The former Bash Brother will begin his stint with the Fort Worth Cats as a player and a coach. The first game, coincidentally, will be against Edinburg, which is managed by his brother Ozzie.

“I am excited to come to Fort Worth and mentor the young ballplayers,” Canseco said in a statement. “I love Dallas/Fort Worth and I can’t wait to go up against Ozzie.”

Canseco fell out of the spotlight a bit after a much-publicized bout with steroids and has been using his time out of the Major Leagues to pursue other interests–like writing for Vice Magazine–and to gain a following on Twitter, where he posts gems about his life and future goals.

It’s unclear if Canseco will continue on his new path in Fort Worth after this season, but fans are sure to fill the seats once word gets out that the former Oakland A’s hitter will be on the field again.

Houston’s KHOU news is reporting that the man was 29-year-old Carnell Moore from Beaumont, Texas. The TV news station also reported that Moore left behind a suicide note stating he had a “monster within” and coloring the shooting as a suicide-by-cop situation.

Over the course of the week, Moore had posted cryptic messages to his Facebook account about “staring death in the face” and stating, “This Life Will Crash Tomorrow!”

Witnesses to the shooting told KHOU that Moore simply walked into terminal B at the airport and began firing his weapon. A U.S. Homeland Security agent is reported to have fired on Moore as the shooter fired a gun at himself. An autopsy will be performed to determine which bullet ended Moore’s life.

This week, the Austin American-Statesman is reporting that Armstrong has sold his 1.7-acre estate in Austin, Texas. The report stated that Al Koehler, the founder of Royalty Clearinghouse, has taken out a $3.1 million loan to purchase Armstrong’s estate, which includes a 7,850-square foot house.

Armstrong bought the estate in 2004 and renovated it, hanging his seven yellow Tour de France victory jersey’s on the walls of the house. The athlete also owns a home on Hawaii’s Big Island.

Armstrong was recently spotted in Los Angeles and is rumored to be in talks with movie studios over a biopic of his life. If the cyclist is planning a more permanent move to L.A., he could look into buying the infamous Playboy Bunny House, which just went up for sale and is located directly across the street from the Playboy Mansion.

Anyway, it’s still in beta. But today, Amazon has announced the addition of a major state to the mix. Amazon Wine is messing with Texas.

“We’re very excited for Texas wineries to share their highly-ranked selection with our millions of customers through the Amazon Wine store,” said Peter Faricy, vice president for Amazon Marketplace. “Our customers tell us they enjoy our wine-country selection combined with the convenience of finding detailed wine information in one place. We want to connect customers with wineries around the country and provide a destination where they can learn about and purchase wines directly from wineries on the platform they trust.”

Adding Texas to the list of available states means two things. First, wine drinkers in Texas will be able to ship wine directly to their doors. And second and more importantly (for the rest of us), Amazon Wine customers will be able to purchase wines from Texas – including Messina Hof, Becker Vineyards, McPherson Cellars, Brennan Vineyards and Llano Estacado, among others.

As of now, Amazon WIne boasts 350+ wineries and 2,200+ labels.

Amazon Wine puts most of the work on the wineries, who process and ship all of the orders. “When you order wine on Amazon.com, you’re ordering directly from a winery,” says Amazon. And due to that, there are only a handful of states that allow customers to receive intrastate wine transactions.

Amazon started out with 12 states back in November, and have since added a few more. As of today, Amazon Wine is available in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia.

Amazon Wine offers enthusiasts the ability to browse by region, wine style, price, pairings, and more. It also offers a wine mailing list. According to the company, more states will follow.

“Today, we’re pleased to announce with Mayor Lee Leffingwell that Austin, Texas is becoming a Google Fiber city. It’s a mecca for creativity and entrepreneurialism, with thriving artistic and tech communities, as well as the University of Texas and its new medical research hospital. We’re sure these folks will do amazing things with gigabit access, and we feel very privileged to have been welcomed to their community,” says Google in a blog post.

Google hopes to begin construction in 2014, and will be asking neighborhoods about the service to determine the areas of the highest interest. That’s where they’ll start building first. Google hopes to get their first customers up and running by the middle of 2014.

Google says that they are still trying to work out pricing, but they think it will be similar to what’s happening in Kansas City: $120 a month for Gigabit internet plus TV, $70 a month for just the Gigabit internet, or free internet with a $300 one-time construction fee.

Public institutions within Austin are going to get the Google Fiber hookup for free. This includes schools, hospitals, libraries, and more – to be determined alongside the city of Austin.

“We believe the Internet’s next chapter will be built on gigabit speeds, and we hope this new Google Fiber city will inspire communities across America to think about what ultrafast connectivity could mean for them,” says Google VP of Access Services Milo Medin.

If you live in Austin, and want to sign up to be notified when you can sign up, check here.

Ars Technica reports that two analysts for Alliance Bernstein – Carlos Kirjner and Ram Parameswaran – have calculated the costs of bringing Google Fiber to most of the nation. Over five years, it would cost Google $11 billion, or four percent of its current net worth, to realize the dream of many across the nation.

So, why is Google Fiber so expensive? First and foremost, the infrastructure costs are astronomical. The main reason you don’t see many established ISPs upgrading their services is for this very reason. Upgrading infrastructure takes time and money – both of which most ISPs aren’t willing to sacrifice when most of their customer base is apparently happy with what they have.

The other major hurdle is of the regulatory kind. Google was lucky enough to get a range of perks from Kansas City, and Austin must be offering the same perks as well. Some cities may not be as kind, while other cities may have stricter regulations in place in regards to how utility poles, which are used to hang fiber wires, can be used.

In short, there are a number of obstacles standing in the way of nationwide Google Fiber deployment. The projected cost is definitely one of the main reasons, but there’s a number of others that Google must take into account before deciding to bring its service to another city.

That being said, relying on Google alone for Fiber is a fool’s game. There are other groups, like Gigabit Squared, that are working to bring Fiber to other cities across the nation. The FCC is also pushing for more gigabit networks across the nation.

Google didn’t start the Fiber craze, but it definitely helped give it some exposure. We can only hope that the move to Austin encourages more cities and organizations to start building out Fiber networks in other cities across the nation.

The news doesn’t come from Google of the city of Austin (yet), but rather a press release by Gig.U, a coalition of 30+ universities that promote ultra-high-speed brandband in the U.S.

“Gig.U congratulates Google and the City of Austin for their initiative to bring a world-leading network to one of the world’s great research university communities. This effort will pay enormous dividends for the country, as it will help develop the human capital America needs to lead a global economy that increasingly creates value with big data and big bandwidth,” says Gig.U Executive Director Blair Levin.

Earlier we told you that Google had inadvertently published a blog post stating that Google Fiber was in fact on its way to Austin. The post was quickly removed. Reports also indicated that Google was readying a launch event, and had sent out some invitations.

Austin will become the third location to get Google’s high-speed service – as right now it’s only available in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. There’s no word yet on exactly when and how fast Google will be deploying the network in the city.

We’ll update with more information as we hear it.

[via Engadget]

The invitations for the event reportedly said:

On Tuesday, April 9, at 11 a.m., the City of Austin and Google will make a very important announcement that will have a positive impact on Austinites and the future of the city. We anticipate more than 100 community leaders and elected officials to be in attendance to celebrate this announcement. The event invitation is attached for your convenience. Although we cannot share the details of the announcement with you in advance, we know readers will want to learn more, so we encourage you to join us on Tuesday.

It appears that Google prematurely posted the news on its blog, before taking it down. Engadget reports (via a tipster) that the news section on the Google Fiber “Cities” page was showing “Google Fiber’s Next Stop: Austin, Texas”.

That is currently not showing up on the page. The latest Google Fiber news at this point is the April Fools’ joke about Google Fiber Poles.

It was reported this week that at least one state is throwing its hat into the digital privacy legislation arena. The move could trigger more states moving forward with their own digital privacy laws to counter any attempts by the federal government to destroy online privacy. Now only one question remains – will it work?

Do you think the states can succeed where the federal government has failed? Let us know in the comments.

One of the major threats facing digital privacy is the practice of warrantless location tracking. In essence, a government agency, usually law enforcement, can request your location data through a smartphone without a warrant. This was put to the test last year in a case involving a drug trafficker that was tracked via location data on his cellphone. This data was procured without a warrant, and the defense argued that this was a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this reasoning in a 2-1 decision that said there was no violation:

“There is no Fourth Amendment violation because Skinner did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data given off by his voluntarily procured pay-as-you-go cell phone. If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal.”

