“It was a total waste of time,” Jerrold Nadler , D-N.Y., said of the secret session. “Frankly, we think the whole thing was a bluff. But we called it. They thought, ‘We’ll call a secret session and the Democrats will reject it, then we can say they didn’t want to hear all the information.’ ”

...

A dispute broke out when an unnamed Republican started to talk about a topic that Democrats considered off limits under the ground rules for the session, since it was at a higher security clearance level than the discussion up to that point. But one Republican lawmaker said the discussion was in bounds. “We tried to give them the information, but they didn’t want to hear it,” the lawmaker said.

Ding!

Tom Price , R-Ga., said he was disappointed by the partisanship on the floor during the closed session. “There were two different camps in the approach. One camp was interested in talking about issues. The other camp was talking about . . . politics,” Price said.

Will someone please tell me where Republicans have discussed the issues? Have they explained why President Bush thinks the Electronic Frontier Foundation sees "a financial gravy train" in these lawsuits? Is there a place where they describe just exactly how the system they have established prevents their domestic surveillance apparatus from being abused for domestic political purposes? Have they explained why amnesty will not create perverse incentives for telecoms to comply with unwarranted surveillance in the future?

CQ Politics | Secret Session Brings House Members No Closer Together on Surveillance

Memestreamer Cyan got $7 million in funding for Zivity!

The site allows both amateur and professional models and photographers to show their stuff. Users vote on those that they like, which channel real dollars to the talent. The more votes, the more money. The basic site is free, but users must pay to vote. About 40% of gross revenue is given directly to the talent. With a recent redesign, the site is focused much more on social networking - users and talent have profile pages and can add each other as friends. They’ve even added a news feed feature that shows who is adding who as friends, and which models users have voted for.

Go Cyan!

Zivity Takes $7 Million In Venture Financing

A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops.

Regardless of what you think of sites like "RateMyCop" the bottom line is that it is not appropriate for GoDaddy to pull a domain name without contacting the administrator. This is not a phishing site. Following this and a number of recent takedowns by ENOM; we need new regulation at the ICANN level that prohibits this sort of shoot first and ask questions later behavior. While the fact that GoDaddy personally contacted me in response to my complaints when they shut down seclists, this incident demonstrates that a year later their policies haven't changed. Actions speak louder than words.

GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com | Threat Level from Wired.com

Title 2: Litigation Procedures for Telecommunication Company Liability

• Does not confer retroactive immunity on telecom companies alleged to have assisted in the President’s warrantless surveillance program.

• Provides telecom companies a way to present their defenses in secure proceedings in district court without the Administration using “state secrets” to block those defenses.

Title 3: National Commission on Warrantless Surveillance

• Establishes a bipartisan, National Commission – with subpoena power – to investigate and report to the American people on the Administration’s warrantless surveillance activities, and to recommend procedures and protections for the future.

Its very rare that I see a proposal in Congress that genuinely makes me happy. This is one of those moments.

House Dems Proposing Commission to Investigate Warrantless Spying, Still Reject Amnesty | Threat Level from Wired.com

Today's the day. Daily Buzz Coffee officially opens its doors. I'm eager to see what happens. I hope you'll stop by. We've already met a number of you.

Bill McCauley, a friend to several folks here at MemeStreams, has successfully opened his coffee house in Arizona! March 10th was their first day.

Congratulations Bill!

DailyBuzzCoffee Opens in Queen Creek, Arizona

They ran every American through their algorithms, searching for targets in our phone calls and internet searches, trying to make sense of who called who, in order to find some sleeper cell inside the United States.

That is to say the Bush Administration ordered NSA turned its formidable capabilities upon Americans.

And now the Congress is set to legalize, bless and grant amnesty to this drift-net program.

There's been no real debate in Congress or in the press about whether the government should be allowed to track every Americans phone calls, emails and web browsing.

The debate shouldn't be about whether the government can wiretap purely foreign to foreign phone calls without court approval, since as we've just learned, that's never been the case.

Report: NSA's Warrantless Spying Resurrects Banned 'Total Information Awareness' Project | Threat Level from Wired.com

unmanaged wrote:

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.
If your group has moderate programming, web, sysadmin, and hardware resources, you can use BOINC to create a volunteer computing project. With a single Linux server you can get the computing power of thousands of CPUs. Organizations such as IBM World Community Grid may be able to host your project (please contact us for information).
Use BOINC to create a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center.
Use BOINC for desktop Grid computing.

Like distributed.net but putting it to good use... Lets see if we could get a memestreams user grid going... Tom had some kinda of idea going around....

I'm down for that. How do we organize it? Which projects should we pick up? Have you considered doing a lightning talk on this at Outerz0ne or Summercon?

RE: BOINC: For the love of Grids

The League of Technical Voters is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to motivating and assisting technical experts to improve lawmaking and governmental process.

League of Technical Voters | Changing the World Through Transparent Communication

"Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0—the wisdom of the crowds—and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined."

Its amazing to me what venture capitalists can be convinced to invest in. Clearly, large sums of money are not distributed generally to people who know best what to do with them. Here are some rules for you.

1. If the first place you hear about a hot new technology trend is the pages of Newsweek, this either means that you don't know much about technology, or its a bunch of fluff generated by marketing people that will have no real impact on anything.

2. The Internet will never be better than mass media at doing things mass media is good at. In general, the Internet is good at enabling more participatory media that produces content which meets the interests of narrow audiences. The Mass Media is good at presenting professionally produced information that meets the interests of a wide audience.

3. Revolutions in technology are generally driven by changes in technology. The change in technology that enabled more participatory media hasn't prevented less participatory media from being created. The creation of new "less participatory media" is not a technology revolution because it is not enabled by a change in technology. It was possible to do that all along.

While it is certainly the case that there are good business ideas that aren't based in technology revolutions, they certainly shouldn't be sold as technology revolutions if they aren't technology revolutions, and they shouldn't be expected to impact society in the same way that technology revolutions do.

This is the corner that the VC industry painted itself into with retail dot com companies. Webvan, for example, was not a new technology. It was a grocery store. The economics of it worked like the economics of grocery stores, and it was competing in the already saturated, low margin grocery store market. It was not a bad business idea, but it was also not a software company and the core mistake made by its investors was to assume that it would behave like a technology revolution behaves.

Is User-Generated Content Out? | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com

Friday March 21st in Atlanta.

Outerz0ne 4 | This might be habit forming...