"The idea behind capping our investment at $1 million is tied to making sure we avoided investments from traditional adult media sources," Banister explained. "It's all part of a plan to methodically decide how much money we want to take and on what terms. Investors that would want to alter the amount we pay out to models would be changing the focus of the site, and we want to avoid that."

An interview with Cyan about Zivity is on one of Wired's blogs.

Epicenter - Zivity's CEO, CSO Discuss Funding An Adult Startup

Katie Hafner puts Virgil on the front page of the Sunday New York Times.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.

Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”

Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”

I love seeing my friends in the news. Especially when it's not because someone is suing them.

Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits

The 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death has passed, and news reports have stressed his continuing influence on music, culture, and race relations. But those reports have missed Elvis's greatest achievement: as a cultural immune response to totalitarianism.

This is a must read essay.

The King of Anti-Fascism

North Korea will gradually open its door to embrace the Internet when tension on the Korean Peninsula eases after the South-North summit, an expert said Thursday.

The historical moment may come in November when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is expected to approve North Korea's Internet country domain as ``.kp.'' It is certain that North Korea will apply for the domain suffix during ICANN's regular meeting in Los Angeles between October 29 and November 2, the organization's Korean representative was quoted as saying by The Korea Business Daily.

I guess they got enough spare diesel fuel to run a nameserver..

North Korea to take control of .kp tld

The Iranians finally got around to showing Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith on TV last month, and their ruling mullahs couldn't help but add some commentary of their own. It turns out we Americans have the story all wrong. George Lucas's sci-fi saga, they tell us, is in fact a parable about our own day and age. And guess who the bad guys are...

"In what seems like a children's film, [Lucas] predicts the dark and gloomy future of the U.S.A. Elsewhere in the film, the discussions between Lord Sith and Anakin remind the viewer of the opinions held by White House politicians. It shows that for the sake of popularity, regimes talk about the rule of the people and democracy, but, in fact, they are tyrannies and dictatorships."

MEMRI did the translation. The link on their site appears to be dead. I can't seem to find the full video.. Could Lucas Film have made them pull it?

Bad Guys Blog | Watching Star Wars in Tehran

"The Internet is the new Afghanistan," Kelly said, as he released a New York Police Department (NYPD) report on the home-grown threat of attacks by Islamist extremists. "It is the de facto training ground. It's an area of concern."

This goes along great with this "Best Quote of 2006" nominee:

"I'm an artillery officer, and I can't fire cannons at the internet." -- Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt US Central Command

Internet is the new Afghanistan: NY police commissioner

If the trends hold, the one thing that we can be sure of is that Mr Rove’s political grave will receive no lack of irrigation from future Republicans.

James Carville knows how to belt out a good line.

Carville - How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans

Susan Landau plants a flag now, so she can say "I told you so" in the years to come.

This change looks reasonable at first, but it could create huge long-term security risks for the United States.

Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations.

Such threats are not theoretical.

... In simplifying wiretapping for US intelligence, we provide a target for foreign intelligence agencies and possibly rogue hackers.

In its effort to provide policymakers with immediate intelligence, the NSA forgot the critical information security aspect of its mission.

You might consider this a follow-up to the article from Sunday.

A Gateway for Hackers | Susan Landau | Washington Post

The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the U.S.

The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.

Access to the high-tech surveillance tools would, for the first time, allow Homeland Security and law-enforcement officials to see real-time, high-resolution images and data, which would allow them, for example, to identify smuggler staging areas, a gang safehouse, or possibly even a building being used by would-be terrorists to manufacture chemical weapons.

The domestic usage of surveillance drones has been in question lately too.

The reality of a total surveillance society is more realistic than most people think..

U.S. to Expand Domestic Use Of Spy Satellites - WSJ.com

For 90 minutes, through one and a half salted margaritas, John Young has been eyeballing me, speaking softly, fidgeting with the digital recorder I've placed in front of him. He's heard all the questions I am asking before, and he answers them carefully and pleasantly. Then he tells me why he's here.

Young points out how easy it was for me to set up the interview, how accessible he made himself to me. "See, it's standard tradecraft in the spy world to be extremely cooperative to people who are expecting resistance. You just offer all possible help, and they just walk right into it. Did you really think I'd let you interview me, rather than me interview you? I'm plumbing your data. I've learned a lot about how Radar operates. I'm just doing the usual shit that agents do to recruit other agents."

Am I being recruited?

"Yes."

My mission, should I choose to accept it: Find out what happened to Haden-Guest's
story, and write about Haden-Guest's alleged MI6 connection in Radar. If I don't, Young will write about it on Cryptome. "I don't believe you for a minute that you're any different from Haden-Guest," Young rants. "I'm about to get fucked over again. Radar's behind this. Turns out, you're on my shit list. I'm only talking to you to figure out what happened, and what I'm going to make of it. It doesn't look good. Until you find out what this story was and why it was killed, I only have vengeance in my mind against Radar and anyone associated with it."

Radar Online : Inside Cryptome, the website the CIA doesn't want you to see