source of picture

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The gent’s name is Othman Awang; he’s in the northern Malaysian village of Kepala Bukit; and he’s rescuing his pet cat and pet goose from floodwaters, in this fine Reuters image via WaPo.

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PvdA-leider Wouter Bos wil na de verkiezingen in 2007 het liefst een kabinet met het CDA vormen. Dat zegt hij zaterdag in een interview met De Telegraaf. GroenLinks-fractievoorzitter Femke Halsema reageerde teleurgesteld op de uitspraken van Bos.

enzovoort, enzovoort.

En zo maakt het weer geen fluit uit wat ik stem – het enige dat ik van een verkiezing hoop, dat het CDA niet in de regering komt, zal gegarandeerd niet uitkomen. De uitkomst staat al vast, en poitici zullen weer klagen dat niemand geinteresseerd is in verkiezingen.

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A huge quake rupturing the Earth’s crust, heavy snow in Siberia, even high winds in the Andes Mountains can alter the planet’s rotation and change time, even by a single second.

And for people like retired Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer Skip Newhall, a second is a big deal – big enough that he’s planning his first, and possibly last, “leap second” party today at his Valencia home to note the extra blink of the clock between 3:59:59 and 4:00:00p.m. local time.

“We’re going to have 30, 35 people,” Newhall said Friday. “I’ve got three different time read-outs. One will have a 60 in the second spot – clocks don’t usually do that – and I have a couple of clocks that aren’t going to read right.

“I’m going to have everyone give a chorus of `boos’ for those.”

(and here is what Bill O’Reilly thinks of leap seconds…)

Arriving at Saturn in July of 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has now spent a year and a half exploring the magnificent rings and moons of the distant gas giant. The year 2005 began with Cassini’s Huygens probe landing on Saturn’s large moon Titan. Cassini’s continuing series of close flybys also revealed details and discoveries across the surface of the smog shrouded moon. In fact, with a ringside seat throughout 2005, Cassini’s cameras have made spectacular pictures of Titan along with Saturn’s other moons and rings almost common place. But often, Saturn itself provided the most dramatic backdrop. In this view, Saturn’s moon Dione lies in front of edge-on rings and the gas giant’s cloud tops draped with broad ring shadows. Dione is 1,118 kilometers across and lies about 300,000 kilometers from the ring’s edge.

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For those of you who have forgotten just what a stonewall paranoid Nixon was, the poor man used to stalk around the White House demanding that his political enemies be killed. Many still believe there was a certain Richard III grandeur to Nixon’s collapse because he was also a man of notable talents. There is neither grandeur nor tragedy in watching this president, the Testy Kid, violate his oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of our country.

The Testy Kid wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it because he is the president, and he considers that sufficient justification for whatever he wants. He even finds lawyers like John Yoo, who tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal.

The creepy part is the overlap. Damned if they aren’t still here, after all these years, the old Nixon hands — Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the whole gang whose yearning for authoritarian government rose like a stink over the Nixon years. Imperial executive. Bring back those special White House guard uniforms. Cheney, like some malignancy that cannot be killed off, back at the same old stand, pushing the same old crap.

Of course, they tell us we have to be spied on for our own safety, so they can catch the terrorists who threaten us all. Thirty-five years ago, they nabbed a film star named Jean Seberg and a bunch of people running a free breakfast program for poor kids in Chicago. This time, they’re onto the Quakers. We are not safer.

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Folks, we KNOW this program is being and will be misused. We know it from the past record and current reporting. The program has already targeted vegans and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — and, boy, if those aren’t outposts of al-Qaida, what is? Could this be more pathetic?

This could scarcely be clearer. Either the president of the United States is going to have to understand and admit he has done something very wrong, or he will have to be impeached. The first time this happened, the institutional response was magnificent. The courts, the press, the Congress all functioned superbly. Anyone think we’re up to that again? Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?

Getting a TV episode pulled because it makes fun of your religious belief system, and then calling the creators of that episode bigots should earn you a trip to the nearest dictionary.

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Intel Corp., whose marketing made its computer chips a household name, is changing its logo for the first time in 37 years.

The dropped “e” in Intel will be shed in favor of a swoop around the company’s name with the tag line “Leap Ahead.” The “Intel Inside” phrase, a fixture since 1991, will be dropped, Santa Clara, California-based Intel said yesterday.

Those who don’t know their history are bound to repeat it.

Besides, with this slogan, doesn’t Intel admit that they’re basically behind the competition?

