Check out the Google tribute logo to the one of my favorite childhood toys, Lego bricks which is celebrating its 50th Birthday!

Taken from the official Lego website:

The 50th birthday of the LEGO brick is in January 2008 and there is plenty to celebrate. Children all over the world have played with LEGO bricks for the past 50 years, and LEGO is still right at the top of many wish lists, just as it always has been.

Industry and trade associations also recognize the LEGO success. Just before the turn of the millennium the LEGO brick was voted “Toy of the Century”, one of the highest awards in the toy industry, by both Fortune Magazine in the US and the British Association of Toy Retailers.

Legos are awesome! For those of you who missed it, check out my post about Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego.

Man, I could spend hours upon hours playing, building and just geeking out with my giant box-o-legos. I was fond of the little Lego people too.

My box of Lego bricks are long gone… first handed down to my younger brother, then later sold at various garage sales.

I think sometime this coming week I need to hit a local toy store and see about getting some Lego bricks for old time sake… maybe build myself a Lego laptop or robot?

Is it just a marketing veneer or is IBM really getting serious about integrating the social Web into its enterprise content management stack?

Yesterday, Big Blue released details on how its collaborative toolsets help companies prepare for Web 2.0 and previewed an integration between Lotus Quickr and its FileNet P8 ECM platform.

This is good news for FileNet clients as it appears their ECM repositories might get a Web 2.0 facelift, bringing better collaboration to often siloed islands of information.

Part of the foundation for its Web 2.0 strategy is Lotus Mashups, Web-based capabilities that make it easy for companies to assemble and publish mini-applications in real time.

And in true Big Blue style, IBM is ready to enter the building and take the business.

It has positioned Global Services to capture the projected demand for enterprise 2.0 solutions and social networking with the launch of specialized consulting services.

According to the release, it will focus on emerging technologies like social computing, SOA, and the 3-D Internet to improve business performance.

The U.S. government spends $7.5 billion to classify its information each year — that’s more taxpayer dollars than we annually put into the Department of Commerce.

But over-the-top secrecy policies aren’t just an expensive governmental habit. They give the President, the military and intelligence agencies powers far beyond what our founding fathers intended.

At least that’s the case made in Robb Moss and Peter Galison’s documentary Secrecy.

Though apparently too heady and subtle for the demands of the marketplace, it hasn’t caught on with Sundance buyers yet, however the film shines valuable light on a particularly troubling trend in American governance. Read the rest of this entry…

The Recording Industry of America’s (RIAA) website was attacked – again – over the weekend.

According to numerous breaking news stories it seems a lack of proper security controls enabled some to take parts of the site down, and tweak its pages. Get serious.

It looks like a plain vanilla SQL injection vulnerability was publicized on the social news network site Reddit, and the attacking escalated from there.

The RIAA.org Web site appears fully functioning now, but that probably won’t last too long if history is any indication. During the past five years the site has reportedly been defaced and has undergone several denial-of-service attacks.

Things got really sticky a few years ago when Senator Orin Hatch proposed to give the entertainment industry the right to attack systems used by illegal file swappers.

How about a search warrant?

Other than a laugh, these more recent hacks aren’t going to push their argument against the RIAA, its lawsuits, or the demise of DRM any further.

Energy would be better placed by hounding Congress to improve the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and boycotting the purchase of DRM enabled music files and CDs.

Speaking of DRMed music files, they’re already starting their fade into oblivion.

Nearly every, if not every, major record label is already starting to release DRM-free files. In fact, defacing Web sites is about as petty as trying to sue your customer-base to save a dying business model.

Speaking of petty: why won’t the RIAA spring for the occasional server assessment?

In recent months I’ve been taken over by a new found love for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. I’ve been digging through childhood boxes in storage and in my garage and came across my NES system.

I blew the dust off, gave it a nice wipe down, installed a new 72 pin connector and the thing runs like new. All my games work too. It’s like being back in the early 1980’s again.

So in my quest for Nintendo pirate treasure, I’ve also located both original NES controllers, the grey (the original) Zapper light gun and the rare Power Pad.

Everything works like it did back in 1985. Kick ass. Now that’s playing with power!

As an added bonus, I also have an Original Game Boy in almost mint condition, complete with box, Tetris, headphones and link cable. Basically how it was first released. Yeah, I’m a geek.

Over the weekend I plan on taking some pictures of my geektastic NES collection of gaming goodness and posting it for your viewing pleasure.

I’m also in the search for any original Nintendo “stuff” you might have and don’t want… it doesn’t matter what it is, just let me know as I might want it. Your trash could be treasure to me.

For those readers that are feeling in a “giving” mood, I’m accepting donations to my Nintendo addiction and more then willing to cover shipping fees and maybe a little extra for you depending on what you have.

Yahoo will support digital identity framework OpenID 2.0 in beta form January 30.

Yahoo announced this morning that it would support the technology, which allows users to consolidate their Internet identities. Plaxo and JanRain are working with Yahoo so users don’t have to create separate IDs and logins at the Web sites, blogs, and profile pages they visit — as long as the sites support OpenID 2.0.

The OpenID Foundation and community also helped create specifications to improve security and convenience of OpenID.

Users can customize OpenID identifiers on me.yahoo.com or type “www.yahoo.com” or “www.flickr.com” on sites that support the platform.

Yahoo said users will be protected by the company’s sign-in seal while they surf the Web. Web sites can also add an option to allow users to sign in with their Yahoo ID. E-mail and instant messaging addresses are withheld as users log in, and that creates a barrier to phishing or other attacks, Yahoo said.

“A Yahoo ID is one of the most recognizable and useful accounts to have on the Internet and with our support of OpenID, it will become even more powerful,”

– Ash Patel, EVP of platforms and infrastructure.

Scott Kveton, chairman of the board for the OpenID Foundation, said Yahoo’s support of “an open Web” validates the OpenID movement and immediately triples the number of people who can use OpenID. Yahoo has 248 million users.

“With Yahoo actively engaged with the OpenID Foundation and its community to promote OpenID, Yahoo’s users will be able to more easily access the many sites across the Web that support the standard, and the potential for access to Yahoo’s vast international user base will create an even more powerful incentive for additional Web sites to begin accepting OpenID users.”

– Scott Kveton, chairman of the board for the OpenID Foundation.

Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect of Plaxo, said the move also supports data portability for various Web services.

Larry Drebes, founder and VP of engineering for JanRain, said that secure, portable, digital identities are keys to advancing Web applications.

More than 120 million URLs and 9,000 sites support Open ID, created by open source developers.

Source: Yahoo! Press Release