Just because you’re fighting for freedom doesn’t imply that you’ll be getting any of that freedom.

Happy Wiretap the Internet Day!

I heard if you work for Blackwater, you get unlimited bittorrents and 12 Mbps download.

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You may not know this about Windows Media Player, but it knows secrets about you. It’s aware of your man-crush on Sean Connery, it knows about what you did with your roommate’s toothbrush, and it knows that you threw up in your tuba during 10th grade marching band practice. What you may not know is that it can only hold a finite amount of secrets, and once it hits that limit it’ll start blabbing all your secrets to your iPod.

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Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged.

“The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them,” said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.

You know, if only the students all had guns, they could have defended themselves.

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When at his Last Supper Jesus said: “This is my body”, what he held in his hands still had all the appearances of bread: these “accidents” remained unchanged. However, the Roman Catholic Church believes that, when Jesus made that declaration, the underlying reality (the “substance”) of the bread was converted to that of his body. In other words, it actually was his body, while all the appearances open to the senses or to scientific investigation were still those of bread, exactly as before. The Church holds that the same change of the substance of the bread and of the wine occurs at the consecration of the Eucharist.

Because Jesus, risen from the dead, is living, the Church holds that, when the bread is changed into his body, not only his body is present, but Jesus as a whole, body and blood, soul and divinity. The same holds for the wine changed into his blood.

Well then….

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There has long been a cat-and-mouse game between Web advertisers, which pay to place their messages on sites where people view content, and ad-blocking services, which let people hide those messages from their browsers.

Steve Lambert, a conceptual artist, plans to add his own twist to one type of software that blots out commercial messages. His add-on will replace the display ads — which are usually papered over with blank windows — with curator-picked artwork from contemporary artists.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Lambert demonstrated a test version of AddArt at the Chelsea studios of Eyebeam, a nonprofit arts and technology center where he has a fellowship. Mr. Lambert opened the Fox News Web site on his computer, and both the banner ad at the top of the page and a rectangular ad on the bottom were replaced with a bald eagle illustration. (He is using stock art rather than original work at this point, which can be downloaded from www.addart.eyebeam.org.)

Mr. Lambert, 30, said he and Evan Harper, an artist, are not starting from scratch, but rather were modifying the program Adblock Plus. “Why reinvent the wheel when you can insert a gear and make it run backwards?” said Mr. Lambert.

Far from taking umbrage, the developer of Adblock Plus, Wladimir Palant, who lives in Norway, wrote in an e-mail response to questions, “Replacing annoying and obtrusive ads with some eye candy, turning them into their exact opposite, is a consequent continuation of what Adblock started — making the Web endurable and enjoyable.”

Interesting statistic from the article: According to Forrester Research, 53 percent of consumers had ad-blocking software on their computers in 2006, up from just 21 percent in 2004.

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The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth’s equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change. Carbon emissions from deforestation far outstrip damage caused by planes and automobiles and factories.

The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists.

Figures from the GCP, summarising the latest findings from the United Nations, and building on estimates contained in the Stern Report, show deforestation accounts for up to 25 per cent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each; and aviation makes up only 3 per cent of the total.

“Tropical forests are the elephant in the living room of climate change,” said Andrew Mitchell, the head of the GCP.

Scientists say one days’ deforestation is equivalent to the carbon footprint of eight million people flying to New York. Reducing those catastrophic emissions can be achieved most quickly and most cheaply by halting the destruction in Brazil, Indonesia, the Congo and elsewhere.

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On 29 April 2007 a Boeing 757 owned by the low-fare carrier Thomsonfly injested 2 large herons, causing a failure of the aircraft’s #2 engine. A video camera was present and captured the entire event. The birds did not survive the incident, but the 200+ passengers did.

The most remarkable thing on this is when the tower tells them to “continue own navigation as required”, essentially permitting a 757 commercial carrier to operate under Visual Flight Rules, which almost never happens.

