In a victory for the attorney representing the family of slain exotic dancer Tamara Greene and a blow to Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a federal judge has ruled that text messages exchanged by Kilpatrick and other city and police officials must be released as part of a lawsuit against the city involving the dancer's death.

THIS is the real story behind Kilpatrick. For all of the misdeeds around his other conduct, it will eventually end in a conspiracy to murder trial. Yes... it can get worse.

Judge rules attorney can get texts in Greene case

An update on the pro-Tibet tech-art protests happening in Beijing: Students for a Free Tibet tells Boing Boing that a group of five pro-Tibet activists displayed an LED Throwie Banner near the Olympics site in Beijing, and were promptly detained by Chinese authorities.

I knew this was going to happen. This is not the Man you can play around with. People "disappear" and are never seen again over there.

Activists detained after lighting up "Free Tibet" LED throwies banner near Olympics

There were people who wanted to make sure this event didn't go off as planned, and I'm very proud it was able to go off despite the change of venue," said Drew Johnson, president of Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a libertarian think tank that partnered in the launch. "There have been a lot of attempts to quiet us in our findings about global warming alarmism so it's not surprising it would happen to this event.''

yes, global warming alarmism. must be the same science that's used to float that balloon!

I cannot wait to see this skewered on the Colbert Report.

Global warming skeptics launch air attack on Gore

Sen. McCain, who was in Paris on Friday, said any breach of passport privacy deserves an apology and a full investigation.

"The United States of America values everyone's privacy and corrective action should be taken," McCain said.

Y'know... unless we need to spy on you without a warrant!

Clinton, Obama, McCain passports breached, State Department says

Ahhh corruption. How you serve our interests so well.

Worker in case against Dow Chemical returned to Nicaragua

In PBS's epidose of Frontline entitled "Spying on the Home Front", a good primer is developed for anyone who is interested in just one example of how the executive branch has ram shod over the Constitution and used every IT trick in the book to help them do it. If you haven't seen this episode, you need to watch it and think long and hard about the next time you use a credit card, do a search online, or browse alt.binaries.pictures.preteen. If you are already up to date on this topic, I still suggest you watch the episode for some interesting interviews. There's even additional footage that should make up anyone's mind about whether Al Gonzales is a slimeball or not.

Ironically, I'm not in the infosec biz, not even tangentially, but I counted no less than three people in this program that I know personally. Cindy Cohn, from the EFF, who was very helpful to us at the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network when we resisted some MPAA injected legislation back in 2003. Jeff Jonas, who's now at IBM, but had developed some of the best pattern recognition software in the world which we've used in health care claims analysis. And my good ole friend Steve Bannerman, now at Narus, but formerly at Apple Computer back in the day. Such a small world, even more painfully obvious after watching this program.

Bin Laden is laughing and so am I

Faulty fax, mistaken as threat, prompts evacuation of stores

Having formerly been a resident, I can gladly say that people in Boston are stupid.

Faulty fax, mistaken as threat, prompts evacuation of stores

slashdot is not resolving today. At least for Komkast customers. Since I'm running late, I don't have the time to check and see what might be the problem, but I find it kinda funny that they're having an outage, especially since they seem to be the source of so many outages. Maybe it's just geek karma?

more DNS screwage

Since then, in addition to the $200 billion thrown away paying for but not achieving the NII goals, we've spent another $500 billion (not including interest) on various foreign adventures intended to make us all feel safer. I just wonder what we could have got for that money, for the full $700 billion, if we'd spent it more thoughtfully, perhaps more as a business might do?

No. Bob Cringely is not my mouthpiece. But I'll definitely buy him a beer the next time I see him.

A Prius in Every Garage

Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

And if you believe this, then it's worked. Yes, you have perhaps more convenience and capability than ever before. But you don't control anything. Large institutions control everything. In fact, you've sacrificed personal freedom, economic prosperity, liberty, and privacy to enable this to come about. From the food you eat, to the clothes you wear, to the 'indie' this n that which you seek out in order to feel like you're still an individual. Even this article which soothes your wary soul into thinking it's okay comes from a large corporate source. Yes, even the religious establishment of your choice is most likely a corporation. So while you may move through the anxieties of life with the greatest of ease and capability, don't think for a second that you are in control. Big money is in control and the second you take the red pill, you'll understand that.

TIME Magazine's Person of the Year: You