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If you’re into reading legal proceedings verbatim, here’s a doozy for you. It gets even better if you like to see RIAA lawyers dragging themselves, rather than their chosen targets, through the dirt. Let’s get a feel for what’s going on here:

In Motown v. Nelson, pending in federal court in Port Huron, Michigan (Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division), the defendants — Mr. and Mrs. Nelson — have made a motion for attorneys fees against the RIAA attorneys, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1927 for unreasonable and vexatious litigation and improperly interfering and/or obtaining false testimony from a prospective witness.

Got all that? Good. For the rest of us, here’s what it means. The RIAA sued the Nelsons, who in turn are basically asking for the case to be dismissed and their legal fees reimbursed, because the RIAA lawyers got the testimonies they wanted from some witnesses through coercion and/or extortion.

The transcript of the deposition that followed this motion gives us a glimpse into exactly how far the recording industry is willing to go to justify their crusade against file sharing. It’s also very long, so I’ll just give you a taste here:

[..]

Q. Did he tell you why he needed you to stick with your original false story?

A. Because he said he didn’t have a case unless I did.

Q. So, he told you that he didn’t have a case unless you stuck with the original false story?

A. Yes.

This is a 15-year-old girl, telling the story of how lawyers of a major industry group told her she had to commit perjury, just so they could win their case.

A bit late, I know, but I’ve just found a transcript of the powerful speech given by Harold Pinter for this year’s Nobel Prize.

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Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed…

Read the whole speech here.
There’s a downloadable video in WMV format (16Mb zipped), link at top of the page.

Best summary of 2005.

At least, as far as I’ve seen today.

You know what’s funny? The press is calling the exploit that’s doing the rounds right now “a bug in windows”. This turns out to be untrue – what the exploit is doing is using windows as designed. Read this article:

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The problem with the WMF (Windows Metafile) file format turns out to be one of those careless things Microsoft did years ago with little or no consideration for the security consequences.

Almost all exploits you read about are buffer overflows of some kind, but not this one. WMF files are allowed to register a callback function, meaning that they are allowed to execute code, and this is what is being exploited in the WMF bug.

This means a picture can tell windows “if you draw me, execute this code for me as well”. Windows is designed to do that. Amazing. What’s even more amazing is that, with the recent “we’re oh so focused on security, believe us” campaign by Microsoft they still didn’t manage to catch this.

And if it’s the anti-virus companies you’re depending on: forget it. This particular malware can do all kinds of crap to your system, an no alarm bells ring. They’re supposed to be another line of defense for this kind of stuff, and they are not.

If you make one new years resolution, let it be this one: switch away from microsoft as the operating system you’re working on!

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Techshout.com reports that a new, deceptive Trojan Horse program has surfaced. The program is engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. The ads are incorporated in Google AdSense, the program that lets website owners display ads from Google’s list of advertisers. The Trojan Horse apparently downloads itself onto an unsuspecting computer through a web page and then replaces the original ads with its own set of malicious ads.

Since the Trojan Horse makes the deceptive ads look like normal Google ads, the program was nearly impossible to detect by the general public. However, Raoul Bangera, an Indian web publisher, discovered the bogus program and contacted the Google AdSense team. Bangera emailed the team a number of cases, including various screenshots, log files of an infected computer and system files as proof. The AdSense team validated the news saying, “We can confirm from the screenshots that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.�?

And another one..

Bill Gates’ predictions about speech recognition: a historical review.

You know where to find a place on the map, but you’ve never seen it? Try this.

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Meet Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Chewbacca and Yoda the Jedi Master as you’ve never seen them before! Good and evil clash, and creativity saves the day when the heroic Jedi Knights battle the villainous Sith for control of the galaxy in this mini movie.

Lego style, of course.

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In 2002, Botswana became the first African country to offer free treatment to all who needed it. With more than a third of adults infected, many doubted it could fulfill the promise.

But the largely desert nation now has half the estimated 110,000 people in immediate need on life-prolonging anti-retroviral medicines, showing that treatment is possible on the world’s poorest continent.

“If HIV was left to take its course, this country would be literally destroyed both economically and socially,” said Segolame Ramotlhwa, operations manager for the national treatment program dubbed Masa, or New Dawn. “Not treating is not an option.”

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Another one here

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A Texas golf course, a Nevada tanning salon and an Illinois candy shop were among small businesses that may have improperly received U.S. subsidized loans intended for firms hurt by the September 11 attacks, an internal government watchdog has found.

The Small Business Administration’s inspector general said in a report made public on Wednesday that in 85 percent of the sample of loans it reviewed, a company’s eligibility to receive the money through the program could not be verified.

An Iraqi man looks at the wreck of a car, according to residents the result of a battle tank driving through a narrow street during a pre-dawn raid by the U.S. military, in a neigborhood in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday Dec. 29, 2005. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

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Girard Gibs and Kamber and Associates sued Sony BMG, First 4 Internet and SunnComm International last month in regard to the Sony rootkit mess.

We have obtained a copy of a preliminary settlement that was filed today seeking judicial approval for a settlement in the Sony case.

The proposed settlement is as follows:  

Under the terms of the settlement, Defendants agree to:

• stop manufacturing SONY BMG CDs with XCP software (“XCP CDs”) and SONY BMG CDs with MediaMax software (“MediaMax CDs”);

• immediately recall all XCP CDs;

• provide software to update and uninstall XCP and MediaMax content protection software from consumers’ computers;

• ensure that ongoing fixes to all SONY BMG content protection software are readily available to consumers;

• implement consumer-oriented changes in operating practices with respect to all CDs with content protection software that SONY BMG manufactures in the next two years;

• waive specified provisions currently contained in XCP and MediaMax software End-User Licensing Agreements (“EULAs”);

• refrain from collecting personal information about users of XCP CDs or MediaMax CDs without their affirmative consent; and

• provide additional settlement benefits to Settlement Class Members including cash payments, “clean” replacement CDs without content protection software, and free music downloads.

Much more reading in the proposed settlement, which you can read here.

As somebody on slasdot correctly notes:

These people literally have their boot on Sony’s throat. This could be a watershed moment in the “IP” war for individual rights. And instead, what do we get?

* Sony does not have to undo their vandalism to anyone’s computers or provide cash compensation for their victims to do so (although they may have to fix unintentionally created security vulnerabillities)
* Future similar DRM schemes are legitimized as long as they are disclosed on the jewel case and in the EULA, and an uninstaller is provided
* The role of the EULA in this fiasco is implicitly legitimized (the entire concept of a “EULA,” for those few who don’t know, is largely an obnoxious legal fiction – sans UCITA, anyway)
* Collection of personal information in media products is legitimzed (“only for purposes of providing enhanced functionality” – LOL!)

This is a love letter to Sony, and a “go ahead” signal to expand “open season on your computer” into the entire market.

Solution: never buy another Sony product for doing what they did, and never buy another MS product for enabling them to do it.

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With Tony Blair and Jack Straw cornered on extraordinary rendition, the UK government is particularly anxious to suppress all evidence of our complicity in obtaining intelligence extracted by foreign torturers. The British Foreign Office is now seeking to block publication of Craig Murray’s forthcoming book, which documents his time as Ambassador to Uzbekistan. The Foreign Office has demanded that Craig Murray remove all references to two especially damning British government documents, indicating that our government was knowingly receiving information extracted by the Uzbeks through torture, and return every copy that he has in his possession.

Craig Murray is refusing to do this. Instead, the documents are today being published simultaneously on blogs all around the world. The first document contains the text of several telegrams that Craig Murray sent back to London from 2002 to 2004, warning that the information being passed on by the Uzbek security services was torture-tainted, and challenging MI6 claims that the information was nonetheless “useful”. The second document is the text of a legal opinion from the Foreign Office’s Michael Wood, arguing that the use by intelligence services of information extracted through torture does not constitute a violation of the UN Convention Against Torture.

Document #1 (PDF)

Document #2

Craig Murray stood up for what many of us believe, and it cost him his Job, his health, and his professional reputation. The least we can do his stand by him as he defies the UK government’s attempts at censorship, and possible prosecution.

Craig Murray comments:

I am in discussion with the FCO over what I am and am not allowed to publish in my book. The FCO is seeking to gut the book of all evidence of complicity with the Uzbek regime.

With Bliar cornered on extraordinary rendition, they are particularly anxious to suppress all evidence of our complicity in obtaining intelligence from Uzbek torture.

In particular, they have demanded I do not publish the attached documents, and that I hand over all copies of them.

The obvious answer to this is to post these documents as widely on the web as possible. This is also potentially very valuable in establishing that I am not attempting to make money from these documents – you don’t have to buy my book to see them, they are freely available. If you buy the book, you are only paying for the added value of my thoughts.

This will only work if we can get the [documents] very widely posted, including on sites in the US and elsewhere outside the UK … there is a chance that those who … post this stuff will get threatened under the Official Secrets Act.

