A suspected terrorist accused of conspiring to assassinate President Bush said he proposed the plot but it wasn't pursued, and he was frustrated that other members of his al-Qaida cell lacked initiative, according to prosecutors.

Also, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Laufman writes in the motion that Abu Ali was frustrated and bored during a stay at an al-Qaida safe house "because his fellow al-Qaida cell members did not appear sufficiently motivated to suit the defendant's terrorist zeal."

Its certainly good to hear that moral is low in al-Qaida terrorist cells.

This reminds me of when a friend and I were trying to come up with propaganda movie ideas. Best one was a dark comedy about an al-Qaida cell in Las Vegas. They came over to carry out coordinated suicide bombing attacks in public places all over the strip. In the process of collecting materials, building bombs, scooping out target areas, and trying to blend in, they all become corrupted by good old American culture. One of them starts dating a stripper, another becomes a pothead, another can't peel himself away from daytime TV leading to talk shows for women teaching him how to be at peace with himself, etc.. I think we made the TV addict the hero that attempts to blow the whistle on the group just as they get their signal to attack.. If I recall, the stripper dies thwarting the only serious bomber, whom she doesn't want to see die, but winds up dead herself. The pothead gets caught and becomes the face of terror in the eyes of the American public.

I think its still a viable idea, if I didn't just blow it..

BREITBART.COM - al-Qaida lacks initiative

Well, this is interesting. Talk about a troll... The line caught me.

One word -- out of several I can think of -- to ponder: China

So, who do you trust? Why? How likely are they to screw you over? How likely are they to screw up?

Don't miss that privacy policy link. Think of what Google could do.

Vapor? How do you inhale outside San Francisco?

So, tell me about the spirit of our times... I have a few ideas of my own, just no resources.

Google Secure Access: Frequently Asked Questions

Your impression when tuning in to CNN's The Situation Room for the first time is likely to be, "Geez, there's a lot going on here."

There is. And much of it involves technologies familiar to internet regulars, but mostly unheard of in the context of TV newscasts.

Throughout the daily, three-hour show, a split video wall behind host Wolf Blitzer displays up to six separate feeds, often topically unrelated to each other.

I've been commenting to several people lately how I like The Situation Room's format. I think CNN is doing something right with it. It will be copied.

Ok, so I was poking fun at them when that worm took out CNN's newsroom..

The name of the program fits well with the environment they have set up for Wolf to do his broadcasts in. Wolf stands with his notes in front of a very large NOC style six-panel video screen displaying video coming in from the field, people he is interviewing, or anything else they have ready to go. It worked very well during the Katrina coverage. I get the impression that its easy to steer the show around in different directions as new video and information comes in. They break away often to review what's being said on the blogs about the major news stories.

It winds up having that exciting Philadelphia "action news" feel to it, not due to raised voices and rapid-fire delivery, but actual higher levels of information transfer. There are almost always several video feeds being shoved at the viewer, and you have a choice of what to look at that's more diverse than talking head vs. ticker at the bottom of the screen. Wolf does break into "Breaking News Tone" sometimes, but usually only when something new is coming in. When you have it on in the background, the cues for when you should pay attention seem honest. There are exceptions I've noticed, but there are always exceptions. Its a new format. If they catch on to the key thing -- keep it honest -- it will continue to be well received. Many people use the 24-hour stations as background noise/info. The subtly of switching into "Breaking News Tone" is enough to catch your attention. Anchors build up a level of trust with the listener if they do their job right. The tone of their voice matters. If you over do it, you wind up in the FoxNews trap, where you can't tell when something is actually worth paying attention to. You just go numb. Dynamics in the presentation of this stuff is key.

A perfect example of this is FoxNews's over use of the "Fox Alert" zig-boom sound. As documented in Outfoxed, the Fox News Alert sound was specifically designed to grab the attention of the viewer when they would break in with something new that w... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Wired News: CNN Hacks New TV Technology

Sad news, Overcode passed away on Saturday, September 17th.

