IE and Outlook run malicious commands without scripting: “An attacker can run arbitrary commands on Windows machines with a simple bit of HTML, an Israeli security researcher has demonstrated. The exploit will work with IE, Outlook and OutlooK Express even if active scripting and ActiveX are disabled in the browser security settings.

The problem here is data binding, an old ‘feature’ going back to IE4 in which a data source object (DSO) is bound to HTML.” The Register US

Social Network Explorer version of FmH; try it out.

Bush’s endless war:

“Inexperienced in foreign affairs and intoxicated by domestic polls, George W. Bush may have misread the initial U.S. military success in Afghanistan as a blueprint for intervening in guerrilla wars all over the globe. New international polls have found he is fast alienating Muslims and other populations whose support is vital if terrorism is to be curbed.

Bush appears not to understand that a key to any successful counterinsurgency operation is to mix reasonable security measures with winning hearts and minds. Instead, Bush is charting a course of tit-for-tat violence that risks turning the world into a giant version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

” The Consortium

From Penthouse Pets to Kelly’s Thumbnails: The author, a former attorney for Penthouse who had zealously pursued reposters of his magazine’s nudes elsewhere on the web, writes:

(In a) recent landmark case, Kelly v. Arriba Soft, …(t)he U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in February 2002 held that posting thumbnails of another’s aesthetic photos is a fair use when done for information-gathering or indexing purposes.

Kelly is a professional photographer known for his shots of the American West. Arriba (now Ditto.com) is a search engine that locates and indexes images and presents them in thumbnail form, as opposed to the traditional text listings one normally gets from an Internet search engine.

To highlight how delicate fair-use analysis can be, the court also held that where a thumbnail of Kelly’s photos could be opened into a larger, higher-resolution image, the copying was not excused as fair use. The larger image constitutes copyright infringement.

The gist of the court’s decision is that thumbnails, for indexing and information-gathering purposes, are of such low resolution that they cannot be used for the same aesthetic appreciation as the original and thus do not expropriate the creative energy of the original author of the image. In fact they may do that person a favor by pointing people with interest in her/his direction.

The decision has caught flak from both those who feel that even thumbnails infringe on the rights of the original image poster, and that one should always use a text pointer (“a href=”) to an image instead of an “img src=” tag; and those who feel that ‘inline posting’ of even fullsize images is permissible — that anything posted on the web is in the public domain, that ‘information wants to be free’, etc.

Apart from the general issue of limitations to access to information and the thorny notion of ‘fair use’, this issue is of particular concern to webloggers, whose practices vary between inline posting of images from elsewhere; through posting of smaller teaser renditions which function similarly, IMHO, to the ‘indexing or information-gathering’ function of the court case; to those who never leech an image from elsewhere. I myself do use “img src” tags to place small online images with some of my weblog entries, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Often these capture images from news sources or magazines which aren’t going to bother with the copyright infringement aspects of my use.

My practice has only been objected to once in the two-plus years of FmH’s operation. When I used Hokusai’s “Wave” here to point to a gallery of Hokusai block prints someone had lovingly put up at his site, the author actually changed the name of the image on his site to stop my link from working. When I noticed that my link was broken, I first assumed I had just miscoded it and edited my link to point to the image again. He fired off an angry message to me demanding I remove the link and berating me for not having understood his intent in changing the name of the image on his site to prevent my link from working. In addition to his opinionated and unenforceable assertion that all inline linking is illegal, he made several claims to me that illustrate that the issue is broader than that of the treatment it got in Kelly v. Arriba Soft, and which troubled me and might trouble other webloggers who have used others’ images in the way I have.

Of course, Hokusai’s image per se was not this web author’s creative output, and he does not own the rights to the image, as Kelly does. But does the court’s distinction between “information-gathering” and aesthetic enjoyment vanish when the creative energies of a web author have been used in gathering, arranging and contextualizing images on a unique site? Did the court have a broad enough notion of aesthetic appreciation or aesthetic use of an image in its decision? This is how this guy asserted I was leeching off him, and it’s a troubling assertion to me. In point of fact — stating the obvious — weblogs are usually somewhere east of being mere catalogues of neat things found on the web and somewhere west of independent aesthetic creations in their own right. How far away from each of those poles a weblog — either the Platonic ideal, or any individual examplar — is, is a time-honored subject of debate in the relatively brief history of this medium of expression… although more energy, in fact, seems to have been expended in deciding how much weblogging resembles journalism (especially since Sept. 11th) — which, IMHO, as a medium it does not, except in the pretensions of some of its authors — than the equally important question of how creative a medium it is.

I responded to him that I thought I was doing him a favor, noting my appreciation of his site, sending him viewers, etc., but I’m not so sure I wasn’t appropriating his creative energies for my own aesthetic purposes, nor whether it would be wrong if I were. Where do you draw the line? Sampling in hip hop has been found to be fair use in repeated court challenges Certain images enter the lexicon as iconic and get used as signifiers in others’ works of collage or bricolage. At the other extreme, there’s frank plagiarism…

In asking me to remove the link, the web author was also objecting to my exploitation of his bandwidth to save data space on my web server. Of course, my page gets only around 500 or 600 hits a day, around 4,000 for the week that the link to his image would be up on the weblog’s main page and probably another few dozen a year thereafter when people view the archived page. But, again, where should the line be drawn? If my site were ten times as popular, would my appropriation of bandwidth from him matter? A hundred times as popular? Does the fact that he operates a small independent web page as opposed to a giant infomedia site make a difference?

