(Screenshot via shifted)

Best Buy's Geek Squad is holding a memorial tonight to honor Arthur C. Clarke. Alas. Everyone was far too polite to say this about the recently deceased sci-fi writer: Had he lived in the U.S. rather than Sri Lanka, he'd be a prime membership candidate for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. "Once they have reached the age of puberty, it is OK... It doesn't do any harm," Clarke told the U.K.'s Sunday Mirror in 1998. More or less exiled from Britain over his underage affairs, he continued to pursue them in the South Asian island nation. Authorities there turned a blind eye. This is all well known among the more sophisticated realms of fandom — but not, apparently, Best Buy headquarters in South Richfield, Minn. At 8:01 p.m., every Geek Squad repairman will pause to think reverently of a champion of child abuse. The press release:

First, Wal-Mart tried to endear themselves to the online world with a thoroughly corporate website full of "Facts." Then, they tried a fake, secretly corporate-sponsored blog. Now, it looks like they've learned their lesson about openness and disclosure; they've started an (apparently) uncensored corporate blog that proves once and for all that free speech is nothing to be scared of, because even high-level Wal-Mart employees are just as gee-whiz predictable and goofy as you would have imagined. Evidence of the fundamental nerdiness of the corporate steamroller—and a fun quiz!—after the jump.

The FCC is considering holding a fresh hearing on net neutrality, with Comcast and Verizon again in attendance — and this time it may be at Stanford. The do-over comes after a mini-scandal erupted over the first hearing, held at Harvard; Comcast flacks confessed they'd paid people off the street to act as seatwarmers. Let this be a lesson to you all: If you're going to meddle in politics, do it skillfully enough not to get caught.

After domain-name registrar Go Daddy charged him for an account he never opened, MessageCast CTO Dave Hodson looked into how it happened. He discovered Go Daddy doesn't ask customers for the three-digit code that appears on the back of their credit cards during the purchase process — a measure meant to assure customers has the original cards in their possession. So Hodson blogged about it to warn others that "Go Daddy is a fraudster's paradise." Really, Go Daddy security czar Neil Warner should stop futzing around with time zones and get his employer to add card-code verification. But that's not the best part of the story.

Toshiba will not be giving any rebates to HD-DVD customers who feel burned by the platform's implosion. They're stuck with the near-useless product. A Toshiba flack's statement:

Southwest Airlines is putting Wi-Fi on four planes starting this summer. Unlike JetBlue's crappy, restricted service, this will be the "full" Internet (save for VOIP, I'd bet) with "the highest bandwidth available to commercial airlines in the United States," according to Southwest. Southwest is partnering with Row 44, an inflight broadband provider. I fly Southwest a lot, so this is great news for me. I won't hold my breath for laptop power ports at my seat though. That would add way too much weight for the Greyhound of the sky. Catch the full press release after the jump. (Photo by AP/David Zalubowski)

Last week, after the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld, my iPhone stopped downloading Web pages and sending text messages. I thought it was just a temporary glitch, but after two days, I realized there was a serious problem. I tracked down a thread on AT&T's help forums, and learned that the problem was my prepaid plan:

Web host DreamHost continues to overcharge customers, some of whose credit cards were already maxed out by the error, one of them tells us. And if DreamHost's initial apologies were bad, the company's communications are worse now. As of two days ago, they stopped altogether. Meanwhile, irate customers are piling on in the comments.

Here's a "1979 ad for Pakistani Airlines promoting its flights to New York City." Can't you just picture a young, fresh-faced Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stumbling across this in a Baluchistan newspaper, some dim flicker of a terrible plan taking hold, just before he books his own flight to the US for his formative education? Yes, it really would explain a lot—if it weren't for the fact that we all know CHENEY DID 9/11. Still: eerie. [AdRants]

There are many economic factors that might have possibly driven the housing boom, all of which are bo-ring. House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes, a new book by Newsweek reporter Daniel McGinn, reveals the truth: it was actually driven by idiots with a herdlike, pathological need to fixate on every aspect of their home, much like Freud's analysis of anal-retentive children examining their own feces. Actual quote: "My house is really pretty, with plenty of room, but it just doesn't do it for me... my artistic imagination isn't lit up by it—it's too much 'practical,' and not enough 'dreamy.'" Here's to the idiot in all of us—now, I'm off to look at Floor Plan Porn on Curbed!