More information and a guestbook is on his home page http://overcode.yak.net

Valhalla welcomes its latest hacker. John, may you Rest in Peace.

John's War with Melanoma is over

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch has accused authorities in Beijing of being paranoid after admitting plans to develop his empire in China have "hit a brick wall", the Financial Times reported.

Murdoch has spent years courting Chinese officials after angering them in 1993 by saying satellite TV posed an "unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere."

I'd like to see Murdoch "hit a brick wall" or two, but this is not one of them.

Murdoch hits 'brick wall' in China, calls Beijing 'paranoid' - Yahoo! News

The other day I had a chance to flip through a friend's copy of Kurt Vonnegut's new book. Its one of those rare volumes that you can flip to just about any page and find at least one great truth present that makes you laugh out loud.

Its clearly targeted to a younger crowd. This is a perfect book to give to a teenager. MemeStreams user Opheria put together this selection of quotes:

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresent life by leaving out sex.”

“One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it.”

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

“I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. We call ourselves ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.’”

“The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”

“We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”

“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

“Bill Gates says, ‘Wait till you can see what your computer can become.’ But it is you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer.”

“The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”

“…I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day.”

“…do you know why I think George W. Bush is so pissed off at Arabs? They brought us Algebra.”

“If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C.”

“Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

“Our President is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.”

“Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?”
“I have one reality show that would make your hair stand on end: C-Students from Yale.”

“Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.”

“What is it, what can it possibly be about blow jobs and golf?”

“…it is time we thanked God that we are in a country where even the poor people are overweight. But the Bush diet could change that.”

“The good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”

“Rules only take us so far, even good rules.”

Amazon | A Man Without A Country - Kurt Vonnegut

Heat-tempered aluminum shell has the strength of steel at only one quarter the weight
Sturdy triple-digit combination lock for superior security
Easy to customize, high-density foam padding
Two to four key locks
Extra strength hinges withstand pulling of over 400 pounds
Sturdy drawbolt latches
Innovative neoprene gasket keeps out dust and moisture, providing unrivaled protection
Manufactured in the USA

I'm fast becoming a big fan of Zero Halliburton cases, mostly due to the one I've borrowed from Decius. This one might qualify as dual use. I could envision it working well for other weapons, such as guitars. I think this has made my want list. Why the hell do I always seem to develop such expensive tastes? The exceptions don't add up to the desired. There is just something about a brief case that can stop a carbine round that's, well, sexy..

Zero Halliburton - Double Long Case

Singapore is a country that takes the Internet seriously. Last week its Ministry of Defense granted a deferment for the country's compulsory National Service to a Singaporean teenager so he could finish competing in the finals of the World Cyber Games - the Olympics of online war games.

If you want to follow a little analogy, www.sg is a portal where www.us is domain registration.. Its something that may mirror the differences between the two places.

Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen. That is why, although its fourth and eighth graders already score at the top of the Timss international math and science tests, Singapore has been introducing more innovations into schools. Its government understands that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere, it's not enough to just stay ahead of its neighbors. It has to stay ahead of everyone - including us.

... without much room to expand out, only up. I'm not sure what the teen suicide rate is compared to say, Japan. As Friedman points out in this article, Singapore has rote learning down pat. Its the creativity part they need to flesh out. Creativity happens within a space where its allowed and supported, correct?

Toward that end, some Singapore schools have adopted a math teaching program called HeyMath, which was started four years ago in Chennai, India, by two young Indian bankers, Nirmala Sankaran and Harsh Rajan, in partnership with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University.

With a team of Indian, British and Chinese math and education specialists, the HeyMath group basically said to itself: If you were a parent anywhere in the world and you noticed that Singapore kids, or Indian kids or Chinese kids, were doing really well in math, wouldn't you like to see the best textbooks, teaching and assessment tools, or the lesson plans that they were using to teach fractions to fourth graders or quadratic equations to 10th graders? And wouldn't it be nice if one company then put all these best practices together with animation tools, and delivered them through the Internet so any teacher in the world could adopt or adapt them to his or her classroom? That's HeyMath.