Images of some form or another are, I’m confident, not likely to stop appearing on FmH; my site if anything lacks visual appeal and could use more. The web is, and my own sensibilities are, sufficiently anarchic that I’m not at all concerned with whether I violate some legalistic definition-of-the-moment of ‘fair use.’ Much more, my deliberation is about how to satisfy myself that I’m being ethical and reasonable to others in the web community. I don’t have any clearcut answers about how to do that, although since the Hokusai brouhaha I’ve certainly been more actively involved in thinking about it.

Smile, You’re on Bootleg Camera: “After last week’s story about a teenager who used his iPod to copy software from a demonstration computer at CompUSA, it has emerged that there are myriad clever ways to steal software from computer stores.

Wired News readers submitted dozens of tawdry tales involving built-in CD burners, digital cameras and even the Internet, which was used to send software from inside an Apple store.” Wired

Antibiotics Found to Have Helped Limit Anthrax Infections: “The widespread use of antibiotics in response to the October bioterrorist attacks spared at least nine people from being infected with inhalation anthrax, the deadliest form of the disease, according to a study released today.” New York Times

Beige Cosmos Produces Red Faces New York Times

The Anatomically Correct Oscar:

‘Two women’s groups, the Guerilla Girls and Alice Locas, have mounted a giant billboard in the heart of Hollywood depicting the “anatomically correct oscar” in the ungainly shape of a pudgy, middle-aged man.

“We decided it was time for a little realism in Hollywood,” they said in an statement yesterday.

“So we redesigned the old boy so he more closely resembles the white males who take him home each year.” ‘ Sydney Morning Herald

“John Rockwell, editor of The New York Times’ Sunday Arts & Leisure section for the past four years, steps down from the influential post today. He will move into the newly created position of senior cultural correspondent, writing cultural news stories and criticism.

Since it became public last December, the impending shift has caused widespread concern in the arts community, particularly because of the Times ‘ stated wish to further emphasize pop culture in the Arts & Leisure section. Under Rockwell’s guidance, it has developed into perhaps the country’s most prominent source of performing arts commentary, with coverage of everything from movies to music, from the mainstream to the fringe.” Andante

NPR Cultural Programming Put to Triage:

‘National Public Radio has begun an extensive review of its musical programming, and is considering overhauling or eliminating some of its venerable jazz and classical offerings.

A strategy paper written by NPR’s top programming executive says some of the network’s live performance and recorded music shows “may disappear,” although officials stress that nothing is final.’ Washington Post

The curse of coffee-table cinema

Movies are all about illusion, and the greatest illusion of them all is the illusion of quality. This is Miramax’s stock-in-trade. It takes stories that seem a bit classy – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat – and turns them into cultureless mush, affected little movies which are grand in their own way, and which win Oscars, but which are actually meritless escapades fine-tuned to dupe the public.

Miramax has given the world a host of cliches about European culture – naughty French priests, macho Greeks, hoity-toity Englishmen, zany Italians – and has reduced human complexity to a bunch of hopeless stereotypes bursting with sentiment. Yuck. I hate Miramax. It is the cinematic equivalent of coffee-table books and slim cuisine: full of big type and hidden sugars, but popular with those who want a taste of culture with a minimum of effort. Telegraph UK

The Last Days of Bamian’s Buddhas: “It took decades to build the magnificent stone Buddhas of Bamian. It took the Taliban nearly a month to obliterate them.

The destruction required an extraordinary effort, so complex that foreign explosives experts had to be brought in and local residents were forced to dangle on ropes over a cliff face to chip out holes for explosives. According to witnesses and participants, the Taliban struggled with ropes and pulleys, rockets, iron rods, jackhammers, artillery and tanks before a series of massive explosions finally toppled the statues.” LA Times

Bush Zigzags After Choice Loses in California Primary Making it much more likely that the governorship of the state, with one of eight American voters, will remain Democratic, this not only compromises Bush’s chances to take the state in 2004, but damages him for having “picked the wrong candidate.” Grey Davis, in a sense, engineered it:

In a highly unusual move, Mr. Davis essentially picked his own opponent by spending as much as $10 million on television commercials — about as much as Mr. Simon and Mr. Riordan combined spent — that depicted Mr. Riordan as a flake who shifted his positions on abortion and the death penalty. Some strategists said it was as if Mr. Davis won both primaries, his own, with token opposition, and the Republican contest.

Although the advertising barrage deeply wounded Mr. Riordan, he did not help himself by being impetuous on the stump and by focusing just on Mr. Davis and neglecting conservatives who are crucial to winning Republican primaries here. NY Times.

