If you don’t have a weblog, you don’t have to deal with comment-spam.

To show you how, ehm, weird the battle has become, read this. I’m receiving comments like this as well – on top of the many, many more classic attempts to spam this weblog, with penis-enlargement product advertising and such. And the new spam attempts are indeed automatically filtered, but it shows spammers are attempting to improve..

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A man who says he was a victim of the CIA’s alleged secret prisons is suing its former chief over torture claims.

Khaled al-Masri says he was kidnapped in 2003 while on holiday in Macedonia, flown to Afghanistan and mistreated.

A US rights group has filed a lawsuit against ex-CIA head George Tenet and other officials on behalf of Mr Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen.

It is the first legal challenge to the US policy of “extraordinary rendition” – flying suspects to third countries.

Gee, didn’t Condi just tell us to shut up?

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Creating your own compilations from a CD, extracting your favourite piece of music to listen to it on your computer, transfering it on a MP3 player, lending a CD to a friend, reading a DVD with free software or duplicating it to be able to enjoy it at home and in your country house : many common practices, perfectly legal, which the French government plans to forbid in fact. The copyright and neighbouring rights in the information society bill (DADVSI) (n-1206) which the French government will try to force through in the coming weeks by using an emergency procedure, actually legitimates the technical devices installed by CD and DVD editors and producers to control their use. And above all, the bill plans criminal penalty against people who would dare to remove those.

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For weeks, the blogosphere has been abuzz with tales of intrigue about Sony’s XCP copy protection system. Among the strangest revelations was that XCP itself infringes on the copyrights to several open source software projects. In one case, Sam Hocevar found conclusive evidence that part of XCP’s code was copied from a program called DRMS, which he co-authored with DVD Jon and released under the terms of the GPL open source license. What made this finding particularly curious is that the purpose of DRMS is to break the copy protection on songs sold in Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Why would XCP rip off code intended to defeat another vendor’s DRM?

The answer is that XCP utilizes the DRMS code not to remove Apple DRM but to add it. I’ve discovered that XCP uses code from DRMS as part of a hidden XCP feature that provides iTunes and iPod compatibility. This functionality has shipped on nearly every XCP CD, but it has never been enabled or made visible in the XCP user interface. Despite being inactive, the code appears to be fully functional and was compatible with the current version of iTunes when the first XCP CDs were released. This strongly suggests that the infringing DRMS code was deliberately copied by XCP’s creator, First4Internet, rather than accidentally included as part of a more general purpose media library used for other functions in the copy protection system.

Two comments on the site linked above are funny enough to repeat:

Sony is up an excremental tributary without propulsion, and those aren’t WATERfalls they’re hearing ahead.

Customer 1: Have you got anything without DRM?
Music Exec: Well, there’s DRM egg sausage and DRM, that’s not got much DRM in it.
Customer 1: I don’t want ANY DRM!
Customer 2: Why can’t she have egg bacon DRM and sausage?
Music Exec: THAT’S got DRM in it!
Customer 2: Hasn’t got as much DRM in it as DRM egg sausage and DRM, has it?
Vikings: DRM DRM DRM DRM’ (Crescendo through next few lines’)

In other news, Sony releases a new uninstaller:

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Thirty seven days after Sony was outed for including a rootkit (a piece of software that hides itself from the Windows filesystem and process manager, and allows viruses to opportunistically do the same) they’ve finally released an uninstaller that you can download and run on your own computer (previous uninstallers ran from the Web and left you computer vulnerable to total takeover through simple attacks like embedding malicious code in web-pages). Of course, Sony knew about the rootkit for at least 28 days, so all told, this uninstaller took sixty five days to arrive.

Please note that uninstalling from your computer the XCP software and associated content protection files loaded from an XCP-protected CD will NOT delete or affect your use of any audio files that you have previously transferred from an XCP-protected CD. Such files remain subject to the digital rights management rules in the End User License Agreement: namely that you may rip the audio into the secure formats provided on the disc, move these tracks to compatible portable devices, and make up to three copies of each track on to CD-Rs.

Please be advised that this program is protected by all applicable intellectual property and unfair competition laws, including patent, copyright and trade secret laws, and that all uses, including reverse engineering, in violation thereof are prohibited.

Talk about “unclear on the concept!” So, we’ll uninstall the software, except we’re not really giving you back control over your computer and if you try to understand what we’re actually doing, technologically, you’re in violation of a bunch of scary made-up lawyerese crap.

Link

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A report released Tuesday by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General revealed that the CIA has mistakenly obscured hundreds of thousands of pages of critical intelligence information with black highlighters.

According to the report, sections of the documents— “almost invariably the most crucial passages”—are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency’s inception in 1947.

CIA Director Porter Goss has ordered further internal investigation.

