This is a weblog on street art. (Random flyers and stickers that people post outdoors for no reason...) Some interesting pics here...

Wooster Collective : Stickers / Posters / Graf / Culture Jamming

] An Internet search company Thursday filed a $100 million
] antitrust lawsuit against VeriSign Inc., accusing the Web
] address provider of hijacking misspelled and unassigned
] Web addresses with a service it launched this week.

Push their asses to the wall!

But wait, check out this quote ::

] VeriSign spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy said he could not
] comment on the lawsuit because the company had not seen it
] and does not as a matter of policy comment on pending litigation.
]
] He defended the company's new service, saying it was helping
] people find Web sites instead of sending them down a digital "dead
] end."
]
] "Twenty million times a day on our network, people mistype domains
] and don't get what they're looking for," he said.

***OUR NETWORK*** Who's network!? My ISP isn't resolving domains to your service, so I guess its not your damn network then, is it? Bitch!

Forbes.com: VeriSign sued over controversial Web service

] When asked why VeriSign did not inform the Internet's
] technical organizations of the change in advance,
] O'Shaughnessy replied: "There's not much I can add
] except to say that our testing and the resources
] we've applied toward this have been in accordance
] with prevailing industry standards for new products
] and services."

If Verisign is not removed I will get involved with an alternate DNS system.

VeriSign sticks with redirect service | CNET News.com

] The landscape has not changed so much that if you had a
] vote taken today, even with all the horror stories of
] RIAA subpoenas sent to grandmothers and honor students,
] the vote would come out in favor of seriously altering or
] removing" that section of the law, Godwin said. "I think
] what you are getting is some impulse, somewhat more
] strongly from the Republican side of the aisle, toward
] some slightly higher level of judicial review and some
] safeguards and remedies for misuse of process."

The DMCA supeonas are a way of removing judicial oversight (and therefore the rule of law) from the information collection phase of intellectual property proceedings. Congress has shown a repeated interest in removing the rule of law from the equation when it benefits their friends in the media industry. Some Republicans are starting to point out that the DMCA supeonas can be used (and abused) by other people, some of whom Congress doesn't like. This is a good thing in general because this law needs to be tightened up. Fortunately its unconstituional for the goverment to give a specific interest group a special right, so they are going to have to lock this thing down across the board. The RIAA offers the same sort of non-technical, and therefore irrelevant response that you're seeing to questions about the security of voting machines. That means they are wrong, and are probably going to loose. This is progress.

Congress starts to look critically at the DMCA

] JetBlue Airways confirmed on Thursday that in September
] 2002, it provided 5 million passenger itineraries to a
] defense contractor for proof-of-concept testing of a
] Pentagon project unrelated to airline security -- with
] help from the Transportation Security Administration.

1. Jet Blue is so fucked. They violated their privacy policy. There are passenger social security numbers in the pdf file linked from this story. The law suits should start flying any minute now.

2. The PDF is worth checking out. Its a nice example of the things you can learn from trolling a database like this.

3. These consultants seem to recommend that if you don't own your home or you change residency too frequently, you ought to be given additional scrutiny at the airport.

This is the future we are heading towards. We have total access to all your purchasing, credit, and other demographic information, and if we determine that you don't fit into a popular demographic group, or that you fit into a demographic group we often have trouble with, you can look forward to getting hassled endlessly.

Remember that you live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we employ omnipotent surveillance to keep us safe from danger.

Wired News: JetBlue Shared Passenger Data

] To gather new strains, Sulakvelidze need only drop a
] bucket into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The waters of the
] Chesapeake Bay, of which the harbor is an inlet, have
] enough exchange with the Atlantic that he can find a
] phage for almost any species of bacteria, he says. If one
] doesn't work, he simply refills his bucket and looks for
] another that does.
]
] "This upgradability is one of the unique qualities of
] phages," Sulakvelidze adds. "Developing a new antibiotic
] takes 10 years and God knows how many millions of
] dollars."
]
] As he puts it, "Mother Nature runs the best genetic
] engineering lab out there. No institution or company can
] match it."

Wired 11.10: How Ravenous Soviet Viruses Will Save the World

This rules... Heavily armed police busting Christmas Carolers.

NYT comic strip on the copyright police

] The Internet Software Consortium, the nonprofit body that
] develops the ubiquitous BIND domain name server, is
] adapting its software so that those users who enter
] mistyped domain names would not automatically end up at
] VeriSign's Site Finder search engine service, AP reports.
] The patch could be available as early as today.

The Register: Bind blacklists Verisign's sitefinder IP

Someone asked me this morning how to parse the MemeStreams RSS feed. So I present this. This is a simple Perl script which uses XML::RSS to parse the headlines from a number of news sites, including MemeStreams, and post them to a Prolite LED sign. There is a lot more in that RSS object then a title, but hopefully you can use this as a starting point for your projects.

LedNews -- Example RSS perl script

] VeriSign/Network Solutions' recent actions to effectively
] "hijack" all unused domain names in the ".COM" and ".NET"
] TLDs (Top Level Domains) for their "Site Finder" service,
] unilaterally and without prior warning or consultation
] with the Internet technical or policy communities,
] represents an arrogant and dangerous abuse of their
] vested, dominant, special position, and have vast policy,
] legal, and technical implications.

Lauren Weinstein, Peter Neumann, and Dave Farber rip Verisign a new asshole. 'Bout damn time someone did it. This is an undercovered story.

PFIR Statement on VeriSign/NSI