Michael Moore’s Rockstar Moment: The kerfluffle over HarperCollins’ threat not to publish Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men after the “political climate change” caused by 9-11 has given legs to the book it otherwise might not have had, making HarperCollins a bundle in the process. Moore, perhaps guilty about being in bed with Rupert Murdoch in the first place, isn’t going to go easy on his publisher, whom he accuses of lackluster promotion of the book. AlterNet

Fortune Telling: Democratic Presidential primary candidates will be the major losers in campaign finance reform “soft money” restrictions; the winner will exit the primary campaign, expected to be hotly contested, underfunded and set to take a beating from Dubya, who is not expected to have any serious challengers in the primaries to drain his coffers. The New Republic

Archaeologists believe they have uncovered the origins of monotheism at the ruins of a 3,600-year-old temple in a remote corner of Jordan. The Daily Star

Gifted few make order out of chaos: Chaotic patterns are nonrandom but disordered, yet some people appear to have a gift for predicting the next elements in a chaotic series, a new study by an Australian psychologist demonstrates. No one has any idea how they do it… [Did William Gibson write this story? –FmH] New Scientist

“Maybe the only lesson that is applicable is: whenever you use local forces, they have local agendas…” How Osama bin Laden got away: “In retrospect, it becomes clear that the battle’s underlying story is of how scant intelligence, poorly chosen allies, and dubious military tactics fumbled a golden opportunity to capture bin Laden as well as many senior Al Qaeda commanders.” CS Monitor

“Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the software giant would have to withdraw the Windows operating system from the market if a federal court approves sanctions being sought by nine of the states in the antitrust case, according to depositions released Monday.” ZDNet News

From Lloyd Grove’s Reliable Source column in the Washington Post yesterday: ‘Here’s a vignette we’re dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday’s Ford’s Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. “I know I shouldn’t have,” a witness told us yesterday, “but I started laughing.” ‘ [thanks again, Adam!]

Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center by Michael Downing

reviewed by Frederick C. Crews in the New York Review of Books. An essay on the downfall of Richard Baker-Roshi, which was a personal disillusionment for me as well as an entire community.

‘Every school of Buddhism aims at the same characterological goals: self-insight, serene detachment from impermanent objects of desire, apprehension of the underlying unity of all things, compassion toward suffering, reaching out to the needy, and sangha, or a loving community of the faithful. In this light Richard Baker presented a disturbingly anomalous model for his flock. He maintained three residences, spent large sums from the general coffers on remodeling, surrounded himself with unpaid student clerks and servants, collected exquisite and expensive works of religious art, traveled widely, and kept company with millionaires and celebrities whose interest in Buddhism was casual at best. His abbacy, Gary Snyder told Downing in disgust, had turned into “an imperial presidency…. He had become the Dick Nixon of Zen.” ‘ [thanks, David]

EU hits back against US steel duties BBC

Annals of Depravity:

Bizarre details of man’s death revealed: “Hit-and-run victim lived for two days while trapped in windshield” Dallas-Ft Worth Star Telegram

Bush’s Bunker Presidency: Galvanized by the news of the “shadow government,” the phrase “bunker mentality” is, appropriately on everybody’s lips with regard to the Bush dysadministration. Reassess the Shrub’s performance since 9-11 in this light and we see, if we haven’t already, that the impression of a confident resolved leader collapses beneath a haze of ‘spin’ by his handlers from his father’s era. James Carroll comments:

George W. Bush’s frantic, ad hoc ”war against terrorism” can seem to be yet another manifestation of presidential unsteadiness. Indeed, an air of low-grade panic has been a mark of Bush’s responses since the very day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked.

Since then the president’s careless rhetoric and bluster have appalled allies, mobilized new enemies, and turned the US State Department into a damage control center. The vice president’s status as the man in hiding has become a national joke. The Defense Department initiated, then dropped, a Soviet-style office of strategic disinformation. Boston Globe via Common Dreams

As an aside, can we really be confident with the announcement that the disinformation office has been closed? It is more likely that is disinfo…

Sure, one would expect such sentiment from the Boston Globe, but Bush Doctrine: war for the appearance of purpose, an editorial from the Daytona Beach News-Journal (“no hotbed of radicalism, as far as I know”, says Adam in sending the link), suggests that a broader range of people are starting to notice that the emperor has no clothes, despite the ‘popularity ratings.’ Noting with concern that the complimentary profiles of Dubya can’t exactly get a bead on which powerful past president he is supposed to be like —

“to be so often compared to so many presidents should signal alarm, not self-confidence. It speaks of a void at the center of power that must be made up.”

it concludes that, with such a disconnect between blurred vision and reality, coherent doctine is shelved in favor of

“this administration’s best trick: war. War, especially war against a ragged but resilient enemy, at least projects the appearance of purpose while obscuring failures of leadership.”

As Adam asked, how much cognitive dissonance can the nation bear? [thanks, Adam…]

But, of course, in the eyes of some of our friends, the editorial staff at the Daytona Beach News-Journal are aiding and abetting the enemy. spinsanity

Staff cry poetic injustice as singing Ashcroft introduces patriot games. Oh, man, you can even see and hear one of his performances on the web! Thank you, thank you, George W., for an appointment rife with such entertainment potential.

