] Baghdad was hectic when two blogging friends e-mailed me
] to suggest that I track down "Salam Pax." I had no idea
] who or what they were talking about. I could have handed
] over the job of sorting out this Salam Pax thing to my
] interpreter—he was a clever and funny Iraqi who never
] failed to provide what I needed, whether it was
] interviews or pizza—but I let it pass. I thought I had
] better things to do.

... and it turns out that Iraqi interpreter was Salam Pax.

Salam Pax Is Real - How do I know Baghdad's famous blogger exists? He worked for me. By Peter Maass

Breakdown of media outlets owned by Viacom, AOL/TW, News Corp, Disney, and Clear Channel.

InfoFlow | Big Media Breakdown

] Certain employees of the Justice Department have been
] advised to hire lawyers to defend them in a spate of
] lawsuits that could be filed shortly by people who were
] detained in the wake of 9/11.
]
] On Monday, the department's Inspector General is expected
] to release a report that will be critical of the
] government's roundup of nearly 800 individuals on
] immigration charges after the terrorist attacks in New
] York and Washington. The report, according to someone who
] is familiar with it, will criticize officials for holding
] detainees for lengthy periods even when it was
] increasingly clear they had nothing to do with terrorism,
] and for blocking many detainees from normal immigration
] hearing procedures. Another portion of the document will
] say that some detainees were not able to get access to
] lawyers.

TIME.com: Nation -- 9/11 Lawsuits for the Justice Department?

] Michigan lawmakers took a tentative first step Wednesday
] to criminalize a bizarre high-tech weapon called the
] e-bomb, which sounds really scary but might not exist at
] all.
]
] Acting on the better-safe-than-sorry model of
] legislating, the House Criminal Justice Committee voted
] unanimously to add e-bombs -- also called electromagnetic
] bombs -- to Michigan's criminal code along with dynamite
] and other explosives.

The "better-safe-than-sorry model"? Interesting..

] At Wednesday's committee meeting, one witness used the
] movie "Ocean's 11," in which thieves use an e-bomb to
] disable electronics for a casino heist, as an example
] of its use.

... when Hollywood drives security awareness.

Michigan might ban high-tech weapon; Bills would add e-bomb to state's criminal code

] In the wake of a firestorm of outrage from Tennessee
] techies, the controversial telecommunications theft
] legislation has been heavily amended, and its backers
] finally agreed late last week to postpone action to give
] interested parties time for further debate. But
] meanwhile, members of the local technological community
] are predicting all kinds of digital doomsdays if the bill
] becomes law. They regard it as a stealth attack on their
] technological freedom by big entertainment and big cable,
] the industries that wrote and heavily lobbied the
] Tennessee bill and have pushed for similar laws across
] the nation.

] "As originally worded, the bill was so broad and vague
] that every citizen who legally used a communications
] service would've been in violation of the law," says
] Scott Kozicki, chairman of the Tennessee Digital Freedom
] Network (www.tndf.net), an ad hoc group formed to fight
] the legislation.

Scott is a MemeStreams user:

http://www.memestreams.net/users/flynn23/

Nashville Scene | Surfers vs. Big Entertainment

] Should radio spectrum be treated as property, or as a
] common resource?
]
] WHAT is the best analogy for radio spectrum? Is it, as
] most people intuitively believe, a palpable resource like
] land, best allocated through property rights that can be
] bought and sold? Or is it, thanks to technological
] progress, more like the sea, so vast that it doesn't need
] to be parcelled out (at least for shipping traffic), in
] which case general rules on how boats should behave are
] enough to ensure that it is used efficiently.

Spectrum regulation, via Lessig's blog..

Economist.com | Freeing the airwaves

AOL be damned.

Nullsoft WASTE Source Code

Rerecommending with some changes to Elonka's text:

The Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters has 4 sections of code on it. The first three have been solved. In 1999 there was a big media splash as Jim Gillogly announced his solution, which had been obtained via a computer attack. Part 4 (the last 97 characters) is as yet unsolved.

I wish I could say that I'd solved Part 4, but I haven't (yet). What I *did* do this week though, was come up with a new solution technique for part 3 which I believe to be the "pencil and paper" method that the original authors of the sculpture intended to be used. It's a way of eyeballing the code, such that anyone with access to the ciphertext ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/july99/kryptoscode19.htm ) could quickly make a grid and check the letters off to get the entire message. -- no elaborate mathematical formulae or number-crunchers required.

I've written to Gillogly and a couple other cryptographers to check my work. If anyone else would like to take a look in the meantime, I've got a page describing the technique which is posted at my Kryptos site:

Elonka's Solution to Part 3 of Kryptos

] The film depicted a bound and gagged Iraqi inside a net
] that was suspended from a forklift, according to The Sun,
] which first reported the story this morning. The Sun also
] reported that the roll included pictures of soldiers
] performing sex acts near Iraqi prisoners.

Sex acts?

Photos Raise Allegations of Torture

] Shadowbane had been hacked by several of its players. But
] unlike standard game hacks, where players gift themselves
] with super strength, health or wealth, these hackers
] managed to completely alter the rules of Shadowbane --
] turning a suddenly wrathful game loose on its players.
]
] "At first, players started speculating that there was a
] really bad bug in the game code," player Tim Wheating
] said. "Then we realized that somehow an insane god had
] taken control of our world and was out to kill us all."

] The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly
] moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City
] guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of
] never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly
] spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the
] streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful
] way possible.

] Mike Gontelli, a late arrival to the game that evening,
] said that when he arrived in Shadowbane "there were
] hundreds of tombstones. New players were being beaten and
] tortured. Newbie blood was flowing like a river. I knew it
] wasn't real, but it was oddly terrifying."

Wired News: Hackers Put 'Bane' in Shadowbane