In other words, the court said that data stored by third parties is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Under this logic, any information that we own, but is stored by a third party, is open to warrantless search and seizure. This goes beyond location tracking, and into stored digital communication that is transported via third party services like email, cloud storage, etc.

This is where the federal lawmakers come in. Rep. Zoe Lofgren has been a major proponent of online privacy for many years, and even introduced an email privacy bill last year to amend the decades old ECPA. She unfortunately failed last year, but it back at it again this year with a greatly expanded bill that covers email and location data – The Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act.

“Fourth Amendment protections don’t stop at the Internet. Americans expect Constitutional protections to extend to their online communications and location data,” Rep. Lofgren said. “Establishing a warrant standard for government access to cloud and geolocation provides Americans with the privacy protections they expect, and would enable service providers to foster greater trust with their users and international trading partners.”

As its name implies, Lofgren’s bill contains a number of protections for digital communications and location data. Here’s a breakdown of its core tenets:

There are a number of factors in Lofgren’s favor this time around that could see this particular bill being passed. There are unfortunately an equal number of factors that could easily see this bill defeated, just like all the other ones.

Do you think Lofgren’s bill can succeed where other proposed federal law has failed? Let us know in the comments.

Lofgren’s bill aims to change federal law, and as such, has many obstacles on its way to becoming law. There has to be an easier way to enact change, right? That’s what lawmakers in Texas are betting on as it’s become the first state to propose a digital privacy bill.

It was revealed this week that both the Texas Senate and House have introduced bills that would require a warrant when requesting location data from in-state cellular carriers. The bill also would require these in-state carriers to submit annual transparency reports revealing how many requests for data were made, and from which agencies the requests came from.

Unlike Lofgren’s sweeping bill, the Texas bills only target geolocation tracking. The bills don’t introduce any kind of digital communication protection clause as that would be too difficult to enforce on the state level. As is the case with state laws, it wouldn’t have any effect on federal agencies’ ability to request data without a warrant. It would only be good enough to protect citizens from data requests coming from in-state agencies and law enforcement.

So, what’s the big deal then? Why is this so important when the protections are so weak? In this case, it’s all about the idea, and what it represents. A successful passage of this bill would send a message to other states that it can protect their citizens’ digital privacy in a small way. If enough states pass similar bills, it would also send a strong message to the federal government to enact similar laws on the national level.

The beauty of our government is how the states can influence national decision making. It’s happened in the past, and is still happening today in various other legal arenas. Digital privacy is an important topic, but the toxic environment in Washington has prevented any meaningful reform. We now have a chance to enact change, no matter how small, across the country one state at a time.

Do you think the states could kickstart a push for federal law reform? Or are the potential protections offered by states enough? Let us know in the comments.

[Image: jmtimages/flickr]

Slate reports that both the Texas state Senate and House have introduced bills that would amend the Texas code of criminal procedure to stop what it feels is the warrantless surveillance of its citizens. Both bills would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before requesting location data from any cellular carrier.

In even better news, the bills would require any and all carriers that operate in the state to produce annual transparency reports. These reports will detail the number of surveillance requests made, and tell citizens which agencies requested the information. For now, we only know the total number of data requests made so a list of the agencies making the requests would be valuable.

Under the proposed bills, the government wouldn’t be able to keep court orders for surveillance hidden either. The court would only have 180 days of secrecy before being forced to unseal the order and make it available to the public.

Some may be concerned over the proposed bills impact on law enforcement, but there are some exemptions in place to keep serious investigations under wraps. For starters, law enforcement can still get a court authorized surveillance order without a warrant if the situation is deemed exceptional. The court order will also remain under wraps if it being made public would hurt the investigation.

There are similar bills being proposed in Washington, such as Al Franken’s Location Privacy Protection Act of 2012, that would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant when seeking smartphone location data. Unfortunately, the bill died with the old Congress at the end of last year, but Franken will no doubt bring it up again. Even then, it has little chance to pass as too many in Washington feel that the needs of law enforcement to trample on your Fourth Amendment rights take priority over your personal privacy.

That being said, the states are the next battleground for this important issue. You can expect some opposition to show up, but the Texas legislature has a track record of defying the folks in Washington. We might even see some serious fireworks if the bills progress far enough.