] Internet chat groups, particularly those using a format
] called Internet relay chat, or I.R.C., now play an
] important and growing role in online credit card fraud,
] according to a report released last week by a group of
] Internet security experts who form the Honeynet Project.
] The project sets up computer systems called honeynets
] that are intended to be easy to infiltrate in order to
] monitor and record how hackers work.

Pfffft.

Internet Chat Seen as Tool to Teach Theft of Credit Cards

] The estimate is given on the fourth page of an eight-page
] table, in the third chapter of an 11-chapter first volume
] of the environmental impact statement for the plant, the
] Modern Pit Facility. The Energy Department is considering
] building the plant to make smaller nuclear bombs and
] bombs to replace old ones that it says may become
] unreliable.

Sheesh ... they really seem to want to make more small bombs...

U.S. Predicts Cancer Deaths at Proposed Plutonium Plant

] In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence
] extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or
] be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would
] bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and
] corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you
] out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of
] transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you
] will be seen to have done that which you did.

William Gibson on Orwell.

NY Times | The Road to Oceania

How do they think this will possibly help them? The music industry seems to be trying to sell itself out for next quarter's numbers and is going to find in just a few more years that it is so widely reviled that noone will do business with them!

RE: Music labels to sue hundreds of music sharers

This just in: in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court has reversed its 1986 decision and struck down Texas's anti-sodomy statute.

] WASHINGTON, June 24 — The Columbia Accident Investigation
] Board today located within inches the spot on the
] shuttle's left wing that was damaged by foam on liftoff
] on Jan. 16 and said the wing came apart at that point 16
] days later in the shuttle's re-entry from space.

Shuttle Board Determines Likely Site of Fatal Damage

] SCO alleges that you need to focus more on getting
] clarification as to where the code that goes in the Linux
] kernel comes from. Do you have any plans to change the
] current Linux development model?
]
] No. I allege that SCO is full of it, and that the Linux
] process is already the most transparent process in the
] whole industry. Let's face it, nobody else even comes
] close to being as good at showing the evolution and
] source of every single line of code out there. The only
] party that has had serious problems clarifying what they
] are talking about is SCO, and now when details start
] emerging like with RCU, it's clearly about IP that they
] had nothing to do with, and don't even own. I'm sure that
] they are confident that they own the collective work of
] Unix, but that's a separate thing entirely legally from
] being the actual copyright owner of any specific section
] of code.

Torvalds Speaks Out on SCO, Linux

] Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled what he claimed was "the
] world's fastest personal computer" today, ending more
] than six months of speculation over whether the Mac maker
] would use IBM's 64-bit PowerPC 970 processor.

Neat.

The Register

] The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for
] brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific
] regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the
] effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced,
] they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients'
] mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability
] to speak, another minute they would speak easily but
] would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of
] researchers started to look into the possibilities, but
] one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people
] undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS,
] could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those
] isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most
] often appear in autistic people.

Weird ...

Savant for a Day

] The consumer-marketer dynamic spawns a spectrum of
] antispam proposals. One general approach centers on the
] collective consumer desire to protect in-boxes by
] requiring prior consent, creating do-not-spam databases
] and allowing individuals to take spammers to court.
]
] Another approach emphasizes how marketing e-mail can be
] legitimate if it has options called opt-outs for
] consumers to remove themselves from mailing lists; postal
] or street addresses; and clear labeling. This approach
] also outlaws spamming techniques like using automated
] programs to harvest or generate e-mail addresses. The
] intent is to eliminate the bottom feeders (the generic
] Viagra and buy-a-diploma ads), while preserving the right
] for mainstream companies to market to consumers.

The first option is the Wrong Answer; abusive spam should be handled like any other kind of fraud.

Congress Finds Rare Unity in Spam, to a Point