Jonathan’s newish blog at Corante has a manifesto that says it all. Gotta love it!

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Dana Blankenhorn points to the most important objection to the Shock and Awe plan: how it will affect the possibility of peace.

Why was poisoning wells unthinkable according to Just Law doctrine? Surely poisoning the drinking supplies of enemy villages might shorten a war. But, it was understood that doing so would make it impossible to return to peace. And that’s the aim of war: to return to a more just peace.

So, while we will hear — and should listen to — arguments about how Shock and Awe will reduce the number of casualties, we also need to think about the effect of launching 800 missiles to make cities unliveable. If our soldiers are not greeted in the streets with cries of joy, then we will have lost the war.

From David Isenberg, in a posting to a mailing list:

Let’s call the U.S. strategy for the attack of Baghdad by its true name — it’s not “Shock and Awe,” it is Terrorism.

I know it is hard for some people, even some people who don’t like the idea of the coming war, to equate what happened in New York with what is likely to happen halfway around the world.

However, when I read about the United States’ “Shock and Awe” strategy I imagine 800 Boeing 757s, each one crashing into a New York building in a ball of fire, a new World Trade Center disaster every four minutes for two days — terrified people jumping from windows to escape certain death by fire, terrified people running from the dust clouds in panic as buildings collapse, grieving loved ones with pictures begging strangers for news, and the sickening smell afterwards. Only it will be 800 times worse, because airplanes are not *designed* to kill people, but the United States will drop weapons designed to kill. In addition to the fire and explosion, thousands of little daisy cutters will rip the flesh of office workers, janitors, restaurant workers, firemen, policemen, rescuers, people on the street.

If the U.S. “Shock and Awe” program is not Terrorism, we have lost the meaning of the word.

Categories: politics Date: January 31st, 2003

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Plans are leaking about our strategy in the war against Iraq. Called “Shock and Awe,” the aim is to spend two days bombing Iraq so intensively that life becomes unlivable there and thus the demoralized troops just don’t fight. To do this, we will send 800 cruise missiles into Iraq in the first two days, more in one day than were launched in the entire Gulf War. “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad,” a Pentagon official told America’s CBS News after a briefing on the plan. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before.”

Links:

smh.com. au
CBS News
CommonDreams

This comes from Tom Atlee via David Isenberg

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Peter Kaminski notes that Bush proposes hydrogen fuel cells, that the Dept. of Energy says that natural gas is the best source of hyrdogen, and that Dick “Dick” Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton, is developing Bangladesh’s natural gasfields. And should I add that there are those who think one of the forces behind our Afghanistan policy is the desire for a pipeline for natural gas?

But you don’t actually need a conspiracy theory to explain W’s new fascination with hydrogen fuel. Since hydrogen won’t be feasible for 15-20 years, supporting hydrogen is a way of postponing ecological responsibility. Let loose the snow mobiles! Roll back the CAFE standards! Open up the wilderness for drilling! Hell, I’m an environmentalist because I support hydrogen fuel!

Which isn’t to say that the conspiracy theory isn’t true also.

(For a commentary on a similar W feint, see here.)

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Marc Abrahams, the editor of the actually funny magazine, Annals of Improbable Research and creator of the Ig Nobel Awards, in an email writes:

>AOL lost $99 billion. That’s over $300 for
>every person in the country!

Uh, oh. Now THEY might decide the best thing to do is go start a war.

Incoming! AOL CD’s!

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Amos has some crisp musings (hmm, do musings admit crispness?) on digital ID and the positive value of privacy. For example, he writes:

The tie between the digID and products is clear. In a short time, the subject will not be called digital rights management but instead Digital Access Management. You will be unable to access significant content without a digID, and the class of digID you have will determine what level of access, both in terms of content and throughput, available to you.

And once DAM has been established, the “public” network will be marginalized…

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Margaret writes that her family calibrates colds and flu by a 1-10 Crud Factor. I am today at CF 7, an improvement from yesterday’s CF 8. However, enough parents have cancelled from the Understanding Disabilities program my wife is running this morning at the local elementary school that I have to fill-in, creating a CF Wind Chill factor of 11.

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I just got a copy of The Wireless Networking Starter Kit by Glenn Fleishman and Adam Engst. I’ve thumbed through it and it looks like a clear and lively explanation of everything you wanted to know about goin’ wifi. Maybe now I can find out how my PPPoE bone connects to the Tx bone.

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Dan Gillmor, whose countercultural journalistic cry is “My readers know more than I do,” asked his readers to come up with “prior art” to dispute SBC’s stupid claim to have invented navigation elements on Web pages. And his readers have responded convincingly.

Hell, a company I worked at invented it also: Interleaf’s Worldview electronic publishing product let you design a stable frame with links to within the document itself. Damn, we should have patented it! Oh, and we should also have patented the idea of having a window that can display pages sequentially! And pages! Yeah, we invented that!

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Steve MacLaughlin suggests we haven’t seen the last of Ted Turner:

So now the 64-year old Turner is stepping down from his executive role at AOL Time Warner, and many think he will fade away into the sunset. Off to work on his philanthropic endeavors or perhaps to write his memoirs. But I believe that Turner has spent too much of his life in the arena to just walk away. Having watched most of his personal fortune go down the tubes thanks to the AOL whiz kids, Turner might be game for a little revenge. I wouldn’t be surprised if Turner is the first person to pull out his pocketknife to help carve up the media giant’s fallen carcass. Play ball!

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Still feeling like crap.

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TinyApps.org is a good-hearted and useful site that makes small applications available, mainly for free. The site’s asking for small donations. It’d be a shame to lose this site.

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Steve Yost has set up the text of last night’s State of the Union so that people can comment on every paragraph. He’s using the “Document Review” feature of his excellent Quicktopic site. [Disclosure: I've done business with Steve.]

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Time remaining in the Bush administration:

[I've removed the applet because it apparently was significantly affecting the loading time for my blog. It's a countdown timer.]

Pointed to by Gary Stock, taken from here.

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David is sick today. He has a sore throat, runny nose, a headache and is tired. So please excuse him from blogging today.

Could you please ask one of his friends to bring him his homework?

Thank you.

Signed,
My Mom

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Peter Jung has a new blog that so far is about politics and has a sense of humor. If you love da Dubya, you will not like his site.

BTW, from this site I learned that Joe Lieberman called the commuting of all death sentences in Illinois “shockingly wrong.” He added, “It did terrible damage to the credibility of our system of justice.” Joe Orthodox maybe ought to check the rabbis’ opinion about how rarely the death penalty should be imposed because human judgment is so fallible.

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Jim Montgomery points us to this despairing ebay listing.

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Phil Becker has a helpful update on Palladium, the Microsoft project to provide “secure” computing. Its name has now been changed and, more important, it is going to be made a standard part of Windows over the next few years. In fact, that Microsoft has moved from the “hot” name “Palladium” to a name that can be neither pronounced nor remembered — Next-generation Secure Computing Base — indicates that Microsoft wants to lower the project’s visibility and make it sound not like an optional product but like a service that will be buried inside of its Windows brand.

[Thanks for the link, Eric.]

Eric and Andre Durand have written a white paper for PingID about federated digital ID. This is from the abstract:

While existing identity management solutions can help reduce the inefficiencies associated with managing users, roles, permissions and access to information, there are a growing number of applications that require the inter-company (federated) exchange of identity-based information (e.g. single sign-on, web services etc.). This document explores the complexity, requirements and merits associated with wide-scale deployment of identity federation, including strategies for pooling resources and the creation of standardized business frameworks for assuring quality, maintaining security, managing liability, reducing risk and resolving disputes.

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I got sent a copy of the latest issue of “Quotes, Notes & Anecdotes,” a 116-page journal of sparkling quotations suitable for use by after-dinner speakers (e.g., “Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best” — Bob Talbert, US journalist, 1982). The accompanying note explained that I was sent this issue because I’m quoted in it. Cool! Unfortunately, they didn’t say which page. So, I quickly thumbed through, and there, amidst quotations from King James I, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Howard Zinn, and, well, a guy who parachutes with a dachsund tucked into his pocket, there I find the insight so keen, so piercing, so arresting, that it has earned me a spot in this pantheon of blurbers:

We get to kick in the teeth the idealized — and constricted — set of behaviors known as professionalism.

David Weinberger (1950-), Canadian author; on the pleasure people get in pointing out the errors and goofs of the famous, as discovered in movies, articles, books.