I'd love to check out HeyMath, but its not something you can just sign up to use. It certainly sounds like an amazing tool for learning. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get access to use this in American schools. They are clearly following a very "all rights reserved" model, according to their site. Don't expect to see a Wikipedia like spirit present in this tool.

"No matter what kind of school their kids go to, parents all ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Still Eating Our Lunch - Thomas Friedman

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has Singapore and hurricane Katrina on his mind.

That is certainly the sense I got after observing the Katrina debacle from half a world away here in Singapore - a city-state that, if it believes in anything, believes in good governance. It may roll up the sidewalks pretty early here, and it may even fine you if you spit out your gum, but if you had to choose anywhere in Asia you would want to be caught in a typhoon, it would be Singapore. Trust me, the head of Civil Defense here is not simply someone's college roommate.

At a point when we are contemplating how to rebuild a mostly destroyed city, invoking Singapore is intriguing. The Disney Land of nation-states, Singapore can best be framed in the context of its airlines. There is one size dress all the flight attendants wear. Either the fit in the dress, or they don't fit in the job. Its one way to run a society, and when you only have one city and 4.4 million people involved, it can work. I'll admit to having found the vision of Raffels somewhat appealing when sitting in the 1st class section named after him cruising at 40 thousand feet while enjoying the most complete booze selection of any airline servicing asia-pac.

"In the areas that are critical to our survival, like Defense, Finance and the Ministry of Home Affairs, we look for the best talent," said Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy. "You lose New Orleans, and you have 100 other cities just like it. But we're a city-state. We lose Singapore and there is nothing else. ... [So] the standards of discipline are very high. There is a very high degree of accountability in Singapore."

Accountability Singapore style can be pretty brutal. Lets just say you best dispose of your bubble-gum properly. Either way, they are pretty much telling us we suck, and they actually have a point or two. Granted they kill people over drug offenses, yet are still one of the major transit ports in the south-east asian heroin trade and a major venue for money laundering. I guess that's what comes with having the largest port in the world in terms of tonnage and being a major outpost in the free market.

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Singapore and Katrina - Thomas Friedman

The better world is one in which we don't need to seek permission or risk punishment to do cool stuff that makes the world a better place. In the early days of the internet, a lot of people felt that we'd found that better world. Thanks to the internet's open protocols, many of the most useful innovations, from the web to instant messaging to internet telephony, emerged without developers needing anyone's permission to run their cool new code.

But under a permission-only legal regime, the Katrinalist.net volunteers would have had to contact every site with listing data and ask for authorization to use the information first. With dozens of sites popping up in the days following the storm, getting permission would have taken a lot of time -- if the site owners could even be reached and convinced of the merit of the idea in the first place.

On the internet, having to ask permission first can kill the creation of a useful new tool.

The law should treat the internet as open by default -- a public resource rather than a gated community. This doesn't mean that we can't protect our networked computers or data with copyright law, passwords, firewalls or perhaps even terms-of-service agreements. But rather than asking whether a user obtained permission to access computers connected to the internet, the law should ask whether the owner did anything to prevent public access.

Jennifer Granick has an article on Wired talking about risks to the open Internet, using the situation surrounding KatrinaList.net as an example. According to a post on her blog, they have already received a cease and desist letter from one of the sites they are collecting information from.

Jennifer is going to be writing columns for Wired bi-weekly. She is one of the best cyberlaw people in the world, so I expect them to be good. Recently, she represented MemeStreamer Mike Lynn during the initial fallout from his BlackHat presentation on flaws in Cisco IOS. It should be noted that she did this pro-bono. Feel the good karma..

Wired News: Open Internet, We Hardly Knew Ye