[Headline: BBC]

Santa’s Privacy Policy [McSweeney’s, via TechCrunch]

Oklahoma City Police Department Crime Report: “ON 12/17/10, AT 945 HOURS, RP WOODSIDE ADVISED ME THAT SHE HAD A STUDENT IN HER CLASSROOM, IN POSSESSION OF A PERMANENT MARKER. AR [age 13, name redacted] WAS WRITING ON A PRICE OF PAPER, WHICH CAUSED IT TO BLEED OVER ONTO THE DESK… I ALLOWED RP TO SIGN A CITATION AGAINST AR AND AR WAS TRANSPORTED TO C.I.C. [juvie] BY SGT. SPENCE. SGT. SPENCE BOOKED THE MARKER INTO THE PROPERTY ROOM.” [The Smoking Gun]

“Still more good news for filibuster reform: Harry Reid is in active discussions with his caucus about moving forward with reform in the new year, and is currently devising a plan to do just that.” All returning Demrat Senators have signed a vague pledge for reform. [WaPo]

Not only is it a great gag, it’s the first website we’ve seen that captures the rhythm of a comic strip.

Comic Sans Criminal [via Daring Fireball]

“I’m not exactly for the use of drugs, don’t get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it’s just, it’s costing us a fortune and it’s ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That’s not a good thing.” [Raw Story]

A dozen years ago, during one of our many Past Lives, we wrote a column for the local alt-weekly explaining how while nobody on the Internet may know you’re a dog, it’s very easy to find out where your paws are coming from.

The secret sauce is your computer’s Internet Protocol address, or IP. If the Internet is going to send something from Point A to Point B, it kinda helps to know where those points are. The IP address is roughly equivalent to your computer’s phone number — no number, no connection.

(In the interest of not frying your brain, we’ll skip the nuances and complications introduced since 1998, especially regarding wifi and mobile networks. Oh, and IPv6. That too.)

The existence and purpose of IP addresses may not quite be popular knowledge (as defined by “Does Mom Know About This?”), but they are Internet 101, the kind of thing anybody even tangentially involved in a field like — oh, let’s pick something at random — national security might be expected to know about.

Then again, we don’t recall anybody ever accusing the TSA of knowing from security:

Read more »