Here’s a look:

Patrons use the web to adjust the table, the music, the lighting, etc. Here’s the description from the KlausK Hotel, Helsinki:

WDC Helsinki 2012 opened a remote controlled café at the Forum shopping centre. The café is used to illustrate the significance of good design in everyday life.

Café Kauko, www.youdesign.fi website and the TV clips are part of the awareness campaign which also consists of outdoor notices and online visibility. The campaign has been designed by hasan & partners and produced by Perfect Fools from Stockholm.

Is the future of the Internet café? For that matter, of dining? Imagine being able to control your dining experience with your smartphone.

What we have is just an amazing read on how the FBI views Internet privacy-seeking individuals, especially those who frequent Internet Cafes. Thanks to the mind boggling “Communities Against Terrorism: Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activies Related to Internet Café” document, according to the FBI:

If you are overly concerned with privacy, you might be terrorist.

If you pay cash or use credit cards with different names at cyber cafés, you might be a terrorist.

If you use anonymizers, portals or any other means of IP address shielding, you might be a terrorist.

If you use “suspicious communications” via VOIP or through video game chats, you might be a terrorist.

If you use encryption software, you might be a terrorist.

If you try to shield you screen from other viewers, you might be a terrorist.

Now, the PDF does offer some information that’s actually useful, if not part of the common sense collective, when it informs people to watch out for folks downloading this kind of stuff:

- Content of extreme/radical nature with violent themes
- Anarchist Cookbook, explosives or weapons information
- Military tactics, equipment manuals, chemical or biological information
- Terrorist/revolutionary literature
- Preoccupation with press coverage of terrorist attacks
- Defensive tactics, police or government information
- Information about timers, electronics, or remote transmitters/receiver

But the rest of the document reads like a how to in relation to profiling “illicit” computer users. I highly recommend reading the FBI/Bureau of Justice Assistance document in full, just to get an idea of how many stereotypes concerning “computer geeks” both agencies are buying into.

And there’s the following disclaimer, which essentially says “sorry for all the profiling rhetoric in the above stanzas, because it is important not to profile, even though that’s exactly what the document did.” See for yourself:

It is important to remember that just because someone’s speech, actions, beliefs, appearance, or way of life is different; it does not mean that he or she is suspicious.

It feels like they left off an “even though that’s exactly what we’re doing with this warning.” One also wonders, in light of the document’s contents, if the closing statement was written with a straight face or not.

Lead image hat-tip.

If you said “selling your children,” you are in a dark place my friend. But that’s exactly what Li Lin and Li Juan of Dongguan did. And they did it to fund their online gaming activity.

ABC News reports out of China that according to Sanxiang City News, the young couple met back in 2007 in an internet cafe. They soon discovered that they both had a pretty strong love for online gaming.

About a year after they met, Li Juan gave birth to a son. According to the reports, days after he was born the couple left him by himself while they traveled over 30 km away to play games at an internet cafe.

It is unclear what particular online games captivated the couple. Possibly an MMORPG? Maybe social gaming? Whatever the games were, they required money, either for a subscription or for in-game micro transactions. Once the couple had their second child, they decided to sell the baby girl for the money to play their games. They received the equivalent of around $500 for her.

When that went smoothly, they decided to sell their firstborn son as well. They raked in a substantially greater amount for him, somewhere around $4600.

They then had another boy, and sold him for about $4600 as well.

Who knows how many more children they would have made and then sold if they weren’t caught? Sure gives more meaning to the phrase “baby factory.”

Li Lin’s mom turned them in when she found out what they were doing.

According to ABC, when asked about their activities, the young Chinese couple replied, “We don’t want to raise them, we just want to sell them for some money.” They also said that they didn’t know they were doing anything illegal.

Now, it wouldn’t be the first time that a story like this out of the East comes to us a little embellished. But it seems to fall in line with other stories we’ve heard recently about strange behavior when it comes to technology.

Last month we told you about a Chinese high-school student that attempted to sell one of his kidneys on the black market in order to acquire the money to purchase an iPad2. A few weeks later, a Chinese girl attempted to sell her virginity through Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. What did she want for it? An iPhone 4.

Those kids had it all wrong. You don’t sell parts of yourself to fuel your technology addiction, you sell your kids. I mean, you can only afford to part with a limited number of vital organs. Technically, you can make around 1.2 kids per year.

Gaming addiction is real, folks. If this doesn’t make that abundantly clear, then I don’t know what does.

[Image Courtesy Lungstruck Flickr Stream]

The Beijing High People’s Court promised harsher penalties would be introduced after three local courts heard cases involving Internet cafes and copyright infringement. In one case, Chinese producer Huayi Brothers, won its lawsuit against three Internet cafes.

The Xicheng District People’s Court ruled the cafes had infringed Huayi’s right to online dissemination of information. The cafes were ordered to remove infringing material from their online services and pay 6,000-8,000 yuan ($860 to $1,145) in compensation to Huayi.

In a similar case a court ordered a cafe to pay the maximum fine of $3,300 for allowing access to a pirated film. Internet cafes are the second most common way to access the Internet; China has around 113,000 licensed cafes and many others that operate illegally.

Some Internet cafes allow users to download films without authorization, while others sign bogus movie service agreements with suppliers who claim to have copyright authorization.

China now has the most Internet users in the world with 221 million, the Ministry of Industry and Information said.