Cognitive Functioning of Long-term Heavy Cannabis Users Seeking Treatment: “These results confirm that long-term heavy cannabis users show impairments in memory and attention that endure beyond the period of intoxication and worsen with increasing years of regular cannabis use.” Journal of the American Medical Association

Hate Watch: Rallying against hate on the bench:

Clergy representing scores of Alabama and Southern houses of worship joined local and national gay rights advocates on the front steps of Alabama’s Supreme Court yesterday, calling for the removal of Chief Justice Roy Moore for “hateful and homophobic remarks” made in a recent judicial opinion…

Moore’s incindiary remarks came in his concurring opinion in a child custody case between a lesbian mother and heterosexual father. The unanimous opinion of the court, which allowed the father to keep custody of his two children, made no mention of the mother’s sexuality. Justice Moore, however, attached a long concurrence saying that homosexuality is “an inherent evil against which children must be protected.” tolerance.org

Park Rangers With Respirators: “Unless President Bush bestirs himself, the controversy over snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park is likely to become for Interior Secretary Gale Norton what arsenic was for Christie Whitman: a thoroughly misguided and wholly unnecessary policy initiative that favors a small group of people Mr. Bush has in his camp anyway while annoying a far larger constituency he can ill afford to lose.” NY Times editorial

Thomas Friedman: The Core of Muslim Rage: “Why is it that when Hindus kill Muslims it elicits an emotionally muted headline in the Arab media, but when Israel kills a dozen Muslims it inflames the entire Muslim world?” NY Times

The Psychology of Submission: “Today, the goal of nation-building is a courageous submission to the market. The international community has a duty to help make it happen. There are four steps, time-tested by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.” Adbusters

David Corn: When 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Go Bad: ” Theories that the U.S. government aided or engineered the 9/11 attacks aren’t just horribly misguided — they distract from the nefarious deeds our leaders actually do perpetrate.” AlterNet

The Imperialism of Everyday Life: John Zerzan, a philosopher and writer in Eugene, Oregon and author of the forthcoming Running on Empty:

“The less people really live – or perhaps more correctly, the more they become aware that they haven’t really lived – the more abrupt and frightening death becomes for them, and the more it appears as a terrible accident.” Theodor Adorno’s observation of decades ago seems even more pertinent today. Exploding jetliners and anthrax can terrify; meanwhile a much deeper crisis triggers a far more pervasive and fundamental fear. Adbusters

Very tentative, but could we be edging toward a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process? The Saudi land-for-peace proposal seems to be gaining momentum, from a surprising corner: Syria backs Saudi Middle East plan:

‘The Middle East peace proposal put forward by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah gained significant momentum yesterday when Syria gave its backing to the land-for-peace plan, according to the official Saudi press agency.

It quoted a Saudi official as saying that talks yesterday between Crown Prince Abdullah and the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, had been “positive and successful”. However, no Syrian statement on the talks was immediately available.’ Guardian UK

Faking It: Sex, Lies, and Women’s Magazines: Liza Featherstone from Columbia Journalism Review: “How can women’s magazines run scrupulously reported and fact-checked articles on such subjects as breast cancer and women in Afghanistan, but tell complete lies in articles about sex?” AlterNet

A Belgian court on Wednesday delayed a ruling on a war crimes investigation against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for his role in the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Boston Globe Recall speculation that the January carbomb assassination of Lebanese militia leader Elie Hobeika related to the possibility of his testimony at the looming war crimes trial.

Blair Fires New Warning at Iraq, Gets Flak at Home:

“British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a stark warning to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on Wednesday that he could face the wrath of the West but quickly ran into fire from members of his own Labour Party…

But he faces stiff opposition, not just from European allies, but his own rank-and-file. A parliamentary debate on Wednesday was suspended after politicians traded bitter accusations over Iraq with a Foreign Office minister.”

Reuters

Intercepted Al Qaeda E-Mail Is Said to Hint at Regrouping: “Newly detected Internet traffic among Al Qaeda followers, including intercepted e-mail messages, indicates that elements of the terror network may be trying to regroup in remote sanctuaries in Pakistan near the Afghan border, government officials say.

United States officials said they had discovered the existence of new Web sites and Internet communications that appeared to be part of a concerted Al Qaeda effort to reconstitute the group and re-establish communications after the war in Afghanistan.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

Ethical Philosophy Selector

These questions reflect the dilemmas that have captured the attention of history’s most significant ethical philosophers. Answer the questions as best you can. When you’re finished answering the questions, press “Select Philosophy” to generate your customized match of ethical philosophers/philosophies. The list orders the philosophers/philosophies according to their compatibility with your expressed opinions on ethics. Click on a philosopher/philosophy to see a summary and links.[via randomWalks]

The site is part of selectsmart.com, which claims to be “the Internet’s biggest collection of selectors. Decision-making based on your preferences.” The general methodology is that you answer qauestions about your preferences in an area; in some surveys, you also indicate what weight should be given to any particular preference you express. At the site, you can operate selectors for anything ranging from “gifts and collectibles” or “lawns and gardens” to “jobs and careers”, “personalities” or “belief systems”. They vary in incisiveness tremendously and, of course, in many cases if you already recognize your preferences you don’t need to be told what to select. But, I agree, the ethical philosophy selector is informative and possibly useful if you want a starting point to explore moral thought and clarify your own.

