k wrote:
I wouldn't bet on it. What bullshit. I'd like to believe there was a good reason, such as a credible threat or lead, but these days, I really just don't have that much faith in our government or legal system.

Its highly likely that this is actionable. Its not generally legal to shut down websites in police raids in the United States. Its approximately equivelent to shutting down a newspaper printing press. Unless the whole thing is pretty much devoted to illegal content they cannot pull the plug on it. In this case they probably didn't realize they were taking out a shared hosting server. However, each and every one of those people who runs a website that was impacted and wasn't the target of the investigation can press criminal charges against the police agency involved if they get a hold a knowledgable lawyer.

See this link and this one.

It shall be unlawful for a government officer or employee, in connection with the investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense, to search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce.

(The exception in this act for child pornography cases is close enough to litigate but Congress did not envision shared hosting websites when they crafted this exception. I think there is a strong arguement that the exception does not apply when the majority of the people using the printing press in question have nothing to do with the crime being investigated. The government CAN be more granular in their seizure and respect for this rule requires it.)

RE: The Department of Homeland Security Has Shut Us Down

Monday there will be a meeting at Kennesaw College:

Date: May 8, 2006
Time: 10:00am
Location: Room 300

Speakers: Calvin Hill, Representative who sponsored the bill, and
John Villanes, Chairman, Georgia Board of Private Detectives

It would be nice to see anyone that cares at all about this topic. REALLY if you care - make arrangements to be there. It does matter and I think we can all make a difference even if it means banding together. The Governor has to make a choice by Tuesday to Sign or Veto.

Scott Moulton

Decius: Unforuntately I will be unable to attend due to some responsibilities at work, but I strongly encourage those who care about this issue to make a showing at this meeting if at all possible. If they don't, this will turn into a very one sided discussion about a nationally unprecidented and extremely destructive law.

U: It has been vetoed!

Debate on HB1259 in Kennesaw

I saw searching for something completely different when I found this... Its an archive of nice photos including a large number of pictures of HongKong. Good desktop background fodder.

Kleptography - Don Ellis Photography

Coop showed me the prototypes for his new limited-edition Hot Wheels cars a few weeks ago, and I damn near drowned in my own drool.

Man these things are cool!

Boing Boing: Two new Hot Wheels cars designed by Coop

A disturbing photoessay of children born with birth defects as a result of Chernobyl, which was 20 years ago today.

Chernobyl Legacy

I’ve become completely convinced that we need to begin a process of fundamental political change in the U.S., not in the form of a new party per se as a new multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures, based around a vision of democracy which is fundamentally open, participatory, and decentralized.

Mitch Kapor wants to change the political system.

This is interesting...

I've been thinking recently that the criminal justice system needs be reformed...

We have all these forensic scientists, lawyers, and other experts that we pay to prosecute people. Their job isn't to determine what happened. Their job is to convict people regardless of what happened. On the other side you have whatever counsel you can afford. The process is punative. Your only chance to get out unpunished if you go in is to funnel your life savings at a defense, as the government is unwilling to invest a similar amount of money in defense that they are in prosecution. (Which would be an obvious prerequisit for fair decision making in the process that we currently have.)

The ultimate goal of this system is to determine what happened, and yet no one is actually professionally responsible for that. To fill that role we pull random people off the street, and from that group we cull anyone who understands the subject matter at hand in the case or who has critical thoughts about the rules being enforced. The rules are created to sell an election bid to the sheep, rather than to produce a desireable sociological result. And despite the fact that judges have been removed from the process of determining guilt, they are still responsible for handing out punishments, something which they become numb to over the course of years...

And the crooks? We throw them into cells with eachother so they can fester together, harden, and organize. Its common knowledge that people get raped in prison. Is this a reasonable thing for our society to broadly accept? The products of the prison system are things like street gangs and neo nazis...

I have serious concerns about whether the system we have ever produces useful results. It seems obvious that its imbalance and mispriority can only produce useful results by chance. I can name many specific examples of cases where the results were detrimental.

Does anyone actually think about these things? Does anyone really analyze criminal judicial processes and pushiment systems and publish information about their effectiveness and about alternative architectures?

This is the kind of thing that humans are highly irrational about. These subjects are dominated by partisanship and pseudo-science in which the conclusions preceed the questions. This is the kind of space where we ought to have a lot of really smart people devoted to asking hard architectural questions in an objective fashion. Where are those people?

Mitch Kapor’s Blog » Blog Archive » A Movement for Fundamental Political Change

Few at eBay initially saw reason to fear Google, say people at the company, in part because of a 2003 study it commissioned from McKinsey & Co. McKinsey concluded that Google wouldn’t use its search capabilities to break into e-commerce. That made Google a manageable threat, say people familiar with the study. EBay’s dependence on Google increased as it shifted ad dollars to online ads from traditional media throughout 2004.

I think McKinsey reports should come with a statutory warning. Why? These are the same people who told AT&T back in the day, that mobile phones will be a niche market.

GigaOM : » In McKinsey We Trust.. oh oh

The world’s first sports car phone with alcohol Breathalyzer has gotten tremendous popularity in Korea. The cell phone by LG was a big hit from the beginning mainly because its outward appearance of a sports. Equipped with an alcohol measurement sensor, the LG-SD410, LG-KP4100, and LG-LP4100 have sold over 200,000 in the four months that it has been available, and is still selling around 1500 per day.

Having an alcohol measurement device attached to something like a cell phone is nothing but brilliant, especially among younger crowds who regularly drink after work or school and like to party. To use the sensor an intoxicated individual simply opens the phone and blows on the sensor, the LCD will tell you whether your level of alcohol in your blood is safe to drive.

Bloody Koreans are too smart! I thought of this while drunk dialing last night: a breathalyzer that will not let you talk on the phone if you are drunk: you can only call a taxi, alcoholics anonymous, a suicide hotline, or 911. Everyone thought it was a novel and original idea. But they've alreay done this and its selling like hotcakes.

I think a phone attachment could still work, though, a little thing that goes in the charge plug/data cable jack.

LG Cell Phone with Breathalyzer gaining popularity

The U.S. Census Bureau, due to issues related to the separation of church and state, does not ask questions related to faith or religion on the decennial census. Accordingly, there are few sources of comprehensive data on church membership and religious affiliation for the United States. Perhaps the leading organization to address this gap is the Glenmary Research Center, which publishes Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000. The following series of county-level choropleth maps, which reveals the distribution of the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies, draws on this resource. The maps are in GIF format.

Some of this data is quite suprising...

Map Gallery of Religion in the United States

Scientists find evidence of a perpetual evolutionary battle in the mind. The process, they suspect, is the key to individuality.

Brain's Darwin Machine - Los Angeles Times