[Quote:]

De Stichting Brein heeft geen recht op de gegevens van abonnees van internetproviders. Dat heeft het gerechtshof in Amsterdam donderdag bepaald. Vorig jaar kwam de rechtbank in Leeuwarden tot dezelfde conclusie.

Brein vroeg het hof vijf Nederlandse internetaanbieders te dwingen om de persoonsgegevens van hun klanten bekend te maken. De stichting wil dat wordt opgetreden tegen mensen die illegaal muziekbestanden aanbieden op het wereldwijde web. Het hof stelt dat zo’n inbreuk op de privacy onrechtmatig is.

Brein vindt dat die inbreuk kan worden gerechtvaardigd, omdat de personen om wie het gaat ook onrechtmatig handelen. Internetproviders zijn wat Brein betreft verplicht te helpen bij het bestrijden van de illegale uitwisseling van bestanden.

De rechter vindt de door Brein gewenste werkwijze niet in overeenstemming met Europese regels die de privacy moeten garanderen. Het hof besloot daarom negatief op de vordering die de stichting had ingesteld tegen de internetproviders Essent, KPN, Tiscali, Wanadoo en UPC.

[Quote:]

A McDonald’s fast-food outlet in the south east of the Netherlands has agreed to remove urinals that are shaped liked wide-open red lips.

Degrading to women or toilet cartoon fun?
The decision was taken after a shocked American customer complained to the McDonald’s head office in the US.

Owner Giel Pijper said on Wednesday that the bright red, mouth-shaped urinals, named ‘Kisses’, are works of art. But a different view is taken of them in America. The urinals are being removed and will be sold off. “I’m not going to harp on about a pair of urinals,” he said.

Virgin Airways was forced to scrap plans in 2004 to install two of the ‘Kisses’ at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport after complaints they looked like women’s mouth.

They are the work of Dutch woman Meike van Schijndel. She is the designer at the Utrecht-based firm Bathroom Mania!

Speaking to Expatica in 2004, she said the urinals were designed as a fun cartoon mouth and not as a woman’s mouth.

She stressed that the idea her urinals represented a man peeing into a woman’s mouth never occurred to her, nor to many men and women she had spoken to. Her company was inundated with orders after the Virgin Airlines controversy, Van Schijndel said.

[Quote:]

You probably have not heard, but yesterday the president signed a bill entitled Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2006. There was not much fanfare surrounding it. Apparently, this little passage within the bill was of great offense to Bush.

(c) Oversight Report- Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, in consultation with the Government Accountability Office, shall submit to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure of the House of Representatives a report on the status of the Coast Guard’s implementation of the Government Accountability Office’s recommendations in its report, GAO-04-380, entitled `Coast Guard Deepwater Program Needs Increased Attention to Management and Contractor Oversight’, including the dates by which the Coast Guard plans to complete implementation of such recommendations if any of such recommendations remain open as of the date the report is transmitted to the Committees.

“Contractor Oversight”? We certainly can’t have that in this administration. A veto would attract too much attention and give Congress a chance to override the President’s actions. So the President decided to do what any good Unitary Executive would do, he made a signing statement.

The executive branch shall construe section 408(c) of the Act, which purports to make consultation with a legislative agent a precondition to execution of the law, to call for but not mandate such consultation, as is consistent with the Constitution’s provisions concerning the separate powers of the Congress to legislate and the President to execute the laws.

Voila. The President, with the sweep of a pen, has gotten rid of the Legislature’s demand for oversight of Coast Guard contractors. The American corporate kleptocracy is now free to go on, unimpeded by that pesky Congressional oversight or government transparency.

[Quote:]

Wrestlers wait to compete in the Mongolion capital Ulan Bator at the annual Naadam Festival, which this year coincides with celebrations to mark the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Mongol Empire.(AFP/Peter Parks)

[Quote:]

Tony Blair’s flagship identity cards scheme is set to fail and may not be introduced for a generation, according to leaked Whitehall e-mails from the senior officials responsible for the multi-billion-pound project.

The problems are so serious that ministers have been forced to draw up plans for a scaled-down “face-saving�? version to meet their pledge of phasing in the cards from 2008.

However, civil servants say there is no evidence that even this compromise is “remotely feasible�? and accuse ministers of “ignoring reality�? by pressing ahead.

