh, and Harry Potter, too. Rowling has said that Dumbledore was gay, so let's get those highly profitable books tagged properly so Amazon can do the right thing.

I was at a Jon Bon Jovi concert in New Jersey with my wife a month ago and he was talking about the next Bon Jovi album. The last one, "Lost Highway," had a decided country tinge to it, but the new one was going to be back to basics.

"I'm tellin ya, you gotta trust me on this one," he said. "You wanted a riff rock record,
you got a riff rock record.  They wouldn't let me back into Nashville so I had
to turn up the loud electric guitars on this one." And the crowd of devoted fans went nuts.

One slight problem, of course, was that we didn't know what "riff rock" meant. But we cheered along with the rest and planned to go home and look it up later. I could take a guess. I know what a riff is, and I assume a "riff rock" song would be one with a lot of riffs shoved in it. But the way he said it made it sound like it had an identity. Was it a specific genre, a school, a trend, a group name, a musical theory, what?

No problem! Interweb to the rescue! There were probably hundreds of sites devoted to answering this very question. The Internet knows everything!

Except, apparently, for this. Wikipedia has no "riff rock" entry, not at all. There's a "riff rock" tag at Last.fm, but no explanation. Riffrock.com seems to think I should know already or I wouldn't be there. Google listed plenty of pages and Amazon had several reviews where "riff rock" was being used descriptively, but none of them included a single definition. Ask.com said it didn't know, dot com.

This staggered me. It has been years, literally years, since I casually reached out for information on the Web and came up dry. Had I walked outside, dropped a can, and watched it fall upward, I could not have been more surprised.

And that brought home how quickly the Internet has become our collective conscious.

It holds our memories, our
knowledge, our facts. "Google" became a verb almost overnight for a reason. I'm honestly surprised we even still make kids
memorize anything. Does anyone need to know the date of the Battle of
Hastings unless you plan to hit up Jeopardy some day? As long as there
are people out there with a) an intense passion for something, b) free
time, and c) a Web site, our pursuit of trivia will be rewarded. We're
not quite up to building a hive mind yet, Twitter notwithstanding, but
we are building the hive mind's long-term memory, and we're doing it
awfully quickly.

Quickly enough to surprise me when I find a gap, anyway.

Our
music reviewer, Rick DeYampert, told me what "riff rock" was: a song
composed mostly (or completely) of one distinct, repetitive riff, a la the Rolling Stones' "I
Can't Get No (Satisfaction).". So now I know.

Maybe I'll start a Wikipedia page about
it.

Fans of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" have marched forward on his behalf many times before. All he has to do is casually mention how nice it would be to have something — or, more accurately, everything — named after him to get hundreds of thousands of his eager followers swinging into vote-box-stuffing action. Colbert has already had his name slapped on a minor league hockey team mascot (Steagle Colbeagle, for the Saginaw Spirit), a trapdoor spider (Aptostichus stephencolberti), a Ben & Jerry's flavor ("Americone Dream"), any number of animals in zoos and scientific studies, and even a Virgin America jet ("Air Colbert").

His latest conquest? Node 3 on the International Space Station, thanks to the naming contest for it that NASA just held which included a write-in option, something they now may be regretting. The first two nodes are named "Unity" and "Harmony" and until very recently it was assumed that the third would become "Serenity." Not only does it fit the theme, but "Serenity" is the name of a spaceship in Joss Whedon's beloved-but-canceled TV show Firefly and the subsequent movie Serenity. And the early voting numbers confirmed overwhelmingly that no one is better at organizing online campaigns than Joss Whedon fans.

Except for the Colbert Nation.

"Colbert" won with over 230,000, beating "Serenity" by over 40,000 votes. Another write-in suggestion took third ("Myyearbook," with 147,637) and "Gaia" came in fourth with 114,427. But NASA may not be a democracy. NASA's human space flight chief, Bill Gerstenmaier, appeared evasive about Colbert's ascendency on Colbert's show on March 10. "Well, we're going to have to go think about that," he said.

"That's NASA's problem," Colbert said to him. "You guys think too much."

The poll's rules stated from the beginning that NASA would not be bound by the winning votes. And early responses from the agency imply that they're leaning away from it, possibly even naming one of the station's new space toilet after Colbert instead.

Now, there are few more loyal "Firefly" fans (also known as "Browncoats") than me. I've supported the show and the movie and the fan initiatives and the annual "Can't Stop the Serenity" charity showings.

But, NASA, the people have spoken. If you wanted "Serenity" you should have named it "Serenity" and announced it, maybe brought Whedon and some of the Firefly actors down to smack it with a bottle of Cristal and a nice photo op. When you hold a contest in the hopes of getting public attention, you really can't complain when you actually get some.

And, frankly, you need it. It's all well and good to bond with fans who already support you but you could really use the shot in the arm this would give you with the non-science-fiction-fan public, which is most of it. You bring Colbert down for the naming ceremony, you'll get more positive attention than you've gotten for 30 years.

"Unity," "Harmony" and "Colbert." Suck it up NASA, and paint it on. You can make it up to the Browncoats by giving us one of the new Orion spacecraft in 2014.

They have learned a vital lesson, though. Monday NASA began the final stage of their "Name the Mars Rover" contest. There is no write-in option.