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And its not just birds. Sometimes jet-stream encounters can take a page from the X-Files. “We’ve had frogs, turtles, snakes. We had a cat once that was struck at some high altitude,” said the Smithsonian’s Dove. She says birds like hawks and herons will occasionally drop their quarries into oncoming planes. “The other day we had a bird strike. We sent the sample to the DNA lab and it came back as rabbit. How do you explain to the FAA that we had a rabbit strike at 1,800 feet?”

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The top-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate on Sunday expressed frustration with the Iraqi government, saying Republicans were “overwhelmingly disappointed” with the lack of political progress.

[..]

McConnell said there was a growing sense of frustration across all political divides in the U.S. Senate with failures of the Iraqi government.

“I don’t know what their problem is but this country has made an enormous investment in giving the Iraqis a chance to have a normal government after all of these years of Saddam Hussein and his atrocities,” he said.

Citing media reports, McConnell said some lawmakers in Iraq’s parliament wanted a vote to ask the United States to leave.

“I want to assure you, if they vote to ask us to leave, we’ll be glad to comply with their request,” he said.

Anybody want to bet McConnell and the rest of these “top-ranking Republicans” will develop selective amnesia shortly?

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Radical Shiite politicians pressed Thursday for legislation demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led troops and a freeze on the number of foreign forces already in the country

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How many times have you heard George W. Bush say some variation of:

Our enemies in Iraq will make every effort to ensure that our television screens are filled with images of death and suffering. Yet over time, we can expect to see…fewer brazen acts of terror…

Well now, with the aid of the Iraqi government, we will no longer have to see the results of those pesky bomb attacks:

Iraq’s interior ministry has decided to bar news photographers and camera operators from the scenes of bomb attacks…

This follows the recent decision by the Iraqi government to no longer release civilian casualty figures. Toss in the U.S. policy of not including the victims of bomb attacks in casualty counts, and soon we will all be able to pretend that there is progress in Iraq.  

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Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe.

FUD. Details, please.

The free world appears to be uncowed by Microsoft’s claims. Its master legal strategist is Eben Moglen, longtime counsel to the Free Software Foundation and the head of the Software Freedom Law Center, which counsels FOSS projects on how to protect themselves from patent aggression. (He’s also a professor on leave from Columbia Law School, where he teaches cyberlaw and the history of political economy.)

Moglen contends that software is a mathematical algorithm and, as such, not patentable. (The Supreme Court has never expressly ruled on the question.) In any case, the fact that Microsoft might possess many relevant patents doesn’t impress him. “Numbers aren’t where the action is,” he says. “The action is in very tight qualitative analysis of individual situations.” Patents can be invalidated in court on numerous grounds, he observes. Others can easily be “invented around.” Still others might be valid, yet not infringed under the particular circumstances.

Moglen’s hand got stronger just last month when the Supreme Court stated in a unanimous opinion that patents have been issued too readily for the past two decades, and lots are probably invalid. For a variety of technical reasons, many dispassionate observers suspect that software patents are especially vulnerable to court challenge.

Furthermore, FOSS has powerful corporate patrons and allies. In 2005, six of them – IBM, Sony, Philips, Novell, Red Hat and NEC – set up the Open Invention Network to acquire a portfolio of patents that might pose problems for companies like Microsoft, which are known to pose a patent threat to Linux.

So if Microsoft ever sued Linux distributor Red Hat for patent infringement, for instance, OIN might sue Microsoft in retaliation, trying to enjoin distribution of Windows. It’s a cold war, and what keeps the peace is the threat of mutually assured destruction: patent Armageddon – an unending series of suits and countersuits that would hobble the industry and its customers.

Bring it on, Microsoft, bring it on! The only thing you have is the ability to scare some of your customers, for a while. Adversarial behavior eventually destroys those who engage in it.

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… in February 1950, an undistinguished, first-term Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, burst into national prominence when, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he held up a piece of paper that he claimed was a list of 205 known communists currently working in the State Department. McCarthy never produced documentation for a single one of his charges, but for the next four years he exploited an issue that he realized had touched a nerve in the American public.