The book Obama's BlackBerry is on sale now, $11 at Amazon, and is consistently hilarious, as you can see from the (authorized) excerpts below. [Kasper Hauser]

Showing favor towards the MPAA, President Obama also appointed Jon Leibowitz—former vice president of congressional affairs of the MPAA—as the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year. As you may recall, former president Bush signed a bill last October, creating the intellectual property czar position to lead the fight against piracy and intellectual property violations. [ArsTechnica]

The new BlackBerry is locked down by Genesis Key's SecureVoice technology that turns any Curve or 8830 into a hack-resistant handheld. When he gets the BlackBerry in a few months, he'll be able to call or text to other people with the same software, like Michelle Obama and top aides, whoever they are. The software is considered hardcore enough that it can access Top Secret-level classified data

In the meantime, he's been using a regular BlackBerry for personal stuff and that crappy Sectera Edge for official business.

I wonder if they're going to let Joe Biden in on the secret BlackBerry circle. Would you? [Washington Times via Fast Company]

The Vice President's quarters, located at the Naval Observatory since 1974, have been pixelated ever since Google has given the public an easy way to check them out—coincidentally ever since Dick Cheney has lived there. This censorship wasn't by Google but those supplying Google the source images, the U.S. Geological Survey.

Now on the same week of Biden's arrival, we're suddenly allowed to see the VP's house as clearly as the President's. Who knows the exact reason for Cheney's extra security...maybe he'd been nervous about the public catching wind of his Mini Cheney clone farm, or maybe he's just prone to gardening in his shorts despite being self-conscious about his varicose veins. [Valleywag]

To make matters worse for McCain, Thompson points out that France, the scourge of Republicans and veterans alike, now has broadband that's four times as fast—and half the price!

Admittedly, there's a bit of fuzzy matching required to join McCain's vehement opposition to the 1996 Telecommuncations Act and his subsequent statutory castration of its powers with the slow increase of our cable modem's actual download speed. However, there's no disputing the fact that McCain has done nothing to grow broadband penetration. (Even that comedic allegation that he helped invent the BlackBerry doesn't do anything to support any kind of breaching of the digital divide.)

In fairness to anyone who thinks we're reporting this lopsidedly, we have previously shared reports about Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden's opposition to net-neutrality legislation, and his Hollywood-backed war against citizen-pirates. And the reason we haven't discussed Sarah Palin's stance is simple—she's a clean slate, baby. Not a word on any of this.

But as you might imagine, Thompson uses his main point—McCain's consistent and ongoing hampering of the kinds of technological innovation that are commonplace in other countries—as a good reason to repeat what we have also recorded on Giz, that Barack Obama's attention to these matters will not be so blas&#233, that in fact he has interesting ideas, not just that America needs a cabinet-level CTO or that there should be true neutrality on the internet, but that, for instance, rural-phone subsidies are used to provide rural broadband (which would basically includes free phone service anyway).

Thompson makes the point that Silicon Valley has gone O, saying that 555 employees of Google have donated to Obama, compared to 26 for McCain. He says the market freedom that McCain wants is "freedom for his country to fall further and further behind as AT&T and the other telecom leviathans sit back, ignoring your customer service calls and just watching the $90 monthly checks roll in." That's harsh, Nick, but it also sounds pretty damn accurate. [Washington Monthly]

• He asked Congress to spend $1 billion to monitor peer-to-peer activity. (In fairness, much of this is to prevent child pornography, but the tactic is apparently a little blunt.)

• Two Biden bills have been explicitly anti-encryption, because you know, encryption makes it hard for the FBI to read people's e-mails.

• He has expressed support for internet taxes and internet filtering in schools and libraries.

• The RIAA seems to be one of his best buddies: Biden sponsored a bill that would restrict recording of songs from satellite and net radio, and another one that would make it a felony to "trick" a computer into playing back unauthorized songs or running bootlegged videogames. That latter one died when Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay and Yahoo all argued against it.

• Biden was one of just four senators invited to attend a celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti and the RIAA's Hillary Rosen, two of American file-sharer's most wanted.

• When he was asked in 2006 about proposing net-neutrality laws, he said there was no need, since any bit-filtering violations would provoke such a huge public ruckus they'd have to hold congressional hearings anyway—and they'd be standing-room only. (Wonder if Biden reads Gizmodo.) [CNet]