The use of dogs to detect various kinds of contraband is well established. Apparently, dogs can be trained to have a nose for movies instead of more unsavory hobbies. A trained dog in Malaysia named “Paddy” discovered a shipment of 35,000 pirated DVDs before they could be shipped out of of the country. The disks included copies of films now in theaters, such as the newest “Terminator” film. The dog, specially trained to smell the ink used to make pirate DVDs, prevented the disks from reaching their intended destination in Singapore.

Once again, Google launches an astonishing new feature in time for April 1.  What will they think of next?

The splogs are getting sublimely absurd. A splog, or spam blog, is a fake blog filled with advertising links and/or links to malicious software. In order to create traffic, splogs link to the comments and trackbacks of legitimate blogs using web crawling algorithms. This site, which linked back to a post on a personal blog on which I jabber about philosophy and theology, is an accidental work of art, given these link titles:

“Looking for ONTOLOGY?”
“Get ONTOLOGY here for free!!!”
“Best ONTOLOGY videos!”
“Shopping for ONTOLOGY?”

Hmmm…. What kind of world will I end up in if I follow one of those links?