"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Timeline Of Events In Scare - News
Topic: Current Events
5:58 pm EST, Feb 1, 2007
The Boston Police Department has shed some light on what occured yesterday. Apparently "real" fake pipe bombs were mixed in with the reports of the ATHF signs, and this contributed to the confusion.
# At 12:54 p.m. the Boston Police Bomb squad receives a call for a suspicious device [a Mooninite] at the intersection of Stuart and Charles Street.
# Six minutes later at 1:02 p.m. Boston Police received a call from New England Medical Center Security that they had uncovered a pipe bomb in their building in a desk drawer. Shortly thereafter Hospital Security reported that a suspect had been seen leaving the area of the pipe bomb in an agitated state stating, "God is warning you that today is going to be a sad Day." The suspect was reported to have fled the hospital.
The police reaction makes more sense in context. I can understand dealing with the first Mooninite with caution. The fact that a "real" fake pipe bomb from a crazy person was reported six minutes after the second report of a Mooninite could have easily contributed to the fear of a city wide incident.
This, however, does not excuse some of the rhetoric targetted at Turner from Boston's politicians, including and especially the ridiculous statement made by the Assistant Attorney General at this morning's arraignment that the Mooninites were intended to be mistaken for bombs.
"It's clear the intent was to get attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location," Assistant Attorney General John Grossman said at their arraignment.
I wonder if it's illegal to make intentionally false statements like that in an arraignment.
"The appearance of this device and its location are crucial," Grossman said. "This device looks like a bomb."
Some in the gallery snickered.
Fortunately, the defendants don't seem to be taking their situation too hard. If I was facing years in prison I don't know if I'd be this silly about it.
"What we really want to talk about today -- it's kind of important to some people -- it's haircuts of the 1970s," Berdovsky said.
Welcome to being misunderstood, demonized and wanted by the law.
This is a video put together by the marketing team that hung the ATHF signs around Boston. The style of this video is VERY similar to that of the Graffiti Research Lab, but it is not... Here are more pictures.
Zebbler IS Boston's Overlord!
In other news, Boston's top government officials have dispatched agents to arrest the guy who put these up because someone must pay!
I'm reminded of the anti-terror unit in Atlanta that responded to dry ice in plastic bottles and the local prosecuter proceeded to bring the guilty party up on four felony counts because otherwise they would have had to admit that they over-reacted. You do not need to make criminals out of innocent people in order to justify your actions!
This is priceless:
At least one of the devices was described to FOX News as a computer keyboard, to which a picture of someone "flipping off" the viewer was taped. Officials at the time suggested that the picture might be an attempt to mock police investigating the device.
The Global Online Freedom Act is back, and this time it looks much better!
Topic: Internet Civil Liberties
5:14 pm EST, Jan 31, 2007
To promote freedom of expression on the Internet, to protect United States businesses from coercion to participate in repression by authoritarian foreign governments, and for other purposes.
While the original version of this proposal was well intentioned I raised some serious objections to it. This version is much better. The export provisions have been cleaned up considerably and the right answers are far more likely to be reached through the process envisioned here than the one that was proposed by the prior bill.
The provisions about hosting computers have been improved as well, but it remains to be seen if the changes are sufficient to make this workable. This bill simply prohibits U.S. companies from storing personal information about their customers in "internet restricting" countries. It really depends on how people have their technologies architected, but this is at least plausible. I think minimally there should be a grace period for reaching this goal, but if anything kills the bill it will be this provision.
Unfortunately the bill that I did like last year, which funded development of circumvention technology, does not appear to have been reproposed. However, that work could be funded under the Office of Internet Freedom proposed here.
I got a call from GoDaddy a few minutes ago in response to the formal complaint I filed with them on Friday. They thanked me for my feedback and for being a customer, and said that they were looking at the issue. They couldn't say anything else. I'm not sure how to consider that. I'm glad that they are paying attention, but actions speak louder.
Senator wants restrictions on social networking sites | Capitol Updates
Topic: Internet Civil Liberties
11:29 am EST, Jan 30, 2007
A Georgia senator worried about the safety of young teenagers who log on to Internet social networking sites such as MySpace.com and FaceBook.com has proposed a bill that would force such companies to tighten up their access to minors.
The measure would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission. Senate Bill 59 also would force MySpace.com and FaceBook.com to allow parents or guardians to have access to their children’s Web pages at all times.
Oh great. Looks like this is going to be an interesting few months. Here is the bill.
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute your applications in Amazon's computing environment.
To use Amazon EC2 you simply:
1. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing all your software, including your operating system and associated configuration settings, applications, libraries, etc. Think of this as zipping up the contents of your hard drive. We provide all the necessary tools to create and package your AMI.
2. Upload this AMI to the Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) service. This gives us reliable, secure access to your AMI.
3. Register your AMI with Amazon EC2. This allows us to verify that your AMI has been uploaded correctly and to allocate a unique identifier for it.
4. Use this AMI ID and the Amazon EC2 web service APIs to run, monitor, and terminate as many instances of this AMI as required. Currently, we provide command line tools and Java libraries, and you may also directly access our SOAP or Query based APIs.
We're looking at moving MemeStreams into this. The biggest challenge is that if your instance shuts down for some reason you loose all of your data.
Ixquick's position: - You have a right to privacy. - Your search data should never fall into the wrong hands. - The only real solution is deleting your data. - We delete our users' privacy data within 48 hrs. - We are the first and only search engine to do so. - Our initiative is receiving an overwhelmingly positive response!
This search engine claims that they delete their logs.
RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service
Topic: Current Events
11:40 pm EST, Jan 29, 2007
National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications Havaria Emergency and Disaster Information Services Budapest Hungary
Well, here is one for your bookmark list. A website in Hungary that keeps an up to date map of the biggest disasters currently occuring everywhere on the planet. Its a death and destruction information console!
