I'm not sure which of these Singaporean Risk ads would be more offensive in the west, the arab royals in the Whitehouse, or the implication (am I missing something here) that having a black woman running Canada would require a war. The current Governor General of Canada is a black woman. In fact, this picture looks a bit like the Risk ad. I suppose they meant to imply an African country taking over Canada by force, or perhaps they thought they were photoshopping a picture of England.

However, I'm suprised that Indians taking over China isn't offensive in Singapore...

Risk - AdverBox Advertising Blog

The barriers to entry have dropped sufficiently so that, as long as anyone has the will to fight, they'll be able to continue fighting. I think that's the strategic picture that's most pertinent to our time."

What if the Iranians could launch swarms of hundreds of missiles simultaneously? All bets might be off. In such a scenario, the Iranians could conceivably devastate an American naval force. Do the Iranians possess enough missiles to do that? The truth is that we don't know. In the longer term, the trend seems clear.

This is the second half of an article recently discussed here.

The democratization of cruise missile technology, part II

Small-time criminals impersonate honest people in order to steal their money. Targets are ordinary folks whose ID numbers fell into the wrong hands.

Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.

I hate these guy's politics, but I admire their technique. They manage to get themselves on TV impersonating important corporate or government spokes people and provide subtly sarcastic commentary.

The Yes Men

A Staten Island, N.Y., player barked an expletive in the dugout within range of microphones and with cameras zoomed in. His manager responded by smacking the kid on the face.

ESPN reportedly has instituted a delay to avoid another ugly word slipping onto the air. We're not sure what they're going to do if another kid gets coach-slapped.

SO, ESPN has instituted a 5 second delay to protect the adults in the viewing audience from hearing swear words uttered by the children. We also seem to have no problem with smacking the children around if the disrespect our authority. People are fucked up.

It's time to cancel these 'Bad News Bears' or rein in ESPN | IndyStar.com

Google has launched a site that allows you to do searches on keywords for graphs of their usage, as well as the top cities, regions, and languages involved. This is the right way to expose this kind of data. This type of statistical data is useful, but does not infringe in anyone privacy. This will be useful for trend spotting and interest gauging.

Google Trends

Richard Posner (blog), a federal appeals judge in the 7th circuit, is on the warpath against civil liberties. His new book is destined to be the sort of thing that would make my blood boil. This New Republic article from January is a bit shorter. He repeats the falacy that the purpose of the 4th Amendment is merely to protect people from embarassment when the Government looks at their underwear, and so there is no privacy implication when robots pick your house apart for contraban.

Once a phone number in the United States was discovered to have been called by a terrorist suspect abroad, the NSA would probably want to conduct a computer search of all international calls to and from that local number for suspicious patterns or content. A computer search does not invade privacy or violate fisa, because a computer program is not a sentient being. But, if the program picked out a conversation that seemed likely to have intelligence value and an intelligence officer wanted to scrutinize it, he would come up against fisa's limitations. One can imagine an even broader surveillance program, in which all electronic communications were scanned by computers for suspicious messages

He does, however, make one suggestion that I have made before:

Permit surveillance intended to detect and prevent terrorist activity but flatly forbid the use of information gleaned by such surveillance for any purpose other than to protect national security.

Its hard to know how well this would work in practice, both because the program will identify serious crimes that don't rise to national security threats and cause a lot of moral teeth grinding on the part of the people involved, and because the definition of "national security threats" has risen to include "the radical fringe of the opposition political party" consistently in history. But, those caveats don't completely eliminate the possibility that there is something workable in this idea.

Unfortunately, this link may only work if you come in through google or you are a registered TNR member.

What if wiretapping works?

A small biotech company says it has found a way to produce human embryonic stem cells without destroying an embryo. That the prospect does not satisfy many religious conservatives who have opposed stem cell research demonstrates once again why the government should avoid making decisions on theological grounds.

Remember what happened in Ireland?

This illustrates the great lengths to which scientists must go these days to shape stem cell research to fit the dictates of religious conservatives who have imposed their own view of morality on the scientific enterprise.

Stem Cells Without Embryo Loss

Man this is infuriating... Dude goes to the bathroom on an airplane and his ipod drops out of his pocket into the toilet. What would normally be an annoying situation turns into yet another police state farce, now seemingly a daily occurance, in which an airplane is diverted to the nearest airport and the passengers and plane are dissected with a fine tooth comb by a bunch of authoritarian assholes who think that they write the law.

Included in this adventure is the now ubiquitous laptop examination for evidence of thought crime, which occured AFTER they had already determined that there was no threat to the aircraft!!

What the hell does the below have to do with preventing terrorist attacks!?

NOT A DAMN THING!

He then asked me to turn on my laptop. I did, and he began using it. I saw him open Spotlight and begin searching...

I waited in total silence for about 10 minutes as he kept searching and searching, until I finally asked him, "What are you looking for?"

"Contraband," he said without looking up at me.
"Such as?"
"Child pornography, hate propaganda."
"Child porn I can understand, that's illegal. But hate propaganda is protected speech."
Now he looked up. "What country do you think you're in?"
"Oh, it's illegal in Canada?"
"I honestly don't know. But that doesn't matter. I get to decide what goes in this country. Do you have a problem with that?"
I paused for a long time while I thought about what I should say to this. "Yes."
"Yes, you do have a problem?"
"Yes, I do. If it's illegal in Canada I'll understand, but saying 'I don't want it in my country' isn't good enough when you're a government official."

Now he was pissed. "Don't fool around with me. I'm sure you want this to end as much as I do. So I will ask you questions, and you will answer. Do you understand?"

Face to Face with the International Authoritarian Police State

Mike the Usurper wrote:

A complaint announced today by the FBI alleges that through a company called HDTV Ltd. located in Brooklyn, Iqbal and others provided customers in the New York area with satellite broadcasts of al Manar, which is a television station owned and/or operated by Hezbollah.

The Department of Treasury named al Manar as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity" in March 2006, thereby making it a crime to, among other things, engage in business transactions with al Manar. In conjunction with the arrest, agents executed search warrants at both HDTV's Brooklyn office and Iqbal's Staten Island residence where, it is alleged, Iqbal maintained several satellite dishes.

Okay, so here's an interesting question. If he's paying Al Manar to distribute their signal, he's consorting with terrorists, but if he's not paying them, then he's stealing their signal and liable under FCC copyright issues? I'd be interested to see what he was doing, because I'm not seeing any way to square this with the first amendment. You can do time, place and manner restrictions, and you can't shout "Movie!" in a crowded firehouse or the like, but otherwise, speech may not be restricted.

This one looks really ugly.

This IS an interesting question.

1. Its not legal to retransmit this broadcast without paying for it. However, it is extremely unlikely that any U.S. organization would enforce those laws on behalf of a designated terrorist organization. They should have stolen the broadcast. Of course, this could have openned them up to extra-legal fee collection from local Hezbollah supporters.

2. Its not legal to engage in commerce with a designated terrorist organization without a license. He could have applied for one. It probably would have been denied, but he could have challenged this denial on first amendment grounds, and he might have won such a challenge. Dan Bernstein did exactly this a few years ago with respect to cryptography export controls. The fact that he did this without obtaining a license muddies the water considerably. It could be argued that a licence requirement places a chill upon the freedom of speech, but its much harder to get that arguement to fly, particularly if the restrictions aren't hard to comply with and are directly connected to legitimate national security interest.

3. The FBI is likely most interested in his subscriber lists.

RE: The Raw Story | FBI: Brooklyn HDTV company provided users with 'Hezbollah TV'

Looks like they've found a new way to squeeze money out of artificial domain name scarcity.

I finally got the “official” word from Vint Cerf of ICANN, “on the record”, who confirmed that my interpretation is correct, that differential/tiered pricing on a domain-by-domain basis would not be forbidden under the .biz/info/org proposed contracts. This means that the registries could charge $100,000/yr for sex.biz, $25,000/yr for movies.org, etc.

As there is no competition for registries, if your domain fees go up neither you nor your registrar can do anything about it. This means that domains will go up until the registry finds the equilibrium point between revenue generated per domain and the reduction in the total number of registered domains.

Vint said it would be “suicide” for a registry to do it, because there’d be the 6-month notice period to raise prices and the ability for registrants to renew for up to 10 years at “old prices”, that supposedly “protects” registrants.

Most businesses are looking at a longer timeframe then 10 years and most individuals can't afford 10 years of registration, so this helps who?

This will cause broad reorganization of DNS.

ICANN Confirms: Tiered Pricing Not Forbidden in New .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG Contracts