[Quote:]

Officials at the Navy’s brig in Hanahan developed elaborate plans to dodge public scrutiny of its operations to detain enemy combatants, plans that include destroying “critical info,” scrubbing public Web sites, and warning brig staff about the temptations of “high priced offers from news agencies,” a Navy report shows.

The 17-page document also describes how, with relatively short notice, the Naval Consolidated Brig created an expensive prison-within-a-prison, in part to prevent regular inmates from retaliating against the detainees. In this separate facility, a brig official said detainees are accorded protections under the U.S. Constitution, “except where curtailed by higher guidance.”

“accorded” protections? “Higher guidance”?

What the fuck happened to phrases like “inalienable rights”?

Stick a fork in the USA. It’s done.

[Meanwhile, at Guantanamo:]

The men imprisoned in Camp 6 are alone in cells with walls, floors and ceilings of solid metal 22 hours a day. There is no natural light or air and no windows except strips of glass next to the solid metal door that allow only a view of an interior corridor. During cell time, the men have no contact with any human beings other than guards.

“Rec time” consists of a transfer in shackles to a “pod” of five pens separated by chain-link fences. Each detainee is placed alone in a 12- by 9-foot pen for two hours and allowed to communicate with others should there be men in adjacent pens. The two-story-high concrete walls of the pod are covered by barbed wire, allowing a glimpse of the sky but no view of the horizon. Though this outdoor time is offered each 24-hour period, it is sometimes offered very late at night. Other than heavily censored letters to family and from family, the imprisoned men are completely cut off from information about the outside world.

The punchline? The prisoners at Camp 6 are the ones the US government says are innocent.

OK everybody, cancel Easter, they found the body.

[Quote:]

A Vancouver Police computer crime investigator has warned the city that plans for a citywide wireless Internet system put the city at risk of terrorist attack during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

The combination of anonymous, mobile Internet access and the potential presence of transit systems, traffic signals and gas and electric utility systems as tenants on a city-wide wireless network will make Vancouver a prime target for a paralysing attack by hackers, said Vancouver Police Det. Mark Fenton.

[..]

“If you have an open wireless system across the city, as a bad guy I could sit on a bus with a laptop and do global crime,” Fenton explained. “It would be virtually impossible to find me.”

“With the Olympics coming up and everybody wanting to go wireless it raises huge security concerns,” Fenton said.

Oh my God! Quick! Arrest everybody with a laptop!

[Quote:]

Muhammed Muheisen is a terrific photojournalist working for AP in the Middle East. He snapped the image above last week. As they say – “a picture is worth 1,000 words”

In this image made from video rats move around inside a KFC-Taco Bell restaurant in Greenwich Village in New York, Friday, Feb. 23, 2007. (AP Photo/Rafael Garcia Jr. via APTN)

A giant sinkhole that swallowed several homes is seen in Guatemala City February 23, 2007. (Stringer/Reuters)

[Quote:]

The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high as the gulf between the nation’s “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of the 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 — half the federal poverty line — was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period.

The above is the device key for WinDVD 8. With this key, it’s suddenly a lot easier to copy HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks.

Yet another copy protection scheme that is falling apart even before it is in widespread use.

[Quote:]

Open Letter to Steven Ballmer

It’s come to many in the Linux community’s attention you have claimed again and again, that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property.  Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

Therefore, this website will serve as a response to this accusation, and within it, a request.   The request is simple, since you, Microsoft, claim to be so sure of yourself: Show Us the Code.

If Linux developers are made aware of the code, then the code can be omitted and Linux can re-write necessary aspects of the kernel or operating system.  This is a fairly simple request and common courtesy. Why wave around lawsuit threats, threats that will cost Microsoft in a court room as well as the defendants? It lacks logic, especially when you consider that there are developers around the world who would be more than happy to work with Microsoft to resolve this issue. Don’t you owe it to your shareholders to work with others to ensure their intellectual property isn’t being violated?

Also, we were under the impression you wanted to work with the open source community. That’s what Port 25 is all about isn’t it?  That’s what the Novell deal is about, correct?  Here’s your chance.  If you’re right you’ll make thousands upon thousands of open-source advocates hush up and make your competitors scramble for ways to not violate your IP.

Linux community members do not want your code.   We don’t want lawsuits.  We don’t want non-free code.   And much to your dismay, we don’t want Microsoft’s code specifically. 

As Slashdot says, if Microsoft answers this challenge — by May 1st — then Linux developers will be able to modify the code so that it remains ‘free’ software. If such infringing code doesn’t exist, we will have called Microsoft’s bluff. And if the campaign garners enough attention and if Steve Ballmer maintains silence, then the community and companies behind Linux can take the silence for the admission that it is.

[Quote:]

Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an “economic epidemic” under certain conditions. Any one of the following:

1) The product they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.

2) The products they want are high-priced, so there’s a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.

3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they’re the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.

And . . .

Guess what? It’s precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called “online piracy,” it’s DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.

A great article by Jim Bean. If anybody knows how electronic distribution can help real sales providing you don’t assume your clients are thieves, it’s Jim. As demonstrated in the same article:

Included among them is my own most popular title, 1632. I put that novel up in the Baen Library back in 2001—six years ago. At the time, the novel had sold about 30,000 copies in paperback.

Today, six years after I “pirated” myself, the novel has sold over 100,000 copies.

In the face of examples like this—and this is but one example—all arguments that “online piracy” guts legitimate sales are exposed as pure and simple blather. In point of fact, the exact opposite is true. The real effect of making books available for free in electronic format is that it keeps stimulating sales of the paper editions—which is where 95% of the money is, anyway, from an author or a publisher’s standpoint.

And on an unrelated note: