A bit of the old Ultraviolence.

Korova Milk Bar | East Village, NYC

The complaint, available here as a PDF, charges Rombom with obstruction of justice and with witness tampering, alleging that in April 2006 Rombom impersonated a federal investigator at the request of a client who had hired him to locate a government informant who was central to the client's money-laundering indictment in 2003.

The charges have nothing to do with HOPE, and sound rather serious, in fact.

FBI Charges HOPE Speaker with Witness Tampering, Obstructing Justice - Security Fix

The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping, CNET News.com has learned.

FBI proposes Internet CALEA

FBI plans new Net-tapping push | Tech News on ZDNet

We've all heard of the Great Firewall of China. These guys found a clever way around it:

The Great Firewall of China is an important tool for the Chinese Government in their efforts to censor the Internet. It works, in part, by inspecting web traffic to determine whether or not particular words are present.
...
It turns out [caveat: in the specific cases we’ve closely examined, YMMV] that the keyword detection is not actually being done in large routers on the borders of the Chinese networks, but in nearby subsidiary machines. When these machines detect the keyword, they do not actually prevent the packet containing the keyword from passing through the main router (this would be horribly complicated to achieve and still allow the router to run at the necessary speed). Instead, these subsiduary machines generate a series of TCP reset packets, which are sent to each end of the connection. When the resets arrive, the end-points assume they are genuine requests from the other end to close the connection — and obey. Hence the censorship occurs.

However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall’s reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We’ve done some real experiments on this — and it works just fine!! Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall — just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9¾.

Ignoring the Great Firewall of China

I (Fyodor) asked users from the nmap-hackers mailing list to share their favorite tools, and 3,243 people responded. This allowed me to expand the list to 100 tools, and even subdivide them into categories. Anyone in the security field would be well advised to go over the list and investigate tools they are unfamiliar with. I discovered several powerful new tools this way.

This is a handy list. Kudos to all the MemeStreamers who write tools on the list... There are several..

Top 100 Network Security Tools

Open Notepad and type in this phrase, without the quote marks and with no carriage return: "Bush hid the facts". Now save it and open it again.

Seriously, try this before you click through this link.

27B Stroke 6: Fun MS bug.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.

I wonder what their MySpace account is. I wonder if they want to be my friend...

New Scientist Technology - Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

Jim Harper left his hotel early Thursday at 5:30 a.m. to give himself more than two hours to clear security at San Francisco International Airport. It wasn't that he was worried the security line would be long, but because he accepted a dare from civil liberties rabble-rouser John Gilmore to test whether he could actually fly without showing identification.

Gilmore issued the challenge at Wednesday's meeting of the Department of Homeland Security's privacy advisory committee in San Francisco.

This is interesting. A member of the DHS privacy advisory committe takes Gilmore's challenge on and sails through SFO. Some of the comments attached are interesting, as well as Edward Hasbrouck's blog post. Apparently if you want to fly without showing ID you just tell them you lost your wallet and they have a process for that. Its when you start yammering about the Constitution that they fuck with you.

Wired News: The Great No-ID Airport Challenge

Nashville producer and artist Jeremy Dickens remains on the vanguard of electronica in a city known for twang.

MemeStreams user logickal has a new EP out. You can get it from iTunes, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, and BeatPort. Jeremy also keeps a blog with numerous podcasts featuring his tracks.

We were all fans of Logickal's last release. I look forward to listening to this one.

dPulse Recordings : Logickal

The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office -- which means, in effect, that we have been deprived of our faith in democracy itself.

American history is littered with vote fraud -- but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people.

Voting, as Thomas Paine said, ''is the right upon which all other rights depend.'' Unless we ensure that right, everything else we hold dear is in jeopardy.

This article is truly disturbing. I clearly remember the allegations of voter manipulation and fraud in Ohio, but I had no idea of the scale or how strong the case was. The fact that Rolling Stone has been the only outlet to publish an examination of this issue in this much detail is even more disturbing. We require the media, as the 4th estate, to provide a check against government impropriety. The freedoms the press, and the rest of the public, enjoys does not come without responsibility. If there is in fact voter fraud persisting on the scale this article alleges, the major media outlets have not honored the responsibility they have to the American public.

On one level, I concur with Decius's opinion that this type of analysis would best be presented in a non-partisan academic journal, rather than a music magazine. That being said, I wonder why this has not occurred already. In no uncertain terms, this article is a challenge to the rest of the mediasphere to further investigate the issue. Much to Kennedy's credit, he provided a reference for every factoid he used, totaling a whooping two-hundred-and-eight footnotes. There is no challenge here figuring out where he got his information from, in order to challenge or validate the allegations present.

This challenge should be answered. Our constitutional values demand it. At this point, the goal should not be to overturn the presidency, but to insure that all votes are counted in future elections. This is critical in order for our democracy to work.

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?