Is Steve jobs turning into an overprotective nanny in his old age? As Apple continues its attempt at world domination through well-designed products and heavy advertising — at one point I saw Apple ads on four TVs simultaneously at my local sports bar, thanks NFL Sunday Ticket! — it's good to know that the company is looking out for our eardrums. Apple has gotten a patent that illustrates a technology for an automatic volume control. Your next iPod could calculate how long you've been listening to music at high volume, and reduce the volume for a "quiet time" before allowing you to increase the sound to full volume again.

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson left his iPhone on during a recent trip to China. Because the device automatically checks for new email every 10 minutes, Anderson rang up more than $2,000 in data charges. AT&T eventually contacted Anderson in China to warn him about his bill. They offered to switch him to a $300-a-month plan. Anderson told MSNBC.com he agreed to the switch, but hasn't heard back from AT&T since. They way we see it, his only remaining option is to pull a Kevin Rose.

Users of Vonage's internet telephone service have been reporting a major service failure, ongoing since Friday. The problems are varied, but it comes down to this: Vonage seems to be missing the "phone" and "service" parts of "phone service." In some cases, incoming calls are not connecting. Vonage is forwarding the attempted calls to subscriber landlines and cellphones, but repeatedly, and late. As a result, the call forwarding feature becomes a series of phantom calls clogging up the customer's only reliable phone service. Some are reporting no service at all.

A reader reports Sears.com has been down for much of Black Friday, the most overhyped shopping day of the year. They never learn, do they? Last year, Macy's and Wal-Mart saw outages. The Sears site is currently displaying a "high traffic volume" excuse page. Anyone know what knocked the site offline? Nothing on this year's Black Friday list of specials strikes me as a must-click.

Apple tracks how iPhone owners use the "Stocks" and "Weather" widgets installed on each device, Uneasysilence claims. All mobile devices possess a unique International Mobile Equipment Identity number, and as the screenshot below indicates, the iPhone sends its user's unique IMEI to an Apple server each time the widgets perform a query. The data includes which stock ticker was queried.

That's what's happening to me. Maybe someone figured out my password, or maybe it's a technical glitch, but my Google password has been changed. I joined Gmail in college, so I used a school address as my secondary address. Years later, I finally need that password-reset email but the address is long dead. And Google's policy is to make me WAIT FIVE DAYS while someone could be wreaking havoc on my life before I can answer my security question and get my email back.

In a bill to allow three brick-and-mortar casinos in the Bay State, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has proposed two-year jail terms and a $25,000 fine for folks caught gambling online. Congressman Barney Frank, who wants federal legislation to regulate online gambling, asks, "Why is gambling in a casino OK and gambling on the Internet is not?"

A number of consumer groups are petitioning the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 for every customer affected by their BitTorrent-throttling practices. The FCC has said in the past that service providers can't "block" customers from using certain applications or websites, but it hasn't enforced that policy. Comcast has stated that they aren't "blocking" data transmissions, but are delaying them. Angry users aren't seeing much of a difference. We still think that government regulation is not the answer. You don't like what Comcast is doing? Let your wallet do the talking — change providers or lay your own fiber, bub. Or, considering that Comcast was caught blocking a digital version of the Bible, perhaps divine intervention is what called for. Down with the infidels! (Photo by AP/Douglas C. Pizac)

Are Facebookers having a hard time keeping their pervy hands off user profiles? Over the weekend, we learned that Facebook employees take full stalkerish advantage of their ability to peruse member profiles. Now a tipster writes in claiming that a Facebook product manager actually looked up a user's password, logged into her account, and changed her profile picture to a graphic image. Here's the back story.