Newly retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took on conservative Republican critics of the courts in a speech Thursday. She told an audience at Georgetown University that Republican proposals, and their sometimes uncivil tone, pose a danger to the independence of the judiciary, and the freedoms of all Americans.

I've said several times that I felt that O'Connor's legal career wasn't over just because she retired from the Supreme Court. I have a feeling that this great woman will continue to make public speaking engagements where she calls it like it is. At least, I hope she does.

NPR : O'Connor Decries Republican Attacks on Courts

The Cassini space probe has found evidence of geysers erupting from underground pools of liquid water on Saturn's moon Enceladus, scientists announced on Thursday.

Earth, Io, Europa... meet Enceladus.

CNN.com - Signs of water found on one of Saturn's moons - Mar 9, 2006

Information overload has become the typical issue of anyone using the web to access or search for nuggets of information. Both the search and the subscription paradigms lead to countless results, posts, articles that one needs to sift through to extract relevant facts. Using Attention metadata (blog subscriptions, document hyperlinks, URLs and keywords entered by a web user,…) is one of the mechanisms infrastructure providers will use to elevate relevant pieces of information – as demonstrated today by the first generation of meme trackers (like Memeorandum, TailRank,…).

This sounds like an interesting conference. I am going to follow that happens with the Attention stuff. This is data we could use, and provide. We've already been trying to approach the situation in a similar manor since 2001.

Also check out this Steve Gillmore article about Attention.

Jeff Clavier's Software Only: SDForum Search SIG: The Search for Attention

She informed me that there had been no direct fraudulent transactions on my account. Rather, she informed me that the ATM networks of Canada, Russia and the United Kingdom have been compromised. I used the term class break as a question and she repeated that there has been a class break of the ATM networks in those countries. The ATM network in Canada has been compromised and as a result, using my ATM card over the Canadian network locked my account automatically. She informed me that this has been an ongoing issue for the last two weeks. When I asked why there was no media attention, she said she wasn't sure. I said it was a pretty big deal and she agreed.

Rumors/stories of a major security breach at Citibank are going around. People have having their cards shutoff all over the place.

Boing Boing: Citibank under fraud attack, customers locked out of accounts

The agency entrusted with protecting the U.S. homeland is having difficulty safeguarding its own headquarters, say private security guards at the complex.

The guards have taken their concerns to Congress, describing inadequate training, failed security tests and slow or confused reactions to bomb and biological threats.

For instance, when an envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at Homeland Security Department headquarters, guards said they watched in amazement as superiors carried it by the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff's window without evacuating people nearby.

Another described how guards flunked a test by the Secret Service, which sent vehicles into the compound with dummy government identification tags hanging from inside mirrors. Guards cleared such vehicles through on two occasions, this guard said, and one officer even copied down the false information without realizing it was supposed to match information on the employee's government badge.

Further down the article, it says the reason the powder wasn't of concern was because all the mail is irradiated. That still doesn't justify that kinda ball dropping. If it was anthrax, you'd still want to assume the irradiation didn't do the trick, and preserve any evidence that might allow you to learn about its source.

I seriously hope this is just false information or something...

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Guards Say Homeland Security HQ Insecure

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.

But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. One application of the database technology, called Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform, or Scamp, offers access to about nine weeks of calling information. It currently handles about 70,000 queries a month from fraud and law enforcement investigators, according to AT&T documents.

A former AT&T official who had detailed knowledge of the call-record database said the Daytona system takes great care to make certain that anyone using the database - whether AT&T employee or law enforcement official with a subpoena - sees only information he or she is authorized to see, and that an audit trail keeps track of all users. Such information is frequently used to build models of suspects' social networks.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive corporate matters, said every telephone call generated a record: number called, time of call, duration of call, billing category and other details. While the database does not contain such billing data as names, addresses and credit card numbers, those records are in a linked database that can be tapped by authorized users.

New calls are entered into the database immediately after they end, the official said, adding, "I would characterize it as near real time."

According to a current AT&T employee, whose identity is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing his job, the mining of the AT&T databases had a notable success in helping investigators find the perpetrators of what was known as the Moldovan porn scam.

In 1997 a shadowy group in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was tricking Internet users by enticing them to a pornography Web site that would download a piece of software that disconnected the computer user from his local telephone line and redialed a costly 900 number in Moldova.

