Forget the trees! If you would only look at the forest, you'd see that it's actually underwater.

In fact, the vast majority of US ports are owned by foreign companies. But ownership ranks toward the bottom of the vulnerabilities, says Flynn, who hopes the attention garnered by the recent purchase will emphasize the need to work with foreign entities in addressing larger security concerns. Regardless of who owns the ports, the volume of goods flowing through them is so massive that providing security oversight for incoming containers is a daunting task.

UAE Port Purchase Raises Outcry

Same old story ...

Many Americans have expressed concern over the Bush administration's eavesdropping program. But there's a simple solution for anyone concerned with prying eyes, at least when it comes to e-mail: encryption.

Um, obviously the folks at NPR didn't read that WaPo story about the not-so-anonymous botmaster in Middle America. Or they'd know that for a great many of those "concerned with prying eyes", their computers are infested with malware, often with root access.

E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use

I haven't read this yet, but it seemed interesting.

Earlier this week, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, held a remarkably interesting conference titled "Panic Attack: The New Precautionary Culture, the Politics of Fear, and the Risks to Innovation." It was interesting not only because I was a participant, but because it looked at how many Western countries are losing their cultural nerve, as evidenced by the increasing cultural acceptance of the so-called precautionary principle.

The strongest versions of the precautionary principle demand that innovators prove that their inventions will never cause harm before they are allowed to deploy or sell them. In other words, if an action might cause harm, then inaction is preferable. The problem is that all new activities, especially those involving scientific research and technological innovation, always carry some risks. Attempting to avoid all risk is a recipe for technological and economic stagnation.

Bill Joy came to mind.

Culture of Fear: Dealing with cultural panic attacks

This story's been going on for a while now, and no one has mentioned anything about it.

"When you look at these cases, you have to ask yourself, 'Is there a protection racket in Los Angeles?' And I think you are seeing evidence that there is right now, that people are using extra-legal means to neutralize antagonists in legal proceedings. The integrity of the courts has been called into question."

"There is a great deal of schadenfreude going around among the lawyers who are not targets, I'm sure."

A B-Movie Becomes a Blockbuster

Fancy yourself a movie buff and a gambler? Keep your eye on the *.

Think you know who's going to take home the Oscar? Cast your vote now!

Predict correctly and you could win an all-expense paid weekend in Hollywood to watch your favorite stars arrive at the 79th Academy Awards in 2007! Seated in the Red Carpet arrival area*, you will be able to watch as the stars strut for the cameras and the fans!

* Grand Prize does not include tickets to the Academy Awards Ceremony itself; it only consists of seating in the bleachers in the red carpet arrival area.

Oooh, somebody stop me. Please.

Entertainment Weekly and ABC want to send you to the bleachers!

stare at this then stare at something else... trippy.

Magic Yo | Yoism

Great selection of fonts, including free TrueType fonts.

Larabie Fonts : MyFonts

Blogging -- if you will forgive the cartoon philosophising -- brought the European Enlightenment to the US. Each blogger was his, or her, own printing press, spontaneously exercising their freedom to criticise.

Which is great.

But along the way, opinion became the new pornography on the internet.

...

If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

"Oh, the boredom of argument without action, politics without power."

...

Blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts -- a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

I wonder if anyone ever wrote an ode to the telegram or the personal letter, lamenting the evanescent qualities of the telephone. (Can you imagine a book being published 40 years from now, based on Sergey Brin's instant messages?)

A historical tidbit for you:

Needless bureaucracy led to the founding of William Dockwra's Penny Post in 1680. A merchant of London, Dockwra realized the potential for a business designed to quickly and cheaply deliver mail from one place in London to another, all for the cost of a penny. Along with his business partner, Robert Murray, he quickly founded his business and based their head office in Line Street, along with seven additional sorting offices. The Penny Post met with tremendous success, and grew to five hundred receiving houses in just two years. Messengers would deliver to each area between 5 and 15 times daily. It was a well-run system that received much acclaim.

Time for the last post

"It's totally like a networking thing."

There was a time when only phreaks had memorized the area codes. And back then, there were far fewer codes to know.

"I'm totally from Richmond."

Like, totally. "Give me a C, give me a U, give me a T ... TAX CUT!"

Samantha Test, 27, is the proud owner of the Cadillac of area codes, San Francisco's 415. It has enormous cachet.

Ms. Test says she just "feels more like a 415 than a 202."

Of course, this has been years in the making.

KRAMER: It's a whole different world downtown-- different Gap, different Tower Records, and she's a 646.
ELAINE: What? What is that?
JERRY: That's the new area code. They've run out of 212s, so all the new numbers are 646.
ELAINE: I was a 718 when I first moved here. I cried every night.

...

PHONE MAN: All right, miss Benes, all finished. Here's your new number.
ELAINE: Ahem. 646? What is this?
PHONE MAN: That's your new area code.
ELAINE: I thought 646 was just for new numbers.
PHONE MAN: This is a new number.
ELAINE: No, no, no, no. It's not a new number. It's--it's--it's just a changed number. See? It's not different. It's the same, just...changed.
PHONE MAN: Look, I work for the phone company. I've had a lot of experience with semantics, so don't try to lure me into some maze of circular logic.

...

Elaine and a man are talking.

MAN: You're probably one of those women who doesn't like to give out her number.
ELAINE: No, I'm not. Here you go.
MAN: 646?
ELAINE: It's a new area code.
MAN: What area? New Jersey?
ELAINE: No, no. It's right here in the city. It's the same as 212. They just multiplied it by 3, and then they added one to the middle number. It's the same.
MAN: Do I have to dial a one first?

Elaine nods and the man crumples up her number.

Ah, Area Codes ...

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point is pleased to present this report, "Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting Al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vulnerabilities." Based on a collection of al-Qa’ida documents that have recently been released from the Department of Defense’s Harmony Database, this report provides an analysis of al-Qa’ida’s organizational vulnerabilities. These documents, captured in the course of operations supporting the GWOT, have never before been made available to the academic and policy community. "Harmony and Disharmony" includes a theoretically informed analysis of potential opportunities to exploit al-Qa’ida’s network vulnerabilities, a case study of jihadi operational failure, and specific recommendations for effectively addressing the evolving al-Qa’ida threat. We have provided brief summaries of each of the released documents, and the full texts of the released documents can be accessed via hyperlinks within the report, both in their original Arabic and in English. We hope that this report will provide a useful resource in our collective efforts to better understand and combat al-Qa’ida and its affiliated movements.

Be sure to click through on Harmony Document List (with linked summaries) for more documents.

In addition, the CTC report "Stealing Al-Qa'ida's Playbook" is available.

Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting Al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities