jessica wrote:
] I really don't know how to describe this. It's just really
] strange. Strange flash entertainment.
]
] Warning: very psychedelic!

Uhhhh.... WOW. I especially liked the synchronized dancing penis men. I thought they were Mellow Mushroom (tm) dudes at first, but then became convinced otherwise. Really cool animation.

RE: flashback

Coalition forces are trying to restore civil order in Baghdad, a city of 4.5 million, and the looting has almost ended. However, the pandemonium and destruction that occurred have cost the Bush administration credibility and trust in Iraq and across the Arab world. Silliman, who's now a law professor at Duke University and executive director of the Center for Law, Ethics and National Security, says the coalition forces may have violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls for an occupying force to protect cultural property. Even if the coalition forces didn't intentionally breach the Geneva Conventions, he says, "the effect [of the looting] will be more in world opinion, than in legal sanctions."

It's amazing that we had troops stationed at the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad to protect it. There's no oil in that building, it's purely administrative.

Here we have literally thousands of years of culture being systematically disassembled and sold to the highest bidder while Rumsfeld chuckles and makes statements to the effect that boys will be boys.

Dolemite

The end of civilization

In English, this meant that anyone who intentionally let people do drugs at their events could be held liable. It also expanded the crack-house statute in two significant ways: Now the law could be applied to one-night events -- concerts, raves, parties, festivals -- as well as permanent locales like nightclubs, and it added civil penalties for violations, lowering the burden of proof from "beyond reasonable doubt" to a "preponderance of evidence."

And the trampling of Civil Liberties just goes on and on! What would constitute knowledge that people are going to do drugs at your party or festival? The article lists the presence of overpriced bottles of water, glow sticks and pacifiers. Imagine this being applied broadly to shut down hacker conventions because there might be underage drinking or other illegal drug use. Time to cancel the masquerade party where someone would undoubtedly show up as a baby? Then apply it further and you could end up with college fraternities being shut down for throwing a costume party. This law could bring back the days of River City, IA, in The Music Man.

Dolemite

Your glow stick could land you in jail

] The newly revealed genetic code of the suspected SARS
] virus still doesn't explain how it arose or how to stop
] the spread of the deadly flu-like illness, federal
] officials said Monday.

Salon.com Technology | Despite SARS genetic code, experts puzzled

] A pair of students were blocked by a federal court from
] presenting information at a Georgia security and hackers'
] conference on how to break into and modify a university
] electronic transactions system.

] "The temporary restraining order pointed out that the
] irreparable injury to Blackboard, our intellectual
] property rights and clients far outweighed the
] commercial speech rights of the individuals in
] question," said Michael Stanton, a Blackboard spokesman.
]
] The company claims that the speech being blocked is
] commercial speech because the students were a "small
] competitor" to Blackboard. One of the students,
] Georgia Institute of Technology's Billy Hoffman, had
] threatened to give away code allowing any computer to
] emulate Blackboard's technology, the company claims.

] Although an initial cease and desist letter sent to the
] Interz0ne conference organizers hinted that the students
] may have violated the DMCA, the complaint that resulted
] in the temporary restraining order did not touch on that
] copyright law.

Court blocks security conference talk | CNET News.com

Instead of the scheduled discussion, several hundred conference attendees were read the cease-and-desist letter, said Scott Milliken, an attendee. Attendees said they saw the case as a clear infringement on the First Amendment rights of the two students, and they contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who specializes in copyright issues, seeking advice on what to do next.

Hey, that's me!

Decius added: "We live in a society in which we are increasingly dependent on this high-tech infrastructure which our lives are arranged around, and if we can't take these things apart and understand how they work, then I think we have a very serious threat to our freedom."

Hey, I know that guy, too!

Dolemite

The copyright cops strike again

Decius wrote:
] Interz0ne talk censored due to DMCA notice (blogging from the
] sequestered talk (which is instead a discussion about what
] occured)).

As an update, I sent an email to the editors of Salon about this. I have since received two updates, the latter being the most important. Farhad Manjoo is looking into the details for writing this article and has contacted me for more information. If you would like to submit information as well, please let me know today so that I can get your contact information to him. Farhad is the reporter who has written some of the best stories dealing with the hacker community, such as detailed stories about the DMCA, Dmitry Skylarov, the inability to discuss the security of voting machines and more. Do a search at Salon.com for his name and you'll see plenty of articles. This is a very good thing.

Dolemite

RE: Interz0ne: Cease and Desist Letter - 20030411

Interz0ne talk censored due to DMCA notice (blogging from the sequestered talk (which is instead a discussion about what occured)).

(Rattle here blogging live from my talk.. There is a reason I have been going around all day chanting "Chilling Effects" in ominous tones..)

Interz0ne: Cease and Desist Letter - 20030411

This article gives some insight into the flaws of the National No-Fly List associated with CAPPS and CAPPS II. Along with the horror stories of existing problems, there are examples of why the new plan for CAPPS II is even worse than the current one.

"Remember, this isn't just about privacy, it's also about accountability," Tien says. "It's not just Orwell -- it's Kafka."

A bigger problem with CAPPS II, though, is that it may not work very well at finding terrorists. In May 2002, Samidh Chakrabarti and Aaron Strauss, two graduate students in computer science (and a few other disciplines) at MIT, decided to see if they could come up with an algorithm that terrorists might use to beat a profiling system like the current version of CAPPS. After studying everything that is publicly known about CAPPS, the pair determined that anyone with the will and not very many resources could easily get around the system. They concluded that airlines would be safer if, instead of profiling, they instead selected a portion of fliers at random and subjected them to more thorough searches for weapons. (Chakrabarti and Strauss wrote up their findings in a term paper for a class, but it was picked up by First Monday, a peer-reviewed academic journal on the Web.)

'Please step to the side, sir'

] A "South Park" episode, of all things, has yielded some
] investing insight. Its underpants gnomes have built a
] business based on "Phase One: Collect underpants. Phase
] Three: Profit." Look around your portfolio and you might
] discover some similar firms missing that critical
] element: Phase Two.

Fool.com: