[Quote:]

For most of the 10 years she has lived in her three-bedroom apartment on Codman Park in Roxbury, Betty Smith has been fighting to keep the drug dealers off her street.

     Lately she’s been winning.

     But her efforts to make her block safer have had the perverse effect of helping to price her out of her home.

     A few months ago, her landlord told Smith he was raising the rent from $825 a month to $1,600 a month. Smith is now afraid she’ll have to leave the neighborhood she worked to make safer for her two boys, 17 and 12 years old, as well as two foster kids placed with her by the state.

[Quote:]

A woman was shocked to learn Friday that a photo of what appeared to be her old driver’s license showed up on an Islamic Web site along with a claim that she had been captured in southern Iraq and slain.

Dawn Perryman, 43, who lives in this community near Flint, found out about the Internet posting after a reporter from The Associated Press called and talked to her husband about the claim.

More…

[Quote:]

Never content to pass savings along to customers, banks – with a little help from their friends in Congress – are again poised to turn a basic service into a profit center.

Last week, federal law began allowing banks greater latitude to process checks electronically, reducing to minutes or hours the time it takes for the money to be deducted from a check writer’s account. But there is no change in the length of time that banks can hold deposited checks before making the funds available – up to two days for local checks, five days for nonlocal checks and 11 days for checks over $5,000. So in addition to saving an estimated $2 billion a year in paper processing costs, the banks will make loads of money on the float.

And not just from that. By processing checks faster while placing holds on deposits, banks are increasing the chances of bouncing a check. As banks start using the new procedures, unsuspecting consumers will bounce an estimated seven million more checks a month and pay an additional $170 million in monthly bounced-check fees. Worse yet, to promptly correct problems that may arise from electronic processing, such as double payment of a single check or payment in the wrong amount, the new rules require a customer to present a copy of the check’s electronic image, known as a “substitute check.” There’s nothing to prevent a bank from charging a fee for providing the copy.

[Quote:]

” … Nun, natürlich, das Volk will keinen Krieg”, sagte Göring achselzuckend. “Warum sollte irgendein armer Landarbeiter im Krieg sein Leben aufs Spiel setzen wollen, wenn das Beste ist, was er dabei herausholen kann, dass er mit heilen Knochen zurückkommt. Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg; weder in Russland, noch in England, noch in Amerika, und ebenso wenig in Deutschland. Das ist klar. Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. … das Volk kann mit oder ohne Stimmrecht immer dazu gebracht werden, den Befehlen der Führer zu folgen. Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land.”

[Quote:]

Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday the invasion of Iraq will go down in history, along with the war in Afghanistan, for its “brilliance.”

[Quote:]

The Bushies’ campaign pitch follows their usual backward logic: Because we have failed to make you safe, you should re-elect us to make you safer. Because we haven’t caught Osama in three years, you need us to catch Osama in the next four years. Because we didn’t bother to secure explosives in Iraq, you can count on us to make sure those explosives aren’t used against you.

You’d think that seeing Osama looking fit as a fiddle and ready for hate would spark anger at the Bush administration’s cynical diversion of the war on Al Qaeda to the war on Saddam. It’s absurd that we’re mired in Iraq – an invasion the demented vice president praised on Friday for its “brilliance” – while the 9/11 mastermind nonchalantly pops up anytime he wants. For some, it seemed cartoonish, with Osama as Road Runner beeping by Wile E. Bush as Dick Cheney and Rummy run the Acme/Halliburton explosives company – now under F.B.I. investigation for its no-bid contracts on anvils, axle grease (guaranteed slippery) and dehydrated boulders (just add water) .

Osama slouched onto TV bragging about pulling off the 9/11 attacks just after the president strutted onto TV in New Hampshire with 9/11 families, bragging that Al Qaeda leaders know “we are on their trail.”

Maybe bin Laden hasn’t gotten the word. Maybe W. should get off the trail and get on Osama’s tail.

W. was clinging to his inane mantra that if we fight the terrorists over there, we don’t have to fight them here, even as bin Laden was back on TV threatening to come here. The president still avoided using Osama’s name on Friday, part of the concerted effort to downgrade him and merge him with Iraqi insurgents.

The White House reaction to the disclosures about the vanished explosives in Iraq was typical. Though it’s clear the treasures and terrors of Iraq – from viruses to ammunition to artifacts – were being looted and loaded into donkey carts and pickups because we had insufficient troops to secure the country, Bush officials devoted the vast resources of the government to trying to undermine the facts to protect the president.

The Pentagon mobilized to debunk the bunker story with a tortured press conference and a satellite photo of trucks that proved about as much as Colin Powell’s prewar drawings of two trailers that were supposed to be mobile biological weapons labs.

[Quote:]

“Joey, I think we’ve been to the place they’re talking about.”

That’s what Dean Staley told Joe Caffrey after reading last Monday’s New York Times account of explosives reportedly missing from a munitions facility in U.S.-occupied Iraq. The statement began a chain of events that resulted in politically charged video being broadcast nationally less than a week before Election Day.

[..]

“We talked about what we had been doing to try to confirm or deny or figure out what we had,” Hubbard says. ”We broadened our search for possible contacts” and experts to analyze and comment on the video.

“Most people didn’t want to talk to us.”

That, Hubbard says, included the Pentagon, the Minnesota National Guard, independent consultants, and weapons manufacturing companies. Some potential sources at first agreed, he says, and then changed their minds because of the political ramifications. 

[Quote:]

In an attempt to find an accurate transcript, I located 3 translations of the portion released so far:

al Jazeera – ALJ – translator not listed, “unedited”.

CNN – CNN – translator: CNN senior editor for Arab affairs Octavia Nasr.

Drudge – DRU – translator not listed; includes commentary not found in others.

What follows is a comparison of selected lines, referring to warnings about and charges against certain American administrations. These lines were quoted from the transcripts because of specific references to events and misdeeds involving a certain family.

Interesting differences in the translations…

[Quote:]

Posting unprotected source codes for a commercial product on the Web is rare and considered unspeakably stupid in the computer world, so, word spread quickly, and a computer scientist at Stanford University told Dr. Rubin. Dr. Rubin, in turn called in Adam Stubblefield, a doctoral student at Hopkins, and Tadayoshi Kohno, a summer graduate student, telling them they needed to drop everything and come see what was on his computer. What they were looking at, they concluded, was a program compiled in 2000 and its April 2002 update, apparently posted so programmers could work on it. It was nothing less than the programming that made the voting machines voting machines.

The students pored over 49,609 lines of “code,” computer language commands that look like hieroglyphics to anyone not trained as a programmer. One line blew them away. It means nothing to laymen, but it was enough to make Dr. Rubin’s hair stand on end.


#define DESKEY ((des_key* "F2654hd4".


All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted, protected by secret code so that no one could read or change the contents without the encryption key. That is particularly true of programs that require transmission by telephone or wireless networks. The line that staggered the Hopkins team told them first, that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is no longer used by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption.

The programmers had done the equivalent of putting the family jewels in a safe, putting up a blinking neon sign reading “Jewels in Here!” and taping the lock’s combination to the safe door. Moreover, because the key was in the source code, all Diebold machines responded to the same key. Unlock one, you can unlock them all.

[..]

The code is so badly written, Dr. Rubin shows sections to audiences at computer science conferences to get laughs.

[Quote:]

Fourteen months ago, Hamida Ghafour went to Afghanistan to cover her native country’s postwar reconstruction for this newspaper. But, as a westernised Afghan, her homecoming wasn’t as welcoming as she had hoped.

[Quote:]

If you’re an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music from your iPod to your Mac. Of course, Apple hated that poor little app, so it was sometimes hard to find, as Apple devoted expensive laywer-hours to shutting down all the sites that were hosting copies of it. Of course, there’s more dough where that came from — they’ll just pass the cost on to you in your next iPod.

As it turns out, you’re shit-outta-luck even if you managed to snag a copy. That’s because Apple just devoted some expensive engineering hours to updating iTunes to version 4.7, with the “improvement” of breaking iPod Download. That’s right — Apple’s spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod. Thanks a whole lot, Apple.

[Quote:]

A Republican Senate candidate from Oklahoma who has run into trouble over verbal gaffes was drawing fire again on Friday for saying black men have a “genetic predisposition” for a lower life expectancy than whites.

Dr. Tom Coburn, a Republican physician locked in a neck-and-neck struggle for a pivotal U.S. Senate seat, made the comment in a discussion of Social Security privatization during a locally televised debate on Wednesday night.

Coburn said black males were statistically more likely to die before they could benefit from Social Security.

“What kind of plan is that, that we are going to take from those who have a genetic predisposition of less life expectancy, that we are going to steal from those and give it to somebody else?” Coburn asked on Wednesday.

Oklahoma is solidly Republican, but Coburn’s largely self-inflicted political wounds have let his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Brad Carson, gain a narrow lead in surveys of likely voters.

Carson brushed aside Coburn’s remark during the debate, but black politicians in Oklahoma blasted Coburn on Friday.

Angela Monson, a Democratic state representative from Oklahoma City, said the suggestion that blacks are genetically inferior was “bizarre.”

“I think he was so bent on pushing the privatization of Social Security that he took this leap,” she said. “A leap off the deep end.”

I’ve implemented a new anti-spam trick. I’ve added the following small piece of code to the “check_comment” function in “functions.php” in wordpress:


$spammer_ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
list($a, $b, $c, $d) = split('.', $spammer_ip);
if( gethostbyname("$d.$c.$b.$a.list.dsbl.org") != "$d.$c.$b.$a.list.dsbl.org") {
 header( "Location: http://dsbl.org/listing?".$spammer_ip);
 return false;
}


This means that if your IP address is on a list of known open proxies (mostly used by email spammers, but recently by comment-spammers as well) you will not be able to post comments.

UPDATE: A new version, with more and better checks, is here

Nikon Small World Gallery…

More…

[Quote:]

A New Zealand resident who sent $5000 to his ill uncle in India had the money frozen for nearly a month because his name matched that of several men on a terrorist watch list.

When Mohammad Abbas’ uncle desperately needed a kidney transplant, the Mt Roskill resident quickly sent money for the operation through Western Union to India.

But Western Union held it, waiting for confirmation that Mr Abbas was not a terrorist.

“Is my religion, the fact that I’m Muslim, and my name a reason to be discriminated against?” said Mr Abbas, a native South African who became a permanent New Zealand resident early last year.

The 22-year-old TelstraClear employee said it took a few days before Western Union – an American money-transfer company – gave him a vague explanation of why his money was being held.

Meanwhile, his dying uncle, on holiday in India from his home in South Africa, waited in a hospital.

Mr Abbas said Western Union told him his money was being investigated by the company’s legal team in the United States, and he would have to wait.

“It was a life-or-death situation,” Mr Abbas said. “They did not care.”

On Friday, a month after Mr Abbas tried to transfer the money, he got it back with the help of his MP, Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff.

Tip: avoid US companies when whatever you’re doing doesn’t involve the USA.

A wounded journalist, with the Al-Arabiya TV channel, talks on the phone following a blast at the nearby television office in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, October 30, 2004. A bomb exploded outside the office of Dubai-based Al Arabiya television in western Baghdad Saturday, wounding 16 employees, the channel said. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

[Quote:]

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ top contracting official on Friday called the government’s grant of multi-billion dollar contracts to oil services giant Halliburton the worst case of contracting abuse she has ever seen.

“It was misconduct, and part of that misconduct was blatant,” said Bunny Greenhouse, in an interview on NBC’s Nightly News program.

Greenhouse has already demanded an investigation into the contracts that last year were granted to Halliburton, the energy services firm run by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995-2000. According to her attorney, the FBI has since asked her for an interview on the matter.

