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The post 9/11 spending splurge by the U.S. national security state has given rise to a new industry devoted to developing technology for spying on almost everyone. These gizmos now represent a threat to what’s left of personal privacy, writes Lawrence Davidson.

By Lawrence Davidson

It was certainly ironic that the Wall Street Journal, the mouthpiece of capitalist ideology, would publish an exposé on “a new global market for off-the-shelf surveillance technology,” entitled “The Surveillance Catalog” and subtitled “where governments get their tools.”

So you are new to web design and development. You are thinking of creating a web site, well below are the top 15 mistakes created by first time web designers.

Most people who are reading this will probably know these already but it was writing for those who don't know.

- Using frames

- Going overboard with high tech "tricks"

- Under construction signs

- Misusing Graphics

- Ransom note fonts

- Complex backgrounds

- To many animations

- Orphan pages

- No organisation

- No unique content

- Too many ideas

I recently came across this post and wanted to share it with you to show you how "the other side" of web scraping.

We are in the process of migrating a comparatively small web application (~2k pages) embedded in a large (enterprise scale) portal to a new platform. The rewrite is an enabling step for future expansion, albeit some minor new features will be added on the fly already.

We've been asked by many clients about purchasing some popular data that we've already scraped. To simplify the process and save our customer's time we decided to add an online store immediate file download. Now you can get access to the data you want within minutes.

Here is a list of the data we're working on to add to the online store within the next few days:

• USA Zip Code Database
• ISBN Database
• US Architectural Companies Database
• English Dictionary Words
• Computer File Extensions / Types
• Computer Games Database