[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…

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