One official warns of a “botched operation�? that could put back the introduction of ID cards for a generation. He added: “I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.�? Another admits he is planning Home Office strategy around the possibility that the scheme could be “canned completely�?.

[Quote:]

Northrop Grumman forecast Wednesday a potential “very large” market for a laser-based system it has developed to shield airports and other installations from rockets, ballistic missiles and other threats.

Los Angeles-based Northrop said it had already pitched the system, called Skyguard, to Israel, which worked with the company and the Army to develop the technology.

Northrop also is pushing Skyguard – described as capable of generating a shield five kilometers in radius – to each of the armed services and the Department of Homeland Security, company executives told a news briefing.

Setting up a protective “bubble” around a typical airport might cost $25 million to $30 million once enough systems were installed, said Mike McVey, vice president of directed energy systems at Northrop’s Space Technology business unit.

[..]

Northrop described Skyguard as capable of destroying rockets, mortars, artillery shells, unmanned aerial vehicles, short-range ballistic missiles, as well as cruise missiles. Against shoulder-fired missiles, which are relatively easy to heat with a laser and destroy, the protective shield would extend to a 20-kilometer radius, Wildt said.

I see “laser” and I see “bubble.” Clearly, this plan involves some frickin sharks at some point.

This technology has never actually worked in a carefully controlled test, but it will be on sale! Politician, spend now and show the scared Citizen that you care!

I’ve decided it’s time to show you where you can call me while I’m on vacation…

Progress is the word.

Today they let him wake up – so I had my first “conversation” with him… as far as you can have one with one party hampered with a breathing tube.

But it looks like all your kind words and thoughts paid off, and I thank you all for that…

If any of you ever need some kind thoughts thrown in your direction, or the direction of somebody you love, just drop me a line…

[Quote:]

Former president George Bush and his wife, Barbara, were among the mourners Wednesday at the funeral of Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay.

Lay’s funeral drew some of the high-profile guests who were close to him before he was convicted in May of fraud and conspiracy for lying to investors and the public about the energy company’s financial health before it collapsed in 2001.

The Enron case is, ehm, odd. I’m sure we’ll never know what really happened, the connections are too high-level. Check this out:

[Quote:]

a banker who worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland and was questioned by the FBI about the Enron fraud case has been found dead in an East London park, the BBC reported. The body has been identified as banker Neil Couldbeck, the BBC said, citing unnamed sources. According to the report, police are keeping an open mind about whether the death was linked to the Enron investigation, which involved RBS subsidiary NatWest. Three British former NatWest employees are being extradited to the U.S. on Thursday to face fraud charges.

[Quote:]

VBA (not VB) is Visual Basic for Applicaitons, embedded into other apps. A fine, extensible subset and superset of VB commands. Works pretty well if you stay within its bounds.

VBA has a DATE$ command, used to set the workstation date. Why you would want to reset the workstation’s date is left to your imagination, but the command is documented in the help.

All was well until a HPC (Highly Paid Consultant) came in and used DATE$ to (try to) store a date string, then parsed it (using US date format) and printed it on a form. The thing is, it worked okay because of the way the data and commands he was using defaulted to ‘today’ – he was trying to store ‘today’, and print ‘today’, and it seemed to work fine. No one knew, but because of the command ‘DATE$ = (system date with US formatting) it also kept resetting the system date on the PC to ‘today’, format MM/DD/YYYY.

So then the app was rolled out to Europe. They use date format DD/MM/YYYY. The first time someone printed a form, if it was during the first 12 days of the month, it would reset their PC’s date to by reversing months and days. The second time it would print a form, it would set the date back correctly. So, some people had their PC’s time messed up until reboot (or manual date change), some did not. The forms all looked okay (the date format was hardcoded to US format on the forms, but the users were used to things like that coming from the US)

On the 13th and later, it would not mess up, because it would silently swallow the ‘invalid date’ error. If you printed an even number forms, it would set your date back to ‘today’ in DD/MM/YYYY format. If you use a US machine to test it, it will work fine, because you have to have a machine set up for a Europe location to make the error appear.

It took over three years to finally find and squash this bug. At first, no one believed the users, especially when they could not repeat the problem very often. Then when people finally believed there was a problem, no one could find the bug, which was hidden under five nested gosubs to other scripts, uncommented, and something that the eye would just pass over as ‘just another string assignment’.

After I found the $DATE command in the help, I was then pretty sure I knew what the problem was. It took me two hours to pinpoint the problem. So, three years and two hours later, Europe could stop counting forms before printing, and always printing an even number of them per workstation (or failing that, rebooting after printing, which set the PC time to network time).

I wonder which is more amazing…

- that the command exists at all;
- that it isn’t called something sensible like SET_SYSTEM_DATE, or at least SETDATE;
- that Windows doesn’t have a proper security system to prevent arbitrary apps doing this sort of thing;
- that the dates on the forms were hardcoded in American format in an app shipped to Europe;

Again, click the image for a desktop sized version.

Taken one week after the tugboat picture, and about a mile away. The beach at the end of the caracasbaaiweg is one mostly visited by the locals, and a pretty unknown dive spot, although the reef is beautiful. And if you’re wondering how we spotted this one, just seconds before he was trying to hide on a different background. Check this movie (ipod format, 1.3Mb) (mpeg4, 600 Kb) and note his back fin rising up when he starts to move…

The ideal dive partner for you.

[Quote:]

Microsoft has been fined 280.5m euros ($357m; £194m) by the European Commission for failing to comply with an anti-competition ruling.

The software giant was hit by the fine following a long-running dispute between the US firm and EU regulators.

The move follows a landmark EU ruling in 2004, which ordered Microsoft to provide rivals with information about its Windows operating system.

EU regulators also warned Microsoft it could face new fines of 3m euros a day.

The daily fines will come into force from 31 July if Microsoft fails to supply “complete and accurate” technical information to rival developers, the EU said.

Microsoft has insisted it is meeting the Commission’s demands, and says it expects to deliver the final bundle of information for use by rival software firms by 18 July.

EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said she had “no alternative but to levy penalty payments” against Microsoft, adding that “no company is above the law”.

“I regret that, more than two years after the decision… Microsoft has still not put an end to its illegal conduct,” Ms Kroes said.

If you want to know more about the terrorist attacks on the trains in India, it’s better to turn to a local resource than any of the media…

[Quote:]

Today the National Journal published a list of salaries for the 403 White House staffers. Here are the four most overpaid:

Deborah Nirmala Misir	Ethics Advisor	$114,688
Erica M. Dornburg	Ethics Advisor	$100,547
Stuart Baker	Director for Lessons Learned	$106,641
Melissa M. Carson	Director of Fact Checking	$46,500

And yes, there is a White House Director for Lessons Learned. We aren’t making this up.

[Quote:]

It promises to be a long summer. We’re almost at the mid-way point, but it feels like the days are just crawling by. It’s a combination of the heat, the flies, the hours upon hours of no electricity and the corpses which keep appearing everywhere.

The day before yesterday was catastrophic. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. Some were executed right there in the area. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60.

The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a ‘Sunni’ mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn’t respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.

At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he’d brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he’d promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.

[..]

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don’t report rapes here, they avenge them. We’ve been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can’t believe their ‘heroes’ are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

In the news they’re estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes… Raise your heads high supporters of the ‘liberation’ – your troops have made you proud today. I don’t believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an ‘independent investigation’, ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn’t his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It’s been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can’t bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can’t bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can’t bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can’t bring myself to care because it’s difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they’ll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Why don’t the Americans just go home? They’ve done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they ‘cut and run’, but the fact is that they aren’t doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what’s being done about it? Nothing. It’s convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it’s no longer a ‘life’ like people live abroad. It’s simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.

[Quote:]

A man imprisoned more than 18 years for kidnapping and raping a woman was released Tuesday after new forensic tests showed evidence from the crime did not match his DNA.

James Calvin Tillman, 44, told his family he wanted to take a quiet walk for the first time since 1988, when he was imprisoned after his arrest. He was sentenced a year later to 45 years in prison.

“I thank the Lord,” he said as he left Hartford Superior Court. “I was innocent all along, so I just kept my faith and let science be science.”

Judge Thomas P. Miano granted Tillman’s request for a new trial and released him.

Hartford State’s Attorney James E. Thomas said his office will likely drop the charges.

Tillman was 26, living in a homeless shelter and working at a car wash when he was charged with abducting a woman as she got into her car near a Hartford restaurant, then beating and raping her at a housing project.

Anyone still want to make a case for the death penalty?

[Quote:]

Working as an office manager in a career services office and hearing the warnings surrounding social networking sites, the mother knew her son could potentially have a problem. The son had created his Facebook.com profile when he was 18. Now 20, he had accumulated a good amount of material—typical college musings and photos—that his friends might enjoy but others might view differently.

The son was beginning a search for an internship, so she asked him to consider limiting access to his profile to just his friends. Understanding the gravity of the situation, he heeded his mother’s advice and did so.

Shortly after, he got the call he had been waiting for. A state agency wanted to interview him for an internship. He prepared for the interview and reviewed the types of questions that could be asked. He was ready, as ready as he could be.

But, during the interview, something he was not prepared for happened. The interviewer began asking specific questions about the content on his Facebook.com listing and the situation became very awkward and uncomfortable. The son had thought only those he allowed to access his profile would be able to do so. But, the interviewer explained that as a state agency, recruiters accessed his Facebook account under the auspices of the Patriot Act.

“Very well, Herr Klein so you’ve decided to apply for membership in the SS. I see you have a very good athletic record, your certificates of racial purity appear to be in order.. and you have served in the Reichswehr during the war, Herr Gefreiter. You’re almost 2 meters and 10 centimeters tall, you have blue eyes and blonde hair and you have won multiple contests both military and private in marksmanship. I’m sure a carreer awaits you in the Schutzstaffet but there is a matter which still has us .. puzzled .. Tell me, Herr Klein, what do you do every wednesday night?”

“Herr Standartenführer, I go to a club where we listen and dance to music but I can assure you this has nothing to do with my dedication to our Führer and the Reich.”

“Oh? But I am afraid it does, Herr Klein, I’m afraid it does. You listen to American music! You listen to music created by jews and enacted by blacks, isn’t that so?? You seem to like that kind of music, eh? We had you followed! We saw you dance with a Fraulein and above all, did you know that Fraulein is also half jewish??! We followed you then to your appartment where you sneaked in with your “Fraulein” and had sex with her. Our investigator listened at your door and made a personal of what perversions you were living out with that “woman”. You had sex with a half-jew and outside of marriage at that and believe me you’re going to hear from the Staatsanwaltschaft for this.”

“What, Himmel Herrgott! You had me followed??! You spied on me??” You spied on me sex-life??!?

“Quit acting so surprised Herr Klein. The SS lives up to high standards and we are legally bound by order of the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler himself and by various laws enacted by the Reichstag to investigate the backgrounds of all our applicants. You Herr Klein are certainly not the kind of person we’re looking for. If you want to make an issue of it, be my guest. If you want, you can use my phone to call the Gestapo.

Thank you all for wishing me a great vacation. I’m starting to get in the mood, although this morning I have a bit of a cold. I’ll be rid of that before my flight coming monday, so it doesn’t worry me much. To show you what I’m going to do, I give you the picture above, taken by yours truly on an earlier trip. Click on it for a full 1280×1024 desktop sized picture (actually, it is my desktop picture right now). This may possibly be the best known dive site of curaçao, certainly it is the most visited, both by divers and snorkelers. This place has everything: the wreck of a little tugboat in only 10-15 feet of water, overgrown by corals; a beautiful vertical wall that starts in about 30 ft and drops down to 110ft; in shallow water giant coral-covered boulders provide a varied divescape; ledges along the shore cliffs are carpeted with orange tube coral; and large sea-plume colonies forming a veritable forest provide camouflage for numerous trumpetfishes, and sometimes large cornetfishes are also seen.

Am I going to this divespot again this vacation? You bet!

I’ll probably post a few more desktop sized pictures from my previous trips before I leave, stay tuned

Where was it you wanted to go diving on holiday, John?

An amazing set on Flickr!

These days, if you want an product announcement, just read the CEO weblog

[Quote:]

The Bush administration and the National Security Agency (NSA) have been secretly monitoring the email messages and phone calls of all Americans. They are doing this, they say, for our own good. To find terrorists. Many people have criticized NSA’s domestic spying as unlawful invasion of privacy, as search without search warrant, as abuse of power, as misuse of the NSA’s resources, as unConstitutional, as something the communists would do, something very unAmerican.

In addition, however, mass surveillance of an entire population cannot find terrorists. It is a probabilistic impossibility. It cannot work.

What is the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s mass surveillance identifies them as terrorists? If the probability is zero (p=0.00), then they certainly are not terrorists, and NSA was wasting resources and damaging the lives of innocent citizens. If the probability is one (p=1.00), then they definitely are terrorists, and NSA has saved the day. If the probability is fifty-fifty (p=0.50), that is the same as guessing the flip of a coin. The conditional probability that people are terrorists given that the NSA surveillance system says they are, that had better be very near to one (p=1.00) and very far from zero (p=0.00).

The mathematics of conditional probability were figured out by the Scottish logician Thomas Bayes. If you Google “Bayes’ Theorem”, you will get more than a million hits. Bayes’ Theorem is taught in all elementary statistics classes. Everyone at NSA certainly knows Bayes’ Theorem.

To know if mass surveillance will work, Bayes’ theorem requires three estimations:

1. The base-rate for terrorists, i.e. what proportion of the population are terrorists;
2. The accuracy rate, i.e., the probability that real terrorists will be identified by NSA;
3. The misidentification rate, i.e., the probability that innocent citizens will be misidentified by NSA as terrorists.

No matter how sophisticated and super-duper are NSA’s methods for identifying terrorists, no matter how big and fast are NSA’s computers, NSA’s accuracy rate will never be 100% and their misidentification rate will never be 0%. That fact, plus the extremely low base-rate for terrorists, means it is logically impossible for mass surveillance to be an effective way to find terrorists.

I will not put Bayes’ computational formula here. It is available in all elementary statistics books and is on the web should any readers be interested. But I will compute some conditional probabilities that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of mass surveillance identifies them to be terrorists.

The US Census shows that there are about 300 million people living in the USA.

Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is .00033%, which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of .40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA’s monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA’s misidentification rate is .0001, which means that .01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that .01% of the US population is 30,000 people. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.0132, which is near zero, very far from one. Ergo, NSA’s surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists.

Suppose that NSA’s system is more accurate than .40, let’s say, .70, which means that 70% of terrorists in the USA will be found by mass monitoring of phone calls and email messages. Then, by Bayes’ Theorem, the probability that a person is a terrorist if targeted by NSA is still only p=0.0228, which is near zero, far from one, and useless.

Suppose that NSA’s system is really, really, really good, really, really good, with an accuracy rate of .90, and a misidentification rate of .00001, which means that only 3,000 innocent people are misidentified as terrorists. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA’s domestic monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists.

NSA knows this. Bayes’ Theorem is elementary common knowledge. So, why does NSA spy on Americans knowing it’s not possible to find terrorists that way? Mass surveillance of the entire population is logically sensible only if there is a higher base-rate. Higher base-rates arise from two lines of thought, neither of them very nice:

1. McCarthy-type national paranoia;
2. political espionage.

The whole NSA domestic spying program will seem to work well, will seem logical and possible, if you are paranoid. Instead of presuming there are 1,000 terrorists in the USA, presume there are 1 million terrorists. Americans have gone paranoid before, for example, during the McCarthyism era of the 1950s. Imagining a million terrorists in America puts the base-rate at .00333, and now the probability that a person is a terrorist given that NSA’s system identifies them is p=.99, which is near certainty. But only if you are paranoid. If NSA’s surveillance requires a presumption of a million terrorists, and if in fact there are only 100 or only 10, then a lot of innocent people are going to be misidentified and confidently mislabeled as terrorists.

The ratio of real terrorists to innocent people in the prison camps of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Kandahar shows that the US is paranoid and is not bothered by mistaken identifications of innocent people. The ratio of real terrorists to innocent people on Bush’s no-fly lists shows that the Bush administration is not bothered by mistaken identifications of innocent Americans.

Also, mass surveillance of the entire population is logically plausible if NSA’s domestic spying is not looking for terrorists, but looking for something else, something that is not so rare as terrorists. For example, the May 19 Fox News opinion poll of 900 registered voters found that 30% dislike the Bush administration so much they want him impeached. If NSA were monitoring email and phone calls to identify pro-impeachment people, and if the accuracy rate were .90 and the error rate were .01, then the probability that people are pro-impeachment given that NSA surveillance system identified them as such, would be p=.98, which is coming close to certainty (p=1.00). Mass surveillance by NSA of all Americans’ phone calls and emails would be very effective for domestic political intelligence.

But finding a few terrorists by mass surveillance of the phone calls and email messages of 300 million Americans is mathematically impossible, and NSA certainly knows that.