Rafe Colburn at rc3.org commented on March 2 on the Israeli incursions into the Palestinian refugee camps:

I try to restrain myself from commenting on Israel and Palestine. I really do. Really. But sometimes I cannot. The current Israeli incursions on Palestinian refugee camps are surreal, and I don’t think the media is describing them vividly enough…

And the most grotesque point here is that the even as the Israeli government rightfully condemns terrorism, the IDF is engaged in actions that inevitably result in the deaths of civilians and inevitably fail to accomplish any positive outcome as well. If they captured every militant who they believe is hiding in the refugee camps, would it put an end to the suicide bombings? Would it even reduce their frequency? I think we can all predict the long term effects of living in miserable conditions and being the subject of repeated military assaults by an occupying force…

One thing I find interesting in reading the conservative Israeli press is that they talk about what wretched hives of scum and villainy the refugee camps are, but fail to examine the conditions that lead to their current state. I have no doubt that many terrorists operate out of the camps, but perhaps an alternate solution would be to change things so that the camps are no longer needed.

A secular history if Islam: adapted from Tariq Ali’s forthcoming book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, a fascinating attempt to grapple with the intersecting trends, some dating from the time of Mohammed himself, that explain why Islam has never undergone a Reformation, why it was not touched by the Enlightenment, and why its clashes with the West, from the Crusades to Sept. 11th, have been of a fundamentalist variety.

“It was the discovery of black gold underneath the Arabian desert that provided the old religion with the means and wherewithal to revive its culture while Britain created new sultans and emirs to safeguard their newest and most precious commodity. Throughout the 20th century, the West, to safeguard its own economic interests, supported the most backward, despotic and reactionary survivals from the past, helping to defeat all forms of secularism. As we know, the story is unfinished.” London Review of Books

About the major new exhibit surveying Surrealism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The link points to NPR’s feature on the exhibit (“the art movement defied rigid definitions, but curators keep trying…”). The Met’s own servers have been too busy for me to succeed in getting to their page on the exhibit. Maybe you’ll have better luck…

The stormtrooper tactics of the cult of scientology — both on and off the ‘net — have long been of broad concern. Readers of FmH know I’ve frequently linked to accounts of their antics. I’ve usually written the name of the cult as “s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y” so they wouldn’t find my comments as easily in trolling the net for critical comments; they’ve been known to hack their opponents’ sites in the name of enlightenment and freedom… Thanks to wood s lot, I was pointed to this site which details their meticulous efforts to manipulate the ranking of their own sites in Google and other search engines to prevent readers from finding sites critical of scientology. It might be useful, as Mark Woods and I have done, to use the scientology link to point to such critical sites instead. If this were done enough, it might interfere significantly with their attempt to have only their own hits shown in searches on the term scientology.. Consider doing this too if you agree, please. [thanks, Mark]

Effects of Ethnicity on Psychiatric Diagnosis: do different rates at which various psychiatric illnesses are diagnosed in different ethnic groups represent real ethnic differences in the rates of various mental illnesses? ethnic differences in how the same mental illnesses present? or biases by diagnosticians? Psychiatric Times

Ant base is the first, online continuously-updated database of all 11,000 known ant species in the world. Social Insects Web (SIWeb) And a Wired article about Antbase.

Terrorism as Pretext:

“Terrorism, however, is more than violence. It is also the ultimate publicity stunt, and it did not take long before advertising and PR executives began to look for ways to use it as the ultimate news hook. Advertisers are using flags and patriotic imagery to sell everything from women’s fashions to cigarettes and fast food. Think tanks, lobbyists and Bush administration are using the terrorism as a pretext to justify their long-standing shopping list of bad ideas and corporate welfare measures…” PR Watch

Good (or Unwitting) Neighbors Make for Good Internet Access

“Many of the free rides these days are the result of bandwidth bleeding from private networks that are intended to let their owners connect to the Internet without being tethered to a fixed spot in a home or office.

Because the great majority of these wireless networks have not been secured, it is easy for neighbors and passers-by to use them undetected — although if enough freeloaders download large enough files, legitimate users will notice their own connections are been degraded.

The popularity of 802.11 has also begun to inspire the construction of networks that are intended to be shared, either free or for a fee.

” NY Times

What the heck is emo anyway?

Swiss Vote to Join UN, but EU Still Long Way Off: “Switzerland basked in a rare moment of international solidarity on Monday after voters abandoned centuries of political isolationism and narrowly agreed their neutral country should join the United Nations.” Reuters

Researcher: Hormone to blame for ‘irritable male syndrome’: “A sex expert reckons a condition in sheep known as irritable male syndrome may also occur in humans.

He says men who see their testosterone levels drop change their behaviour, becoming more grumpy and depressed.

It was first found in male Soay sheep whose behaviour changes when their male hormone level drops each winter.

Gerald Lincoln, of the Medical Research Council’s Human Reproductive Sciences Unit in Edinburgh, says the symptoms most resemble the so-called male menopause.” Ananova

The Random Insanity of Letters of Recommendation: “If tables of random numbers became fashionable for deciding on hires, tenurings, promotions, I suppose you, as a serious scholar, would object. And at least a table of random numbers is what it says: random. Why haven’t you objected to the system of letters, which has notably less integrity than a table of random numbers?” The Chronicle of Higher Education

David Gelernter: Paradoxes of painting: “The perceived possibilities of photography and postmodern art have killed painting. Still, it’s a great time to be a painter…” Prospect

Maureen Dowd: 60 Feet Under:

‘In a banner headline on Friday, The Washington Post blared: “Shadow Government Is at Work in Secret.” The article said President Bush had assembled a cadre of officials to operate under the radar, out of the sunlight.