In March 2003 I was summoned back to London from Tashkent specifically for a meeting at which I was told to stop protesting. I was told specifically that it was perfectly legal for us to obtain and to use intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers.

After this meeting Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s legal adviser, wrote to confirm this position. This minute from Michael Wood is perhaps the most important document that has become public about extraordinary rendition. It is irrefutable evidence of the government’s use of torture material, and that I was attempting to stop it. It is no wonder that the government is trying to suppress this.

Craig

(update Changed the links to the documents to copies on my own server. The wider they are distributed, the more difficult it becomes to suppress. -John)

Update 2 This story was give 15 minutes on the BBC Radio4 News today, almost half the programme.
Update 3 There’s the text of an excellent speech by Craig Murray here. It gives a very full background on Uzbekistan and President Karomov’s relations with the USA and the UK.
Disturbing reading…

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Spying on Americans by the super-secret National Security Agency is not only more widespread than President George W. Bush admits but is part of a concentrated, government-wide effort to gather and catalog information on U.S. citizens, sources close to the administration say.

Poindexter admits the program was quietly moved into the Pentagon’s “black bag�? program where it does escapes Congressional oversight.

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Security researchers have released instructions for exploiting a previously unknown security hole in Windows XP and Windows 2003 Web Server with all of the latest patches applied.

Anti-virus company Symantec warned of the new exploit, which it said uses a vulnerability in the way Windows computers process certain image files (Windows Meta Files, or those ending in .wmf).

The exploit is already in the wild. Do this to secure your computer (for now):

1. Click on the Start button on the taskbar.
2. Click on Run…
3. Type “regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll” to disable.
4. Click ok when the change dialog appears.

You will also lose the ability to see thumbnails, but that’s a small price to pay.

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Do note that it’s really easy to get burned by this exploit if you’re analysing it under Windows. All you need to do is to access an infected web site with IE or view a folder with infected files with the Windows Explorer.

You can get burned even while working in a DOS box! This happened on one of our test machines where we simply used the WGET command-line tool to download a malicious WMF file. That’s it, it was enough to download the file. So how on earth did it have a chance to execute?

The test machine had Google Desktop installed. It seems that Google Desktop creates an index of the metadata of all images too, and it issues an API call to the vulnerable Windows component SHIMGVW.DLL to extract this info. This is enough to invoke the exploit and infect the machine. This all happens in realtime as Google Desktop contains a file system filter and will index new files in realtime.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you.

– Rita Mae Brown

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Holy global eavesdropping network, Batman! The NSA has – or rather had – cookies on its web site.

Daniel Brandt – he of Google watching and Wikipedia fiddling fame – discovered a pair of cookies lurking on the NSA’s (National Security Agency) web site. The cookies were set to expire in 2035 and could be used to track your online activity. That’s a big no-no under federal rules that forbid the use of most persistent cookies.

The NSA removed the cookies after Brandt brought the issue to the agency’s attention and after the AP started asking questions.

Well, if an organisation has to worry about the Big Things (such as a commander in chief who wants them to snoop domestically), it’s no surprise the very small things start slipping by you as well.

Somebody searched for “Nazi Deportation” on Technorati, where this posting on this weblog turned up on the second page of results.

That same somebody tried to post a comment with a dozen or so links to compeltely unrelated threads on stormfront.org, a white supremacist web site in the USA.

That same somebody probably didn’t realize that postings with a lot of links are considered “potential spam” and sent to the moderation queue (or deleted outright if there’s a spam-match)

That same somebody probably will never realize his or her IP address is now blacklisted from even visiting this weblog.

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Three years ago, President Bush declared that he had “zero tolerance” for trafficking in humans by the government’s overseas contractors, and two years ago Congress mandated a similar policy.

But notwithstanding the president’s statement and the congressional edict, the Defense Department has yet to adopt a policy to bar human trafficking.

A proposal prohibiting defense contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution and labor was drafted by the Pentagon last summer, but five defense lobbying groups oppose key provisions and a final policy still appears to be months away, according to those involved and Defense Department records.

The lobbying groups opposing the plan say they’re in favor of the idea in principle, but said they believe that implementing key portions of it overseas is unrealistic.

Kiddnapping, then torture, then domestic wiretapping, and now Slavery?

What’s next? Cannibalism? It’s a good thing there’s a Christian president in the Whitehouse whose main concern is values and morality, or who knows what would happen?