The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide plummeted on Tuesday after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity was taken offline.

Spam Volumes Drop by Two-Thirds After Firm Goes Offline - Security Fix

Aquila was a yearbook for Japanese American high school students interned in a camp during WWII.

I thought this was very interesting.

Scan of WWII US internment camp yearbook for Japanese American high schoolers - Boing Boing

Uservoice is pretty decent software.

Obama CTO - What are the top priorities for our nation's first CTO?

Walking to work on Friday (42nd St and Vanderbilt), I bumped into Paul Nawrocki. He is looking for a job in Operations without much success. He got the idea for the sandwich board from an ex-Lehman employee who found success with it.

This wasn't a joke.

Hire This Man! | The Big Picture

What follows is the entire text of the "Agenda" page at Change.gov at the time of this blogging.

President-Elect Obama and Vice President-Elect Biden have developed innovative approaches to challenge the status quo in Washington and to bring about the kind of change America needs.

The Obama Administration has a comprehensive and detailed agenda to carry out its policies. The principal priorities of the Obama Administration include: a plan to revive the economy, to fix our health care, education, and social security systems, to define a clear path to energy independence, to end the war in Iraq responsibly and finish our mission in Afghanistan, and to work with our allies to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, among many other domestic and foreign policy objectives.

Recently the site included far more detailed Agenda, including an entire page devoted to technology which now says:

The page you requested is not available right now.

One agenda item that remains up there is Obama's community service plan, which currently says:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.

Previously this text said something else entirely:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.

That bit of bald faced authoritarianism made a lot of people absolutely furious, myself included. If we have a bunch of people waltzing into the whitehouse who do not appreciate the full implications of the use of the word "require" by a policy maker we are in very serious trouble.

The question of exactly what Obama's agenda actually is has been somewhat difficult to nail down. If Change.gov was intended to help clarify things it is a complete failure at this point.

Changes at Change.gov

I can't help but experience Obama's election as a gesture of recognition and acceptance -- which is patently absurd, if you think about it. The labor of black people made this great nation possible. Black people planted and tended the tobacco, indigo and cotton on which America's first great fortunes were built. Black people fought and died in every one of the nation's wars. Black people fought and died to secure our fundamental rights under the Constitution. We don't have to ask for anything from anybody.

Yet something changed on Tuesday when Americans -- white, black, Latino, Asian -- entrusted a black man with the power and responsibility of the presidency.

Eugene Robinson - Morning in America - washingtonpost.com

Explorers and Exploits in Online Social Networking: Balancing the Risks to Copyrights, Privacy, and Security
Thursday, November 13, 2008 6 PM – 9 PM

A panel discussion of online social networks, such as those formed through Facebook, YouTube, LOOPT and Twitter. The panel will explore the personal and organizational challenges of these networks and assess the efforts to balance the copyright, security and privacy risks.

Moderator:
ROLAND L. TROPE
Trope and Schramm LLP; Adjunct Professor, Department of Law, U.S. Military Academy; co-author of Checkpoints in Cyberspace: Best Practices for Averting Risks in Cross-Border Transactions

Speakers:
STEVEN M. BELLOVIN
Professor Computer Science Department, Columbia University, co-author of Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker

TOM CROSS
Internet Security Researcher with IBM's X-Force

CHRIS KELLY
Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook

LOUISE NEMSCHOFF
Entertainment and Intellectual Property Lawyer, Nemschoff Law Offices, Los Angeles, California, board member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

CADET ASHLEY OLDS
United States Military Academy, majoring in computer science, Class 2009

JOHN PALFREY
Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society; Co-author, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

Sponsored by:
Committee on Copyright & Literary Property Law, Joel Hecker, Chair

If you happen to be a lawyer in New York next week...

A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth.

Sweet!

Rainforest Fungus Naturally Synthesizes Diesel | Wired Science from Wired.com

LinkedIn does appear to be all that it's cracked up to be. Nearly 60% of the professional-focused social network's users have high personal incomes...

Users with personal incomes between $200,000 and $350,000 were seven times more likely than those below that level to have over 150 LinkedIn connections.

Just a few more links...

MediaPost Publications - Study: LinkedIn Users Have Higher Incomes - 11/05/2008

It cannot be denied that this feels like a punch in the gut. It is. I'm not going to pretend that the wound isn't deep and personal, like an attack on my own family. It was meant to be. Many Obama supporters voted against our rights, and Obama himself opposes our full civil equality.

Doesn't it seem wrong that a simple majority can pass a Constitutional amendment in a referendum? I must confess some ignorance of state Constitutional issues, but no minority is safe from a process that can deny any basic civil right whenever a razor thin majority desires it. If not for incorporation of federal constitutional rights, this would be a recipe for unrelenting tyranny.

Prop 8