This is news?

The president did that on Jan. 20, 2001.

But it turns out that after Sept. 11, wanting to make sure that everything wouldn’t collapse if there was a nuclear attack on Washington, he did it again. He formed a secret government within a secret government. A shadow of a shadow.

It suits this administration to a T- ball, reflecting its twin obsessions with secrecy and self-perpetuation.

‘ NY Times

“A brief history of Amherst, Massachusetts as selected from the police beat of the Amherst Bulletin”

Poetry Daily

“A brief history of Amherst, Massachusetts as selected from the police beat of the Amherst Bulletin”

Poetry Daily

“How many microbiologists does it take to change a light bulb?

Whatever you think the answer may be, change that light bulb soon. Microbiologists are dropping like flies. A career in microbiology can be harmful to your health — especially since 9-11.” [via Abuddhas Memes]

The Chocolate Messiah is coming, spreading his message about the best way to attain world peace.

The privatization of our culture: “The discoveries, eureka-moments, fables, characters, songs and jokes that form the only common ground we share as citizens — the set of ideas collectively known as “The West” — are now the property of a few multinational corporations. Our entire culture has fallen into private hands, taking with it our right to tell our stories, our right to keep our personal lives personal, even our right to heal our sick….

It need not be the end, however. Not if we as citizens, as Westerners, as participants in our own culture, can find the will and the resolve to reclaim what is ours.” Shift

Far Right Watch: Authorities Probe Assassination Plot: ‘A Montana militia organization was planning to assassinate as many judges, prosecutors and police officers as possible, amassing a weapons cache that included 30,000 rounds of ammunition, a targeted sheriff said.’ Washington Post Let’s not lull ourselves into a false sense of security reflecting on how halfbaked this plot sounds…

Prolific Sperm Donor’s Bad Gene: “A Dutch sperm donor who fathered 18 children is suffering from a rare hereditary degenerative brain disorder, a hospital said on Wednesday.

The man, whose sperm was used between 1989 and 1995, was not definitively diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia — which causes gradual shriveling of the cerebellum — until late 1998.The children conceived from his sperm, now aged between seven and 13, have a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease, according to the hospital, which agonized for three years before deciding to tell the parents involved.” Wired [via Spike]

Stolen Restaurant Napkins Are Just a Start

As chefs have achieved celebrity status, dining out has become a theatrical event, with the setting and the props as thrilled over as the tuna tartare. Restaurants have become temples of design, filled with beautiful objects. And diners are helping themselves to more than just the bread. A lot more.

From $3 water glasses to $1,200 silver ice buckets, from vintage photographs hanging on the walls to scented candles burning in the bathrooms — if it isn’t nailed down, diners have walked off with it. Over the course of a year, restaurants around the country lose as much as 3 percent of their earnings to theft by customers who seem to be getting more brazen by the minute. Demitasse spoons, Peugeot pepper mills, imported wineglasses, Frette linens, framed artwork, serving platters, Champagne buckets. The list of stolen goods boggles the imagination. And the ways restaurateurs are coping with the phenomenon is changing the dining experience for everyone. NY Times

Koppel Is the Odd Man Out as ABC Woos Letterman, NightLine just isn’t relevant anymore; older, more literate, more informed viewers aren’t enough of a cash cow. If Letterman doesn’t emigrate, ABC might still move its latenight programming in the braindead direction of the other networks. A subsequent article makes it clear that ABC’s news division, blindsided by the plan, is quite fretful. NY Times Wake up and smell the coffee! Infotainment long ago supplanted sophisticated news coverage in the major media…

James Ridgeway: More on the claims by Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ working group on biological weapons, that the <a

href=”http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0209/ridgeway.php”>FBI has a prime suspect in the anthrax cases, has already interviewed him, etc. The FBI continues to stonewall on the claims, probably both because the case that follows would reveal the failure of security measures at US biological weapons facilities where the culprit worked, and because there might have to be discussion of secret bioweapons projects of whose existence the government would prefer the public not be aware. says Ridgeway in his Village Voice column. Is this plausible, however? Ashcroft is such a Machiavellian information gatekeeper, with such a disregard for the niceties of a free society or open inquiry, that I find it hard to believe the Justice Dept’s Good Fight against Terrorism would be stopped by free speech concerns.

Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater Enter the Pantheon: “Can it be that little more than a decade ago, jazz singing was widely written off as a dead art? No one had come along to take the stages abandoned by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae, though Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln had survived the wilderness years to reassert their own claims as supreme individualists in an uncrowded field.” Village Voice

A Boy Genius? Mother Admits Faking Tests, raising questions not only about the boy’s mother (he has been hospitalized with psychiatric problems and placed out of her care) but about the credulity of the psychological experts who pronounced him so gifted. NY Times

The F Scale: “an instrument that (yields) an estimate of fascist receptivity at the personality level.” Relieved to find my score wasn’t “…within normal limits; an appropriate score for an American.” Via Leslie Turek, with whose weblog I’ve become acquainted via my referrer log. She is a fellow Bostonian and appears to have been a campus contemporary of mine as an undergraduate. Leslie also points to this New York Times reminiscence on the 40th anniversary of Spacewar’s advent at MIT. Turek seems to have been there (“When I was a member of the MIT Science Fiction Society in the 60’s, I knew a bunch of people who used to hang out in the M.I.T. computer lab playing Spacewar, and a number of the names in the article are familiar to me. Many of them felt at the time that games were the true calling of computers”); I enjoyed it vicariously from afar, a decade later, via Stewart Brand’s “Fanatic Life & Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.”

