The app uses GPS to show you where all the registered sex offenders are near you at any given time. You can also use addresses from your contacts list if you want to check out where the perverts live near your friends and family. It's perfect for pranks! Just tell your friend there's a surprise party for them at one of the locations. They'll laugh and laugh!

Alternately, you can use this app to get yourself scared and worked up over something you can't control that has a miniscule likelihood of ever effecting you. Either way. [Offender Locator (iTunes Link) via Telegraph via The Daily What]

The bill states that "Congress finds that children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone," a fact which I doubt many would challenge. What many will challenge are the notions that the main purpose of silent camera modes is to perv on Kindergartners and that banning these modes would stop anyone from doing so.

There is a practically unlimited supply of existing, silent-mode-enabled cameras that are available to anyone who wants them, not to mention the fact that many cameraphones have video modes, which present a problem that couldn't really be solved short of requiring handsets to scream "HEY NAKED KIDS, I'M TAKING A VIDEO RIGHT NOW SO YOU SHOULD PROBABLY GO GET YOUR PARENTS" on loop for the duration of the recording.

The measure wouldn't be effective at solving the problem it set out to, but it would certainly be effective at stripping a useful feature from phones for regular, law-abiding users who just don't want a tacky fake mirror slap every time they take a picture. Update: This kind of thing has been happening in Japan for some time now, so make of that what you will. [Crave]

Georgia is one of 15 states requiring sex offenders to give their email addresses, screen names and "other internet handles" to authorities, and now the second (after Utah) to force them to give up their passwords as well, giving authorities unlimited, unfettered access to monitor their email and other internet activities.

State Senator Cecil Staton told MSNBC, "We limit where they can live, we make their information available on the Internet. To some degree, we do invade their privacy...But the feeling is, they have forfeited, to some degree, some privacy rights."

Obviously, privacy groups, like the Southern Center for Human Rights are concerned by the law, though there haven't been any legal challenges to it yet. So, what do you guys think? One step too far, or totally legit? [MSNBC via Techdirt]

According to the Vision 20/20 website, there's 650,000 registered sex offenders in the US and they've got them all placed neatly on a map for you. Try it — it's fun for the whole vigilante-loving family. [Vision 20/20 via TechCrunch]