That’s it? That’s the cleverest, pithiest, zing-iest thing I ever wrote? I don’t even know what that has to do with professionalism and I wrote the damn sentence.

BTW, I am not a Canadian author. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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I’ll be gone all day with no access to the Net. We’re visiting colleges with our daughter. So, try not to say anything too interesting in your blog today, ok?

Thanks.

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Kerry Nitz, who started a blog recently (welcome to blogland, Kerry!), recommends a survey in the Economist called “The Internet Society”

Far from being over, the computer and telecoms revolution that created the internet has barely begun. These technologies will change almost every aspect of our lives?private, social, cultural, economic and political. In some areas, the changes may be marginal, but in most they will be profound, and unprecedented.

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It’s called “Syberia.” It’s lovely to look at. And it’s a pain in the frigging ass to play.

“Syberia” is an adventure game. It opens in a tiny Alpine town, home of the world’s most charming automata. You are a comely and highly professional lass out to close a deal with the automata factory’s owner. But mystery ensues, something about a lady who may be dead or not but in any case used to draw pictures of wooly mammoths in a cave in the forest.

Oh, the mystery ensues alright. It ensues for hour after pointless hour as you ensue your ass off fetching a large and entirely arbitrary set of objects in precisely the right and arbitrary order. Failure to do so means that you will have to traverse the entire freaking landscape yet again. You can run but you can’t just go from A to D without first passing B for the twentieth time and C for the thirtieth. And every time you think you’re at the end of a chapter and the goddamn train is going to leave the goddamn station, the no-longer-charming a-hole of a conductor — an automaton, of course — tells you about some other random hurdle you must jump. And to jump it, you have to go back to D through B and C and don’t forget to give the retarded little Momo character a good thwack on the back of his annoying little head.

Thank goodness for the Universal Hint System. If I have no idea where to get the ink for the stamper for the permit for the ticket for the conductor of the train, UHS will tell me just enough to keep me from going back to the dam where Momo is waiting with another of his long boring stories or to the twisty maze where nothing happens.

This game is so annoying it might actually force me to go read a book.

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A posting from Peter Kaminski to a mailing list (with permission):

It’s a thing of terrorbeauty, this Slammer/Sapphire/W32.SQLExp.Worm. Weighing in at 376 bytes of assembly language code, it is shorter than some email signature blocks. Shorter than the next paragraph.

It fits entirely within one UDP packet. The packet goes into a Microsoft SQL Server box, and boom, the machine turns into a zombie, spewing the same packet back out at random IP addresses, over and over and over and over, running in a tight 23-instruction loop, cycling fast enough to fill the network it’s connected to with the tiny replicates of itself directed anywhere and everywhere on the net.

Here are some more links:
cstone’s annotated disassembly
archived version of the Matrix graph
the slashdot thread
NGSSoftware advisory on the Microsoft SQL Server exploit, 2002-07-25

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Adina blogs interestingly about the social augmentation of reality.

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If “democracy” is government by the demos (people) and “aristocracy” is government by the aristos, then what would you call a government formed by the connections among people? That’s the question I posed, more or less, to the blogiverse’s resident Greek-Latin-Aramaic-French-German-Hebrew scholar, AKMA. He responds bravely to my question:

There’d be a form of metechein, so “metechocracy.”

Zeugnumi or synzeugnumi mean “join,” or “yoke”; what about “zeugnocracy”?

Power to the Zeugnoids!

AKMA has posted a sermon he gave on Thursday about The White Guy’s Burden. (This doesn’t do it justice; you’ll have to read it for yourself.)

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David Stephenson sends me an email:

I feel like an idiot: I know we have 12 allies against Iraq, but I can’t name them all!

I have to admit it: this is a sad commentary on my lack of knowledge of the world. I only count 7. Can you help me with the other 5?

Andorra
Brunei Darussalam
Djibouti
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Monaco
Sao Tome and Principe

No, problem, David. The other five are:

Grumpy
Dopey
Sneezy
Sleepy
Bashful

Doc has a trick knee and Happy is in rehab.

Glad I could be of help.

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Bob Frankston has a new essay that makes the case that the current spectrum management system unduly restrains free speech. He writes:

It’s as if we were having a party and someone came into the room and told everyone to be quiet and gave out pieces of paper with a time and a place telling each person when and where they could talk. If there were a possibility young people would overhear you couldn’t use certain words even if there were no other venues and even if you felt the language was appropriate for them.