University of Chicago students offer definitive answer to the change-a-lightbulb question. SF Chronicle

US, Afghan and coalition forces are being beaten back, with casualties, in a battle with at least 5000 al Qaeda and Taliban forces near Gardez on Saturday. Reuters

Tugboat: thanks to Phil Agre for this delightful blink. As the saying goes, don’t try this at home. [Have patience; lots of pictures, slow-loading, and you may have to click refresh and start over several times if it chokes on you…]

Have a Heart. We’ll Send the Bill: “Last weekend American moviegoers shelled out $23.6 million to watch John Q. Archibald, played by Denzel Washington, hold an emergency room hostage because his HMO wouldn’t spend $250,000 for his dying son’s heart transplant. One wonders how many hearts could have been purchased for that $23.6 million if the supply of organs for transplant were expanded through monetary incentives.

Sound ghoulish? Bear with me. The standing American policy of the distribution of transplant organs can be summarized in one proposition: It is divine to give, but evil to sell. Altruism is chic; individuals are encouraged to give their organs at death and even during life. And they do, chiefly to close family members. But trade is verboten: It is a criminal offense to sell organs, either during life or after death, to strangers.”Wall Street Journal Not that I support this, but unfortunately the WSJ is probably perfectly in tune with the sentiment of the times — that altruism is dead and that people will only do something for a stranger from pecuniary interest.

Dear Ann Coulter…

“I must confess that my heart sank when I read your latest column, “Mineta’s Bataan death march,” in which you criticize Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta for opposing the racial profiling of Arabs in U.S. airports.

It’s not so much that I have problems with your argument (though I do personally disagree with it). What I don’t get is why you tiptoed, quite un-Coulterlike, around your most striking point: That you’d like to see Mineta dead…” –Chris Mooney The American Prospect

“It took all of seven days to shut down the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence — roughly the same amount of time that anyone actually knew it existed.

Controversy over OSI originally heated up following a New York Times story suggesting the office might spread false reports to the foreign press or run “black” propaganda campaigns. After taking a beating over this — as critics barked that the U.S. shouldn’t lie to the rest of the world — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug. Indeed, it was all over so quickly, the debate over OSI didn’t really progress far enough for anyone to bother asking whether office would actually have been very good at duping anyone.

A look back at some of the low points of U.S. psychological warfare, however, suggests that this might have been by far the more salient criticism.” The American Prospect

The American Prospect

shares with us a frustrated 12-year veteran EPA official’s letter of resignation to Christie Todd Whitman, which provides an insider’s confirmation of what is already abundantly clear to outside observers — that delays, budget cuts and the coddling of industry by the Bush dysAdministration have hobbled US environmental protection, perhaps irrevocably.

Our Man Musharraf

Few people did not feel outrage and sadness at news of the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Indeed, according to Colin Powell, Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s dictator, “took it pretty hard because he was trying to do everything he could to keep [the murder] from happening.” Echoing Powell, State Department flack Richard Boucher characterized Musharraf’s efforts at finding the missing journalist as “full-edged and full-bore.”

Diplomacy certainly requires a degree of circumspection and linguistic sleight of hand. However, that the aforementioned comments appeared in a February 23 Washington Post story — under the headline “U.S. Praises Musharraf’s Battle Against Terrorism; Powell, Others Applaud Pakistani Leader’s Efforts on Behalf of Slain American Reporter” — leaves us wondering if the Post isn’t aspiring to the status of “semiofficial newspaper,” happily serving as handmaiden to U.S. government policy. Because not only is the story bereft of any sentiment remotely critical of Musharraf — whom numerous scholars, diplomats, and intelligence agents see as yet another Pakistani strongman playing both sides against the middle in the “War on Terrorism” — but it doesn’t mention Musharraf’s derogatory and deranged remarks on the Pearl case, which were quoted in the Post a few weeks earlier. The American Prospect

KaZaA to Sen. Biden: the RIAA is lying to you PoliTech

Nearest Galaxy Ripped from Another, Study Suggests

The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, our closest neighbor at just 75,000 light-years away, was only found in 1994. The density of stars in our Milky Way can obscure astronomers’ views of the satellite galaxies, making it harder to study some regions the local universe than to examine much more distant groups of stars that exist along clear lines of sight.

Since the discovery of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, researchers have noticed that some of its younger stars are strikingly similar to stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, another satellite galaxy that sits just a bit further out in space.

Now a study led by Patrick Cseresnjes of the Paris Observatory shows strong similarities in a certain class of old stars seen in both of these satellite galaxies. Cseresnjes thinks the evidence may point to a common ancestor, a larger galaxy that was ripped apart to form both the Large Magellanic Cloud and the nearer Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, or Sgr as astronomers call it. space.com via Yahoo!