With the above statistics, the NSA program really is a success. It just depends on how you define “success”. If the agency investigates 30,000 positives a day, the unofficial standing order would be to pick out the few who would most easily be framed. (With 30,000 random people to pick from, finding the idiots should be no trouble.) Run the picks through kangaroo courts and make sure the press sticks to the party line. Keep reminding the public what a great job the government war on ‘terrism’ is doing. Meanwhile remember to occasionally put out nonspecific warnings to take no specific actions at no specific time in no specific place. “Fear” has been very useful in managing the American public, and this program is a tremendous help in that respect.

[Quote:]

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday there was an 80 percent chance the company’s next-generation operating system, Windows Vista, would be ready in January.

However, Gates said at a presentation in Cape Town to Microsoft software partners that he would delay the launch if beta testing uncovered shortcomings.

[..]

He said Microsoft was investing $8 billion to $9 billion in developing Vista and the company’s next version of Office, its key cash-generator. He said the company’s software partners, in developing and adapting their own products for the two launches, would invest 20 times as much as Microsoft.

So implementing Vista costs 20 times 9 billion – if a country has a 180 billion GDP, it would rank in the top 50 countries in the world.

[Quote:]

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has written to two broadband ISPs, asking them to terminate the DSL connections of customers whom the BPI claims are engaged in infringing file-sharing. The BPI is basically asking to replace the “notice-and-takedown” regime that allows anyone to censor any web-page by claiming it infringes copyright with an even harsher regime: notice-and-termination, where the ability to communicate over the Internet can be taken away on the say-so of anyone who claims you’re doing something naughty with copyright.

It’s hard to imagine anything more perverse, really. Copyright is supposed to protect expression, but the BPI thinks that protecting its business should take precedence over due process or free speech. They want to be able to silence anyone whom they think might be breaking the law, without having to go to the expensive mediapathic bother of bringing a lawsuit, with evidence, and proving their case to a judge.

I actually attended a preliminary meeting on notice-and-termination the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) last year. WIPO is the entity that gave us notice-and-takedown, which is now embedded in Europe through the EUCD and in the USA through the DMCA. Notice-and-takedown allows people claiming to be be rightsholders to have any web-page removed from the Internet just by claiming that it infringes their copyright. The Church of Scientology uses this all the time to shut up its critics, and Diebold used it to suppress the publication of a whistle-blower memo that detailed the critical failings in their voting machines (for more examples of bogus takedowns, see Chilling Effects).

The music and movie and software industries are notoriously careless with their takedown notices. ISPs receive thousands of these at a time, generated by software. Kids’ book-reports about Harry Potter, MP3s of lectures by university profs named Usher, and even copies of Linux are routinely mistaken for infringing materials by the takedown bots.

Notice-and-takedown is a censor’s best friend, but as the music and film industry can attest, it hasn’t made any kind of dent in copyright infringement. For one thing, it’s wholly ineffective against P2P file-sharing — notice-and-takedown only works on stuff hosted on an ISP’s web-server, not on a customer’s own PC.

The new proposal for notice-and-termination aims at creating an even more radical version of this judge, jury and executioner privilege the entertainment industry has secured for itself. Under notice-and-termination, you need only claim to be an aggrieved rightsholder to actually knock someone’s DSL circuit offline.

This sounds like something similar to notice-and-takedown, but there’s a gigantic difference: the cost of connecting a DSL circuit is vastly higher than the cost of putting some files on a web-server. Indeed, ISPs have told me that it can take years to recoup the cost of connecting a customer to the Internet.

If termination notices could be sent in the same volume (and with the same negligence) as takedown notices, it could potentially destroy ISPs, who would be forced to terminate customers — on the mere say-so of the entertainment industry — long before the customer had made a penny of profit for the ISP.

Indeed, I pointed this out to a rep of one of the industry lobby groups I met at WIPO and he agreed, but proposed a simple solution: ISPs could cripple their customers’ Internet connections, throttling their bandwidth, banning certain protocols and spying on file-transfers and terminating anything that might be an infringement. By prohibiting all large file-transfers, by constraining upload speeds, and by blocking any non-Hollywood-approved protocols, ISPs could ensure that their businesses wouldn’t be destroyed by an avalanche of termination notices.

And since this is being proposed as a United Nations treaty obligation, every ISP in the land would have the same restrictions, so no customer would be able to jump ship for a less censorious provider.

