A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Chapter 38 of Title 43 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to private detectives and security agencies, so as to revise a definition;

HB 1259 is back, and if anything it is worse. If this bill becomes law it will be a felony for CompUSA to remove virsuses from infected computers without a PI licence and a law enforcement professional on staff. If you are computer consultant and you respond a computer breakin you could face a year in prison under this statute.

This matter requires national attention from the IT Industry. Now.

At this point, both the IT and Internet content industries need to give serious attention to the Georgia state legislature as a whole right now. We are facing serious threats to our ability to function in Georgia on several fronts.

There is also Georgia Senate Bill 59 (SB 59), which would make sites like MemeStreams illegal.

Georgia General Assembly - HB 504

"Defuse the ticking time-bomb known as your child's imagination before it explodes and destroys her completely," said child-safety expert Kenneth McMillan, who advised the HHS in composing the guidelines. "New data shows a disturbing correlation between serious accidents and the ability of children to envision a world full of exciting possibility."

The guidelines, titled "Boundless Imagination, Boundless Hazards: Ways To Keep Your Kids Safe From A World Of Wonder," are posted on the HHS website, and will also be available in brochure form in pediatricians' offices across the country.

According to McMillan, children can suffer broken bones, head trauma, and even fatal injuries from unsupervised exposure to childlike awe. "If your children are allowed to unlock their imaginations, anything from a backyard swing set to a child's own bedroom can be transformed into a dangerous undersea castle or dragon's lair," McMillan said. "But by encouraging your kids to think linearly and literally, and constantly reminding them they can never be anything but human children with no extraordinary characteristics, you can better ensure that they will lead prolonged lives."

Satire: Experts call for restrictions on childhood imagination - CNN.com

This is truly awesome. The folks at Graffiti Research Labs created a rig that facilitates painting with light on the side of a building. It uses a high lumens projector to project the light, a green laser pointer to do the writing, and a security/astrononmy camera to detect where the green laser was pointed. They have made all the code available under the GPL.

Here is video of them using the rig via YouTube:

Higher quality quicktime video can be found here.

Shortly after Nina Reiser disappeared, police found her blood in her estranged husband's home and car. The passenger seat was missing. The floor was soaked with water. And in the back were two true-crime books about murder.

Hans Reiser was quickly questioned, jailed and charged with murdering his wife.

But prosecutors are going to have to prove it without a body, because they have yet to find her remains.

His lawyer already has tried to explain away Nina Reiser's disappearance by suggesting she simply returned to her native Russia or got mixed up with a sadomasochist or the Russian Mafia.

"You can prove the case, but it's a terrific challenge," said E. Michael McCann, the former Milwaukee district attorney who prosecuted Jeffrey Dahmer. He said he remembers about a half-dozen "no-body" homicides during his 38-year career. "A prosecutor's hope is that something will turn up."

Hans Reiser, a 43-year-old Oakland software developer, is being held without bail while a judge decides whether there is enough evidence to try him. A decision is expected next month.

In addition to the blood in his Honda CRX were a roll of trash bags, masking tape, absorbent towels and two books: "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," by David Simon, about the Baltimore police homicide squad, and "Masterpieces of Murder," by Jonathan Goodman, about notorious murder cases.

Reiser bought the books five days after his wife's disappearance last September, according to police. But prosecutors have noted the books included chapters on how to dispose of a body.

Defense attorney William Du Bois has countered by saying the books contain chapters on how police plant evidence and set up murder scenes.

Is someone going to make a joke about ReiserFS being good for storing bodies?

Want to know how to dispose of a body? RTFM!

Murder case has plenty of intrigue -- but no body - CNN.com

That didn't take long. On Feb. 8, I posted to YouTube a clip taken from the Super Bowl: not the football, but the copyright warning the NFL stuck into the middle of it, wherein they tell you it's forbidden even to share "accounts of the game" without the NFL's consent.

Their copyright bot didn't seem to see the fair use in my educational excerpt, so YouTube just sent me their boilerplate takedown. Time to break out that DMCA counter-notification.

Wendy's Blog: Legal Tags: My First DMCA Takedown

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 16, a SWAT team from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, backed up by officers from the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office and the local police department, along with a few drug-sniffing dogs, burst into a unmarked recording studio on a short, quiet street in an industrial neighborhood near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The officers entered with their guns drawn; the local police chief said later that they were “prepared for the worst.” They had come to serve a warrant for the arrest of the studio’s owners on the grounds that they had violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO, a charge often used to lock up people who make a business of selling drugs or breaking people’s arms to extort money. The officers confiscated recording equipment, cars, computers and bank statements along with more than 25,000 music CDs. Two of the three owners of the studio, Tyree Simmons, who is 28, and Donald Cannon, who is 27, were arrested and held overnight in the Fulton County jail. Eight employees, mostly interns from local colleges, were briefly detained as well.

Later that night, a reporter for the local Fox TV station, Stacey Elgin, delivered a report on the raid from the darkened street in front of the studio. She announced that the owners of the studio, known professionally as DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, were arrested for making “illegal CDs.” The report cut to an interview with Matthew Kilgo, an official with the Recording Industry Association of America, who was involved in the raid. The R.I.A.A., a trade and lobbying group that represents the major American record labels, works closely with the Department of Justice and local police departments to crack down on illegal downloading and music piracy, which most record-company executives see as a dire threat to their business.

Kilgo works in the R.I.A.A.’s Atlanta office, and in the weeks before the raid, the local police chief said, R.I.A.A. investigators helped the police collect evidence and conduct surveillance at the studio. Kilgo consulted with the R.I.A.A.’s national headquarters in advance of the raid, and after the raid, a team of men wearing R.I.A.A. jackets was responsible for boxing the CDs and carting them to a warehouse for examination.

If anyone involved with the raid knew that the men they had arrested were two of the most famous D.J.’s in the country, they didn’t let on while the cameras were rolling. For local law enforcement, the raid on Drama and Cannon’s studio was no different from a raid they executed in October on an Atlanta factory where a team of illegal immigrants was found making thousands of copies of popular DVDs and CDs to sell on the street. Along with the bootlegged CDs, the police found weapons and a stash of drugs in the factory. (The Fox report on the DJ Drama raid included a shot of a grave-looking police officer saying, “In this case we didn’t find drugs or weapons, but it’s not uncommon for us to find other contraband.”)

Read this whole article...

Hip-Hop Outlaw (Industry Version) - Samantha M. Shapiro - New York Times

A set of long exposures that were taken while playing video war games of the 80's, created by Atari, Centuri & Taito. The photographs were shot from video game screens while playing the games. By recording each second of an entire game on 1 frame of film, captured complex patterns were captured not normally seen by the naked eye.

Awesome. The included image is from Tempest. I could tell the second I saw it. Tempest is one of the coolest video games ever.

Long Video War Game Exposures

God's view on LISP, and Perl:

"Truly, this was the language from which the gods wrought the universe."

"No, it's not."

"It's not?"

"I mean, ostensibly, yes. Honestly, we hacked most of it together with Perl."

Hahaha.. That explains both the elegance of it all, and how damn confusing it is to reason through the inner workings.

xkcd - Perl: When you absolutely, positively, must create the universe in seven days

Sound of Traffic is a Java "application" which converts TCP/IP header information into midi notes via the Java Synthesizer. The purpose is to listen in on network traffic in ordered time, via a tempo, rather than realtime, which could be more chaotic. In this sense it becomes closer to music then noise.

Play back of traffic is sorted by source and destination addresses and ports. Ports are assigned individual midi instruments and played on odd or even ticks depending upon whether it is a source or destination packet. The note played by the port is based upon the number of hits (amount of traffic) occurring on the port.

Development is on hold while I develop a new package for converting numeric data from any data stream into audio (MIDI, Sampled, FM Modulation.)

Sound of traffic is kinda neat.

Sound of Traffic

Iraq War Plan Assumed Only 5,000 U.S. Troops Still There by December 2006

CentCom PowerPoint Slides Briefed to White House and Rumsfeld in 2002, Obtained by National Security Archive through Freedom of Information Act

PowerPoints Reflect Internal Debates Over Size and Timing of Invasion Force

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 214

The Polo Step presentations have been declassified and obtained via a FOIA request.

Back in ancient history, the 90's, the term stepin' was in the common street vernacular. It came from the term "stepping up", which was synonymous with the term frontin'. In short, it meant one was being overly aggressive and suggesting a challenge.

I honor of this report, I suggest we bring the term back, in the form of Polo Stepin'.. The term meaning, being too aggressive and getting into a situation that will not go as planned.

"You best not be polo stepin' in my face, or you gonna become a causality."

TOP SECRET POLO STEP - Iraq War Plan Assumed Only 5,000 U.S. Troops Still There by December 2006