Hubble’s Hands-on Overhaul: “NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is getting a midlife makeover.

Shuttle Columbia’s crew are ready to set sail on a fourth service call to the Earth circling observatory since it was placed in orbit in April 1990. It’s tool time for teams of spacewalkers trained to carry out a $172 million modernization job on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This latest renovation effort includes: Installing a more powerful picture-taking camera; outfitting the telescope with new solar arrays; plugging in a fresh power control unit; and attaching experimental cooling gear to rejuvenate HST’s infrared vision.” space.com [via Yahoo!]

Study: Most Had Radioactive Exposure: “Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear testing exposed virtually everyone in the United States, and contributed to about 11,000 cancer deaths, an unpublished study by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concludes.

The radioactive exposure also contributed to a minimum of 22,000 U.S. cancer cases overall, according to a progress report the CDC provided Congress last year. The report first came to light in USA Today on Thursday. Reuters Health

Mother Said to Smuggle Saw Blades to Jailed Son. Watching too many movies?

A woman was arrested in Oklahoma on Thursday for trying to smuggle hacksaw blades inside a Bible to her jailed son who was only recently recaptured after escaping from prison, authorities said.

Tawana Cherese Smith, 54, was arrested in southern Oklahoma near the town of Waurika after authorities said they found the blades in the spine of a Bible she brought to her son, Joshua Bagwell.

Smith, an attorney who has been representing her son, was also found to be carrying two assault rifles in her pickup truck, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said.

Shadow Government Activated for U.S.: ‘A “shadow government” consisting of 75 or more senior officials has been living and working secretly outside Washington since Sept. 11 in case the nation’s capital is crippled by terrorist attack. “This is serious business,” President Bush said of plans to ensure the continuity of government.’ AP As usual, profound comment from the Buffoon-Elect.

Good Doobies in the War-on-Terrorism®: Gun Owners Rally Around Man Denied A Computer By Dell Newsbytes

Meet the Marquis de Sade of the puzzle world (who “says he dreams of being a former crossword constructor, but it’s not clear what else he would do.”)

He lives and works in Brooklyn now, not far from Prospect Park, in a small wooden house so barricaded to guests that he barely lets the cable man in. “I’m the guy that inspired the phrase ‘Doesn’t play well with others,’ ” he says. On most days, he wakes up by seven, does a word search to get his eyes focussed, and then spends the day shuttling between his crossword grids, his reference books, and the television. More and more crossword constructors are relying on computer programs and data bases of common clues. Hook uses only a pencil (“A computer looks really stupid tucked behind your ear”), yet he has been known to come up with twenty-four crosswords and write more than fifteen hundred clues in three days.

[…] Crosswords aren’t so different from life, one constructor told me. You start out floundering in a void, plagued by questions. And then, little by little, you begin to find answers. You build gradually on your knowledge, or make mistakes and double back, and pretty soon you find that everything is connected to everything else. But if crosswords can be addictive—if some people love them nearly to the point of folly—it may be because real life hardly enters into them. Here every problem has a solution, and pain, disease, violence, and despair never make it to the grid. “When you solve a crossword, you don’t want death or Nazis thrown in your face,” Will Shortz says. “If there is a seventy-year-old woman who is filling out the grid and she’s got ‘__uck,’ I can’t imagine making her add an ‘F.’ ”

[I’m grateful for David’s feeding me blinks like this from The New Yorker!]

“An analysis of suspected radioactive substances seized in Afghanistan has found nothing to prove that Osama bin Laden reached his decade-long goal of acquiring nuclear materials for a bomb, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing administration officials.

The government’s analysis of suspicious canisters, computer discs and documents suggests that bin Laden and al Qaeda may have been duped by black-market weapons swindlers selling crude containers hand-painted with skulls and crossbones and perhaps dipped in medical waste, the Times reported.” Reuters We all chuckled over the report several months ago that the bomb-making plans al Qaeda had obtained turned out to be spoofs from a scientific humor magazine too. It’s appealing to think of these people as easily fooled buffoons, but they only get swindled until they wise up, and it only takes once…

U.S. Broadens Terror Fight, Readying Troops for Yemen

Yemen is just the latest partner in an increasingly broad campaign that has expanded well beyond Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf, the Philippines and potentially to Georgia and Indonesia as well.

It comes as Democrats have become increasingly restless about the military moves, complaining that the administration has demanded virtually unlimited funds without providing a clear road map of the worldwide military effort. NY Times

Radical New Views of Islam and the Origins of the Koran

The reverberations have affected non-Muslim scholars in Western countries. “Between fear and political correctness, it’s not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about Islam,” said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be named, referring to the threatened violence as well as the widespread reluctance on United States college campuses to criticize other cultures. NY Times

Spacecraft Sees Possible Frozen Water on Surface of Mars: “Pictures of Mars released today by NASA show areas of hydrogen, in blue, which could indicate the presence of ice on the planet.” NY Times

“A long-awaited computer program that can circumvent government censorship of the internet has debuted at a computer conference in the US.

The program – Peekabooty – promises to give people in countries such as China and Saudi Arabia safe access to the whole of the internet. In these countries, internet access is controlled by government-operated ISPs, which blacklist certain web sites. This may include news sites that are deemed unsympathetic to government policy.” New Scientist