Web Watch

In this Facebook and Twitter world we probably share too much. Do I really need to know you what you had for breakfast?

Besides, who needs all those words?

This site http://dearphotograph.com/ invites users to “take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.”

The result? A chuckle, a memory, a wish.

They are all strangers. Yet, you can understand.

The caption on the black and white photo of the downcast boy standing against a brick wall reads: “Dear Photograph, I told you there would be better days.”

You’ve been there.

Web Bits

A Sociologist Returns to the Mean Streets of His Youth: The police officer who threatened to arrest Victor M. Rios for conspiracy would have been hard-pressed to make a charge stick. At the time, all Rios was doing was hanging out with teenagers on some of the country's toughest streets, in Oakland, Calif. As a doctoral candidate in ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Rios spent three years shadowing 40 youths between the ages of 14 and 17, a lot of whom had arrest records and gang affiliations. Read more …

Community Policing Reaches Youths: As morning broke over the city Monday, cops assigned to the Los Angeles Police Department's Southeast Division went about their normal routine, patrolling the streets. There was, as always, plenty to do. The division's 10-square-mile area has some of the highest crime and poverty rates in the city and is home to 120 documented gangs and three of the city's roughest housing projects. But 18 miles and a world away, Officer Scott Burkett was working a very different beat. Having traded his uniform for a wetsuit, the 15-year LAPD veteran was in the water at Torrance Beach with about two dozen kids from the Watts-area neighborhood that Southeast patrols, teaching them to surf. Read more ...

Websites Selling Fake IDs a Booming Business: Fake IDs for underage drinkers have graduated from being a dorm room enterprise to a China-based Internet business, say authorities who are scrambling to stay a step ahead of the counterfeiters.

"We've gone from the days of having a friend with an X-ACTO knife and IDs so bad it's amazing that anyone would believe it … to now, when they look so real, it's frightening," Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said. "And they're everywhere." Read more …

Secret Archive of Ulster Troubles Faces Subpoena: As the war in Northern Ireland was reaching its end in the late 1990s, two interviewers set out to collect memories of the conflict from men and women who had been involved as paramilitary fighters in some of the era’s most violent and grim episodes. The interviewers, working for an oral history project at Boston College, brought two tools: a digital minidisk recorder and a promise of confidentiality. In exchange for candor, the people being interviewed were assured that the contents would remain sealed until they were dead. Read more ...