"It's very important that the constitution is produced through the participation of all Iraqis," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters Tuesday. "This is important for ending and defeating the insurgency," adding that Sunni Arabs can count on the United States to ensure their interests are protected.

However, a draft published Tuesday in the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper included several key points demanded by the majority Shiites. The draft not only states that Islam is the main source of legislation but that no law will be approved that contradicts "the rules of Islam."

That requirement that could affect women's rights and set
Iraq on a course far different from the one envisioned when U.S.-led forces invaded in 2003 to topple
Saddam Hussein.

"Islam is the official religion of the state and is the main source of legislation," the draft reads. "No law that contradicts with its rules can be promulgated."

The document also grants the Shiite religious leadership in Najaf a "guiding role" in recognition of its "high national and religious symbolism.

1700 dead Americans to upgrade Iraq to an Islamic theocracy. I just love the way they are copying Iran by having a group of constitutionally recognized mullas that will be consulted in government matters.

Hurray for freedom, unless you happen to be a women, in which case you can now be raped and sold like property because Allah wills it.

Islam Dominates Iraq's Draft Constitution

NEW YORK (AP) -- Recording industry titan Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed Monday to pay $10 million and stop bribing radio stations to feature its artists in what a state official called a more sophisticated generation of the payola scandals of decades ago.

The agreement springs from an investigation by New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who called the practice "pervasive" in the industry and suggested other music industry giants could face similar penalties.

Pay-for-play "is driving the industry, and it is wrong," Spitzer told reporters

Spitzer rules.

Sony Agrees to $10M 'Payola' Settlement

Saw the trailer for "V for Vendetta" last night, and it looks like an awesome film. It appears to be an adventure set in an alternate history with a fascist Britian, with the main character attempting to free the people by overthrowing the government. The many elements of the film relate to Guy Fawes, a man who tried to blow up Parliament with barrels of gunpowder in 1605, and is still burned in effigy every year on the 5th of November.

Its based on a set of 10 comic books from DC in the early 80's, written by Alan Moore (who also wrote the comic books for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).

I'm memeing what seems to be the main fan site about the comic books and other media

Some cool pictures and blog by the same guy who runs the fan site. here

Trailer (in Quicktime) is here

Offical site is here

For those who are interested in this English Fascism theme, the obvious work to read is Orwell's 1984. There is an excellent movie remake of Shakespeare's Richard III staring Ian McKellen set in a Nazi-like Britian in the 1940s.

Remember Remember the 5th of November...

Julian Beever is an English artist who is famous for his art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. It's peculiarity? Beever gives his drawings an anamorphosis view, his images are drawn in such a way which gives them three dimensionality when viewing from the correct angle.

It really is pretty amazing.

3D street drawings. Too cool!

Description: This bug appeared during a few experimentations with the TCP/IP stack after which we found out that it was not, at least it is not of our knowledge, found anywhere else before. That was actually a Solaris bug that resembles this one.

After an established connection, a specially crafted packet with the ACK/FIN flags set, a corrected Sequency Number but with an incorrected Acknowledge Number will trigger a massive flush of packages with zero size and only the ACK flag set. Ethereal logs showed that the keep alive state was occuring and this flow kept going for approximately 3 minutes and a few million packets. It was clearly observed that CPU and network performance was severed decreased due to this misbehave.

Potential attacks includes DoS and DDoS. Applications and services that depends on quality of services (QoS) such as H323 applications (VoIP) and video streamming will suffer dramatic performance downgrade.

Interesting looking presentation at Phreaknic this year.

TCP/IP Keep alive exploit presentation at Phreaknic

President Bush has created a new senior level position to fight global piracy and counterfeiting that cost American companies billions of dollars in lost sales each year, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said on Friday.

This is the other shoe that I have been dreading since the DMCA adoption.

You might that that is dramatic, but it is also true. DMCA is the weapon that the RIAA and MPAA funded to build. So far courts have not wielded it as effectively as they would like. Bush has created an executive level office to track groups/scenes/technology down and stop them, using the DMCA was one of many weapons.

This person is a single injection point into the governmental process for the MPAA and RIAA. No more dealing with 10 or 100s of piddling representatives from different warring states. This is a focus point, a legitimate mouth piece to make industry desires government standards.

Don't be fooled by this "we really just want to stop China" crap. Yes, China is a growing market that Hollywood would love to get a piece of. Piracy is exposing a whole generation of people to Hollywood franchises and culturing a desire for American goods that we will not be able to capitalize on for 10+ years. China is not hurting Hollywood, China is marketing goldmine that *fell* into Hollywood's lap.

This new post's near term goals will be recommendations/modifications of government mandidated standards for things like HDTV, IPTV, and DRM with as dash of next generation digital IP policy making. Its goals will be to protect MPAA/RIAA IP, while not losing control to the hardware vendor's *cough*Microsoft's*cough* wet dreams of set top box required to view the new generation of digital content.

Its all a question of how effective this post can be (drug czar anyone?), and if this new industry mouthpiece has anyone's ear at all.

The Other shoe: The Anti-piracy czar

Last year, Mattel sued "Barbies Shop" for capitalizing on its trademark name Barbie. Mattel argued the store's Web address, barbiesshop.com infringed on its trademark rights and its own Web address -- barbieshop.com.

Barbies Shop owner Barbie Anderson-Walley said the suit has been dismissed and that Mattel doesn't have a case to come back at it. The dismissal shows that "if you're born with a name you can use it for a place of business," she said.

Barbies Shop, which is based in Calgary, Alberta, specializes in selling clothes for "bad boyz and girls," according to its Web site.

Shoppers can buy vinyl corsets and leather studded bras, as well as accessories like bondage belts.

Domain name poppycock.

Mattel says battle against bondage Barbie 'ongoing'

teh h4x0rs R 3vi1!

Penny Arcade on GTA fluff

After saving, our test editor had Carl visit the house of his nearest girlfriend, Denise in Los Santos. Carl then took Denise on a series of dates to the nearest bar. After a few complications--including being busted for two-timing by another of CJ's girlfriends--we completed a fourth date with Denise, after which she invited us into her house for "coffee."

The next screen proved that the PlayStation 2 edition of the game does indeed include a sexually graphic minigame, which plays almost exactly the same as the Hot Coffee mod. It begins inside a bedroom with Denise, wearing only a pink thong and a cutoff T-shirt bearing the Rockstar logo, performing simulated fellatio on CJ, who is fully clothed in jeans and a "wife beater"-style tank top.

Patching a binary to access unable parts of teh game I can understand. But putting in a cheat code into the console versions makes Rockstar's hands pretty dirty on this one.

GTA content available on PS2 console by cheat code

Presbyterian Hospital installed the "Hugs" Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) infant protection system when it opened its new maternity center last September. The "Hugs" Infant Protection System, part of the June 2005 acquisition of Instantel by VeriChip, which is best known for its controversial people chipping technology, contains a tiny radio transmitter designed to prevent infants from being removed from a health care facility without authorisation. Every infant wears a Hugs tag on the ankle or wrist, and exit points throughout the hospital are electronically monitored to detect unauthorised removal of an infant. The use of electronic bracelets to protect kids in maternity wards is commonplace in the US. RFID-tags represent a refinement of the technique.

This is the kind of stuff RFID is good for!

RFID stops newborn snatching