If this regime had been in place when VoIP was invented, there would be no VoIP — after all, the protocol didn’t exist, and for it to take hold, every ISP in the world would have to be convinced, a priori of its value and allow it at the firewall. Hell, this regime would have made the Web itself impossible; Tim Berners-Lee was smart enough to invent the Web, but would he have had the wherewithal to convince the world’s ISPs to let http on port 80 through their liability-limiting firewalls? link

And later:

[Quote:]

One of the ISPs that the British recording industry tried to strong-arm into terminating customers’ accounts on accusation of file-sharing has refused. In a letter to the British Phonogram Industry, Tiscali’s legal department lectures the BPI on how the law works and why the “overwhelming” evidence of wrongdoing was quite underwhelming.

Webuser has more details on this, including a complaint from Tiscali that the grandstanding BPI issued a press-release about its letter before it had been reviewed at Tiscali: “A Tiscali spokeswoman described the move as a ‘media ambush’. She said the BPI had ‘[sent] their letter to the media before we even had a chance to read it and the information they went to press with was not strictly correct’.”

You have sent us a spreadsheet setting out a list of 17 IP addresses you allege belong to Tiscali customers, whom you allege have infringed the copyright of your members, together with the dates and times and with which sound recording you allege that they have done so. You have also sent us extracts of screenshots of the shared drive of one of those customers. You state that such evidence is “overwhelming”. However, you have provided no actual evidence in respect of 16 of the accounts. Further, you have provided no evidence of downloading taking place nor have you provided evidence that the shared drive was connected by the relevant IP address at the relevant time.

Similar requests we have dealt with in the past, have included such information and, indeed, the bodies conducting those investigations have felt that a court would consider it necessary to see such evidence, supported by sworn statements, before being able to grant any order.

Link to Tiscali’s letter to BPI, Link to Webuser coverage

[Quote:]

oh, the wretched. the worst thing about this whole debacle, as my husband later informed me, is that i TOLD Violet to “go play with the peanut butter.” she liked to roll the jar around in the kitchen. unfortunately, big sister figured out how to open the jar and pile the entire contents onto the little one’s head. it was very hard to convince them that they should never do this again when i was laughing and crying and taking a million pictures.

[Quote:]

A German TV station produced this I believe.

This solves the mystery.

[Quote:]

My email sig has gotten some compliments, so here it is:

[Confidential to all US government personnel to whom this private letter is not addressed and who are reading it in the absence of a specific search warrant: You are violating the law and you are co-conspiring to subvert the Constitution that you are sworn to defend. You can either refuse to commit this crime, or you can expect to suffer criminal sanctions in the future, when Constitutional government has been restored to the United States of America. I do not envy you for having to make this difficult choice, but I urge you to make it wisely.]

Feel free to use in your own mail.

[Quote:]

In a sweeping change of policy, the Pentagon has decided that it will treat all detainees in compliance with the minimum standards spelled out in the Geneva conventions, a senior defense official said today.

The new policy comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling last month invalidating a system of military tribunals the Pentagon had created to try suspected terrorists, and just before Congress takes up the question of a replacement system in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today.

As part of its decision, the court found that a key provision of the Geneva conventions, known as Common Article 3, did apply to terror suspects, contradicting the position taken by the Bush administration.

[..]

Since the Hamdan ruling was announced, some legislators had said they would consider rewriting the law specifically to make Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, no longer applicable.

“We should be embracing Common Article 3 and shouting it from the rooftops,�? Admiral Hutson said. “They can’t try to write us out of this, because that means every two-bit dictator could do the same.�?

He said it was “unbecoming for America to have people say, ‘We’re going to try to work our way around this because we find it to be inconvenient.’ �?

“If you don’t apply it when it’s inconvenient,�? he said, “it’s not a rule of law.�?

Does this include the ghost detainees, who the U.S. won’t admit to holding and doesn’t report to the Red Cross? (Existence of these was publically admitted by the U.S. military in 2004.) Does it include the ones at prison camps in eastern Europe? (Denied by the U.S., though the evidence is overwhelming.) How about the ones held in Afghanistan and Iraq? How about the ones held by the CIA, not the DoD?

[Quote:]

One Alaskan gubernatorial candidate is an extreme long shot to win. But he’ll keep barking up every tree to turn out the vote.

Brinkley is a two year-old golden retriever who is the center of a write-in campaign for Alaska’s highest office.

At least one candidate will sniff your asshole… two, if you count the dog.