A spokesman for President Bush on Friday said the president expects a full investigation into allegations of wrongdoing in how Iraq-related contracts were awarded to Halliburton.

“If there is wrongdoing, the president expects it to be investigated fully and dealt with,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with Bush to New Hampshire.

[Quote:]

A key U.S. anti-terrorism law threatens the privacy of Canadians and rigorous steps are needed to protect private medical and financial information, a government study said Friday.

Current safeguards are not sufficient to prevent the FBI from using the USA Patriot Act to force U.S. firms and their foreign subsidiaries to turn over private data even if doing so violates Canadian law, the province of British Columbia’s privacy commissioner said.

The study is among the first to examine the foreign impact of the Patriot Act, which was passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Reaction to the study is being watched closely as governments move to contract their data storage work to private firms — many of which are U.S.-linked.

B.C. privacy commissioner David Loukidelis said it is unrealistic to try to ban “outsourcing” of government data-keeping, but tougher privacy protections are needed because the problem involves more than just public-sector data

[Quote:]

Making it illegal for Canadians to subscribe to television programming via foreign satellite systems infringes on their freedom of expression, a long-awaited judgment concluded yesterday.

Quebec Court Judge Danielle Cote handed down a 153-page ruling that found two sections of the federal Radiocommunication Act violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Those sections deal with so-called grey-market satellite systems for decoding an encrypted programming signal.

“(Cote) had to invalidate the law because the law itself was such an infringement,” said Jacques D’Argy of Drummondville, who sought the court order.

D’Argy and his brother-in-law, Richard Theriault, were charged in December 1998 with using DirecTV, a U.S. satellite system, to access U.S. signals.

Cote acquitted them in September 2000.

In June 2001, Superior Court Justice Jean-Guy Boilard rejected an appeal by government lawyers.

But in May 2002, the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned the acquittals and sent the case back to Cote.

The Supreme Court of Canada declared in 2002 that anyone who sells technology allowing consumers to access encrypted signals from U.S.-based satellite systems is committing a federal offence.

D’Argy, representing himself throughout all the court proceedings, said yesterday he always wondered “why can I import the New York Times but not (the U.S. television network) Fox.”

He also noted that, at one time, “I could have spent a year in jail for watching the American Congress on C-SPAN. Does that make sense?”

[Quote:]

“I have no ambition whatsoever to use [the 9/11 attacks] as a political issue”.

George W. Bush.

LIAR!
[Quote:]

[Quote:]

Fundrace Block Party searches political donor databases and, with the input of your address and zip code, will give you a map (and spreadsheet if you like) which tells you the names and addresses of your neighbors who have supported national political candidates, and how much they contributed. You can use this information to have a block party!

[Quote:]

few months ago, I had to do some work on the road, so I signed up for an AOL trial. I forgot to cancel it, so it showed up on my credit card bill. I called yesterday to cancel it and found myself in the middle of a lengthy — and creepy — exit interview. It went something like this.

ME: I’d like to cancel this account.

AOL: Alright. Sorry you’re leaving us. How do you usually connect to the internet?

ME: I have a cable connection.

AOL: And what do you usually use the internet for?

ME: I don’t want to answer these questions.

AOL: Are you ashamed of what you use it for?

If this is part of AOL’s customer service script, I’d like to ask them to remove it. If it is not, I’d like to ask that John Ashcroft be reassigned to tech support. Thank you.

Supporters of US President George W. Bush tear up a sign from a protestor that said “Republicans for Kerry” during a campaign rally at Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire.(AFP/Stephen Jaffe)

[Quote:]

“I want you to stand, raise your right hands,” and recite “the Bush Pledge,” said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: “I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.”

I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they’ve replaced the written oath with a verbal one.

…Can I invoke Godwin’s Law on reality?

[Quote:]

A Lower Makefield woman said she received a rude awakening Wednesday when she tried to get tickets to see President Bush today in Lower Makefield.

Simi Nischal got a ride with a co-worker to pick up tickets for herself, her husband, Narinder, and their two children. But just as the tickets were about to be placed in her hands, she was escorted from the Yardley gristmill and told to leave, she said.

