Population; Resource Management; Technology; Knowledge; Economic Integration; Conflict; Governance.

Seven Revolutions

As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.

Grim Pentagon Climate Change Scenario

] The content available online is much less important than
] the manner in which it is delivered, indeed, the way the
] Web is structured. Its influence is structural rather
] than informational, and its structure is agnostic. For
] that reason, parental controls of the sort that AOL can
] offer gives no comfort to conservatives. It's not that
] Johnny will Google "hardcore" or "T&A" rather than
] "family values;" rather, it's that Johnny will come to
] think, consciously or not, of everything he reads as
] linked, associative and contingent. He will be
] disinclined to accept the authority of any text, whether
] religious, political or artistic, since he has learned
] that there is no such thing as the last word, or indeed
] even a series of words that do not link, in some way, to
] some other text or game. For those who grow up reading
] online, reading will come to seem a game, one that
] endlessly plays out in unlimited directions. The web, in
] providing link after associative link, commentary upon
] every picture and paragraph, allows, indeed requires,
] users to engage in a postmodernist inquiry.

The media is the message.

CTHEORY.NET : Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left by Peter Lurie

This is a gallery of different images of human social networks.

Gallery of network images

A female Samurai who dresses only in black and admires Hillary Clinton is running for president in Russia next month.

A Samurai Fighter, Clad in Jeans, Takes On Putin

] Stratton Sclavos, chief executive of VeriSign Inc., told
] investors in a conference call last month that the
] company might relaunch its "Site Finder" service as early
] as April.

Sometimes it feels as if there is not to be a moment of rest, on any front.

Where are the non-wildcard DNS based methods of directing browsers to lookup services? I remember there was much talk here of other ways to approach the problem. A quick search revealed this thread: http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid8950/

washingtonpost.com: VeriSign Reconsiders Search Service

] "The Government must play a greater role in punishing
] those who conceal their identities online, particularly
] when they do so in furtherance of a serious federal
] criminal offense or in violation of a federally protected
] intellectual property right," (Lamar) Smith said at a hearing on
] the topic today.

Congress wants to make it a federal crime to lie on your domain name registration. If you do not make your real address, telephone number, and email available to everyone on earth you can be sentenced to federal prison time (in this version you'd have a sentence for another crime extended). This came up in last years legislative session as well. The thing that makes my blood boil about this is that the spin is totally wrong. The copyright people are lying through their teeth, this journalist can't see through it, and the CDT/ACLU don't understand EITHER so they are providing the wrong counterpoints, almost assuring that this will pass!

This article lets slide absolute lies like:

] Smith and Berman drafted the bill after receiving complaints
] from the entertainment and software industries that much of
] their material is made available for free on Web sites whose
] owners are impossible to track down because their domain
] name registrations often contain made-up names.

No web site owner is "impossible" to track down!

DNS whois information is made available for reference. It is intended to assist communication between administrators who run networks, for security or network management related reasons. It was not designed for lawyers or police. It was also not designed with the modern spam and stalker infested internet in mind, and therefore often people fill it out with false information, especially if they aren't a business entity.

If you want to track down someone on the internet for a legal reason, you do not use the DNS whois system. That is not what the DNS whois system is for. You do a nslookup on the domain name and get the IP address. Then you use the ARIN whois system, (a completely different and totally unrelated database that used to run on the same software) which tells you what ISP an IP address has been issued to. ARIN whois is usually correct. If it is not correct you can complain to ARIN and they can check their records. Their records are always correct unless the IP addresses have been stolen (and if you're dealing with stolen IP addresses you're way past the point where DNS whois is going to help you, federal crime or not). Either way you'll get an ISP. You then go to a court and get a subpoena, and send that subpoena to the ISP, and the ISP produces contact information for the customer. This always works.

Let me be absolutely clear about this. Requiring people to keep accurate dns whois records has absolutely nothing at all to do with being able to track down domain holders on the internet. You can always do that today. Forcing people to keep accurate dns whois records is about being able to track down domain holders on the internet without court authorization. We should not allow that.

What really pisses me off here is that no one on "our side of the fence" in this debate is making that point. We're going to loose this one if the discussion isn't forced back into the realm of reality. If this is about people committing crimes on internet sites that can't be tracked down by any means, we'll be passing laws based on a complete fantasy.

Kids, this is exactly how bad law happens.

Congress Eyes Idiotic Whois Crackdown

] The new law hasn't had an effect on the amount of spam
] being sent, either. "There's been no reduction in the
] volume of spam," says Scott Chasin, MX Logic's chief
] technology officer. "In fact, the exact opposite--our
] spam rates are actually going up."
]
] MX Logic classified 77 percent of its customers' e-mail
] as spam on Monday, up 6.5 percent from January 1.

SPAM continues to grow exponentially. At these rates I think there is about a year left before people will start exiting SMTP in favor of closed systems.

PCWorld.com - Is the CAN-SPAM Law Working?

] Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first
] one is obvious. Profiling's intent is to divide people
] into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need
] to be screened more carefully, and people who are less
] likely to be evildoers and can be screened less
] carefully.
]
] But any such system will create a third, and very
] dangerous, category: evildoers who don't fit the profile.
] Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Washington-area
] sniper John Allen Muhammed and many of the Sept. 11
] terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. The
] Unabomber taught mathematics at UC Berkeley. The
] Palestinians have demonstrated that they can recruit
] suicide bombers with no previous record of anti-Israeli
] activities. Even the Sept. 11 hijackers went out of their
] way to establish a normal-looking profile; frequent-flier
] numbers, a history of first-class travel and so on.
] Evildoers can also engage in identity theft, and steal
] the identity -- and profile -- of an honest person.
] Profiling can result in less security by giving certain
] people an easy way to skirt security.

Bruce Schneier, trying to spread the clue around.

How We Are Fighting the War on Terrorism / IDs and the illusion of security

] Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Thursday
] that people concerned about losing freedom to government
] anti-terrorism efforts should speak out.

The court system is influenced by public outcry.

The Patriot Act provisions everyone is unhappy with are just as much an attack on the court system as they are civil liberties.

[Politech] Justice Ginsburg warns against apathy