While another long-distance carrier simply cut off the entire nation of Moldova from its network, AT&T and the Moldovan authorities were able to mine the database to track the culprits.

Bruce Schneier brings this from the New York Times from behind the great subscription wall..

Schneier on Security: AT&T's 1.9-Trillion-Call Database

Turns out that if someone types "startkeylogger" or "stopkeylogger" in an IRC channel, anyone on the channel using the affected Norton products will be immediately kicked off without warning.

hehehe.... The problem with a lot of automated tools that try to respond to attacks is that an attack can trigger them intentionally. Dropping in a firewall rule to block anyone who port scans you? Why don't I spoof a port scan from your favorite website? Even worse is the idea of automatically retaliating. Retaliating security software is Texan for distributed denial of service zombie.

Leveraging automated attack response

MemeStreams user Jello is setting lose some code for an idea he was working on. If you have legal expertise and want to get involved in developing software for lawyers, this is something to look at:

Screenshot #1 - Screenshot #2 - Screenshot #3 - Screenshot #4 - Screenshot #5

While living in India I made a little prototype for a process-flow based system for lawyers. Its a Java SWT/JFace app, using the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework. I love GEF. It boggles my scrotum. Anyway, its not much, but I'm not working on this anymore and so I've decided to set it free. Someone with more legal expertise and more devotion than myself could create something very cool along these lines, and probably will, someday.

Source requests to source@lucision.com until I clean that up and post it too.

Process Flow Based Legal Reasoning and Document Organization

At several points in the past, we have attempted to get people to colonize a MemeStreams IRC channel. Each time, its had about the same result. Five or six people pop in the first day.. The times when people are chatting don't line up, and people stop coming. Then I see a trail of people entering and exiting for 15 minutes at a time for the next several days..

Lets try this again... This time, stay in the damn channel. Idle there. Attract some more people. It takes awhile for any given channel to grab traction.

The topic isn't limited to MemeStreams, but should have something to do with media, idea transfer, Internet issues, communication theory, or current events.

irc://irc.freenode.net:#memetics

Freenode is a great network. Its stable, there are numerous servers, and the channel/nick services work well so there is no need to have bots to administrate the channels.

For those that don't use IRC, its a very old chat protocol. There are numerous networks and a plethora of clients you can use to connect to it. Asking which client is the best to use is like asking for a major debate. I prefer XChat myself. The main site has the Windows and Linux clients. There is an OSX specific port as well.

I have a hunch something is up here...

I'm sure everyone has seen the video of the live-action Simpsons opening by now. Its the hot net meme of the moment. There may be a little bit more here than expected. This may very well be a test run to get feedback on a plan.. Or an event strategy that just started..

Take note of the linked article from The UK Sun:

Simpson’s maker Matt Groening has approved the human version of the show’s opening credits to promote the brand new series.

An insider said: "We're really excited about it.

In the context of the story, that can easily be dismissed as a typo, as "new season" would make the most sense. However, lets keep one thing in mind here... The Sun is also a Murdoch paper. The Simpsons is Fox's longest running series and a big money maker. Nothing runs for 17 seasons without a chorus of bean counters screaming for a way to expand the empire using its following. That typo has been up there for awhile and no one is correcting it. Since March 3rd, complete with links to the video in multiple formats. That's an intended leak.

Also something to make note of:

And you can be among the first to watch the hilarious titles, filmed over 18 months in Britain, by clicking one of the links below.

"We used regular actors, not so much for their resemblance - as you can't copy a bunch of yellow characters - but becuase you can easily identify with them."

All that language that denotes something more there than a one off thing.

18 months is a long time to make that, unless most of the focus was on casting for the long term, and planning sets that are intended to be reused. Who the hell are these people?

Basing a Simpsons spinoff in Britain makes a lot of sense too. I can think of numerous reasons why. There was talk of a Simpsons live-action movie awhile back... That could be what's going on too. Its possible that right now someone is trying to make a decision which way to go with it. Positive reaction == series. Negative reaction == movie.

So what does everyone think.. Is my hunch right? Have I finally become capable of reading Rupert Murdoch's mind? Did they cast Lisa Simpson in a way we can live with?

The Sun leaks The Simpsons live-action series meme