” ‘I deny you the right to attend this rally,’ ” Nischal said a Bush-Cheney campaign worker told her.

Apparently, Nischal’s ride was a Kerry-Edwards supporter. Her car sported a bumper sticker for the Democratic candidates.

Quote:]

One of the latest incidents came when John Sachs, 18, a Johnston High School senior and Democrat, went to see Bush in Clive last week. Sachs got a ticket to the event from school and wanted to ask the president about whether there would be a draft, about the war in Iraq, Social Security and Medicare.

But when he got there, a campaign staffer pulled him aside and made him remove his button that said, “Bush-Cheney ’04: Leave No Billionaire Behind.” The staffer quizzed him about whether he was a Bush supporter, asked him why he was there and what questions he would be asking the president.

“Then he came back and said, ‘If you protest, it won’t be me taking you out. It will be a sniper,’ ” Sachs said. “He said it in such a serious tone it scared the crap out of me.”

Sachs stayed at the event, but he was escorted to a section of the 7 Flags Events Center where he was surrounded by Secret Service and told he couldn’t ask questions. “I was just in a state of fear,” he said. “I was looking at the ceiling and I didn’t know what to expect, I was so scared.”

[Quote:]

Six months after the fall of Baghdad, a vast Iraqi weapons depot with tens of thousands of artillery rounds and other explosives remained unguarded, according to two U.S. aid workers who say they reported looting of the site to U.S. military officials.

The aid workers say they informed Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the highest ranking Army officer in Iraq in October 2003 but were told that the United States did not have enough troops to seal off the facility, which included more than 60 bunkers packed with munitions.

“We were outraged,” said Wes Hare, city manager of La Grande, who was working in Iraq as part of a rebuilding program. A colleague who also visited the depot, Jerry Kuhaida, said it appeared that the explosives at the Ukhaider Ammunition Storage Area had found their way to insurgents targeting U.S. forces.

“There’s no question in my mind that the stuff in Ukhaider was used by terrorists,” said Kuhaida.

[Quote:]

When I read last Sunday’s New York Times story of the missing explosives from the Iraqi weapons storage facility south of Baghdad at Al Qaqaa, it brought back memories from my time with the Army National Guard’s 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion in Iraq last year. Bad memories. In the Times story, Iraqi scientists who worked at Al Qaqaa described how the facility was looted of almost 400 tons of high explosives right after the American troops swept through the area in April 2003 and failed to secure the site.

But Al Qaqaa is not the whole story. The same month it was being looted, I learned of another major weapons and ammunition storage facility, near my battalion’s base at Camp Anaconda, that was unguarded and targeted by looters. But despite my repeated warnings — and those of other U.S. intelligence agents — nothing was done to secure this facility, as it was systematically stripped of enough weapons and explosives to equip anti-U.S. insurgents with enough roadside improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, for years to come.

Camp Anaconda, where I was stationed with the 223rd from April through October, 2003, is a sprawling logistical supply base located 50 miles north of Baghdad which once served as one of Saddam’s largest air force bases. It is now home to over 22,000 U.S. troops, mostly Army but some Air Force personnel as well, and serves as the main supply point for American forces throughout Iraq. Hundreds of heavy trucks in long convoys enter and leave the two main gates every day, 24 hours a day, hauling every conceivable item that an army at war might need.

[Quote:]

Osama Bin Laden pulled off an October surprise yesterday by butting into the presidential race just four days before the national election.

“American people!” Bin Laden began his rant. “My speech to you is about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan.”

“Despite the fact that we have entered the fourth year from Sept. 11, Bush is still misguiding you by hiding the real reason from you,” he said in what seemed to be a deliberate effort to influence Tuesday’s election.

“Therefore, the factors necessitating the repeat of what happened are still standing.” President Bush and John Kerry both broke away from their campaigns to say they were united in their intention to capture or kill Bin Laden – and America would not be intimidated by him.

(it appears both candidates had the right response to the tape)