“Why did it go on for this long, and this far?” said Goss in a press conference called shortly after the report’s release. “I’m as frustrated as anyone. You can’t read a single thing that’s been highlighted. Had I been there to advise [former CIA director] Allen Dulles, I would have suggested the traditional yellow color—or pink.”

Goss added: “There was probably some really, really important information in these documents.”

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I work primarily on the antifur campaign. Our most recent action took place in New York City, on opening night at the Metropolitan Opera. People traditionally show their fur coats at this event, so we had 15 activists there who were holding the bloody carcasses of skinned foxes, and signs that said, “Here’s the rest of your fur coat.” I love these kinds of demonstrations — actions that are shocking but appropriate. The point we’re trying to make is that each fox coat generates 40 fox carcasses.

Last winter, we also did a fur protest in Park City, Utah. We showed up at the Freestyle World Championship wearing just ski caps and skis, carrying signs that said, “We’d Rather Ski Naked Than Wear Fur.”

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After a threatened boycott from a conservative religious organization, the Ford Motor Company has said it will cut back on advertising in gay-oriented publications.

The group, the American Family Association, called for the boycott in May because of what it said was the company’s “track record for supporting the homosexual agenda.”

After a meeting last week between Ford executives and members of the group, the company said that its Jaguar and Land Rover brands would no longer be advertised in gay publications. It said it had no plans to change the advertising strategy for Volvo, another Ford unit.

A spokesman played down the role the boycott had in the company’s decision, saying that the ads were eliminated as a cost-cutting measure. “As they begin planning their marketing for next year,” the spokesman, Mike Moran, said Monday, “they’ve streamlined their budgets.”

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There could be no doubt about the theme of President Bush’s Iraq war strategy speech on Wednesday at the Naval Academy. He used the word victory 15 times in the address; “Plan for Victory” signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, “Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.”

Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.

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The role of Dr. Feaver in preparing the strategy document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view but accessible with a few keystrokes, the plan posted on the White House Web site showed the document’s originator, or “author” in the software’s designation, to be “feaver-p.”

According to Matt Rozen, a spokesman for Adobe Systems, which makes the Acrobat software used to prepare the document, that entry indicated that Dr. Feaver created the original document that, with additions and editing, was posted on the Web.

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Two CIA secret prisons were operating in Eastern Europe until last month when they were shut down following Human Rights Watch reports of their existence in Poland and Romania.

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

CIA officials asked ABC News not the name the specific countries where the prisons were located, citing security concerns.

The CIA declines to comment, but current and former intelligence officials tell ABC News that 11 top al Qaeda figures were all held at one point on a former Soviet air base in one Eastern European country. Several of them were later moved to a second Eastern European country.

All but one of these 11 high-value al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA’s secret arsenal, the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.

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That is why 45 million Americans think the ocean is a source of fresh water; 120 million think spray cans still have CFCs in them even though CFCs were banned in 1978; another 120 million people think disposable diapers are the leading problem with landfills when they actually represent about 1% of the problem; and 130 million believe that hydropower is America’s top energy source, when it accounts for just 10% of the total.

Here (pdf) is a confidential brief for the President about climage change that leaked recently.

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Harry Beck‘s famous map (above) of the London Underground has a long history and is often praised as a definitive example of excellent information design. Many consider it unimprovable, but that doesn’t stop many others trying. The latest variant is a project by Oskar Karlin, redesigning the map to illustrate journey time .

Here is a map which tells you which carriage to board, to minimise time to the exit when you get off. Excerpt here.

here is a geographical tube map.

Here are some funny maps…

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This Christmas we’ll be swamped with offers, ads and invitations to buy more stuff. But now there’s a way to say enough and join a movement dedicated to reviving the original meaning of Christmas giving.

Buy Nothing Christmas is a national initiative started by Canadian Mennonites but open to everyone with a thirst for change and a desire for action.

Buy Nothing Christmas is a stress-reliever, and more people need to hear about it. You can change your world by simply putting up one of the posters (or make your own) in your church, place of worship, home or work. Be sneaky about it if you have to. The point is to get people thinking. It’s an idea whose time has come, so get out there and make a difference!

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Up to 1,000 couples are expected to register for “gay marriages” today, under new laws making same-sex unions legal in Britain.

The Civil Partnership Act comes into force today and, after a notice period, the first ceremonies will take place in England and Wales on December 21. Couples in Scotland can hold the ceremony a day earlier.

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Councillor Mary Murphy, Manchester city council’s lead member on lesbian issues, said it was an “historic day”.

“For the first time ever, lesbian and gay partners can choose parity with heterosexual couples on a host of legal rights, including tax, benefits and inheritance.”

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Mr Ferguson told the newspaper: “We have been living together very happily for 34 years, we have our wills made out properly to benefit each other, but we feel it is a privilege to be able to have our partnership legally recognised.”

The new act does not use the word “marriage” but grants virtually identical legal rights to same-sex couples as heterosexual couples. Gay marriages are legal in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Canada.