Put that way it seems outrageous. Yet if we communicate using radio waves instead of sound waves that is precisely what the FCC is doing.

The FCC was in 1934 created to deal with a technological limitation of radios of their day. Frequencies had to be assigned exclusively to broadcasters to optimize reception. That meant that access to the “public airwaves” was gated by corporations with enough capital to build expensive transmission systems. The government over the years has recognized that this is a problem, legislating ameliorating solutions. But modern technology means that we don’t need the broadcast chokepoints. All that’s keeping the public from using the public airwaves are regulations based on outmoded assumptions about technology. Our free speech is being restrained.

Bob also points to an essay by Yochai Benkler and Larry Lessig posted by the New Republic: Will technology make CBS unconstitutional? A snippet:

Our argument is straightforward: The FCC regulates speech. It says that, if you want to speak on 98.6 FM in Boston, you must get a license (or, now, buy one). If you speak on 98.6 without a license, you will have committed a crime. The FCC will prosecute you and seize your transmitter. All this despite the fact that the First Amendment to the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” What gives?

Both of these articles are must-reading. This issue is really beginning to boil…

(Don’t forget the two articles at GreaterDemocracy.org: Reframing Open Spectrum and an Open Spectrum FAQ.)

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What a welcome addition you‘ve been to the blogiverse. Here’s looking forward to many more years of your unique bloggery.

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Eric is getting all fin-de-siecle on us in two excellent essays: here and here.

Eric and I agree on almost everything. Our values are in sync around digital ID issues. But we disagree in one important way. Eric is convinced that digID is either going to come from the top down and be way ugly, or we’re going to take the initiative and building something that protects the rights of users first and foremost. So, Eric’s time and words are where his mouth is as he helps to craft a digID system that’ll be better than what the Big Boys are already implementing. I, on the other hand, am unconvinced that any digID system brings more benefit than risk to users. I don’t want the Big Boys’ system, that’s for sure. But I also can’t get real excited about efforts to craft a digID infrastructure whose chief virtue is that it’s less bad. (We actually have a second disagreement: Eric sees more positive good in the less-bad systems than I do.)

In sum: I want to have it both ways. I want to stand on the sidelines and say “DigID is dangerous! Boo!” and count on good-hearted, smart people like Eric to build a bulwark that’s better than what’s being foisted on us.

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Mitch has what he calls a rant on the need to build a connected government in the face of a toxically disconnective administration. If I say it’s too coherent to be rant, I hope I’m not offending him.

Of course I agree with Mitch’s vision. But for a couple of years I’ve felt that despite the gloriousness of loose connections, political movements online as well as off benefit from having a leader. We need one now. Where is the leader who stands for online rights? Who stands for the online world that has so frightened the forces of greed and power? Where? Who?

Please send your answers to:

You Already Be a Leader Contest
Battlecreek, MI

Britt Blaser summarizes emails circulating among a few of us (Doc, Adina, Marc Canter, as well as Mitch and Britt), about Mitch’s post.

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I’ve been reading Halley’s series in defense of the Alpha Male with, let’s say, mixed emotions. I love the writing. I admire her resuscitation of virtues that we’ve become afraid to acknowledge. But as at best an Omikron Male (my math scores pulled me down), I’m pretty durn uncomfortable with the throwback sex roles.

In other words, the series is working splendidly in a genre that itself needs resuscitating: scandalous writing.

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J.D. Lasica explains everything you wanted to know about aggregators — the RSS newsfeed sort — at the Online Journalism Review. And JD’s written a “Making of…” blog entry that explains why he’s posted the full interviews he did when researching the article.

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Eric Norlin explains why the Liberty Alliance’s federated ID scheme is a step in the right direction.

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“All Things Considered” last night had a report on the Bush administration’s attack on sex education programs that teach kids about contraception rather than only proselytizing for abstinence. The scary part was the degree to which our government is willing to ignore or twist science.

Hey, teaching kids that abstinence is an option is great. Still, if the government really wants to get it to stick, they should couple abstinence education with proselytizing for masturbation. It’s a winning combination!

Slate’s daily news roundup notes that W has nominated Jerry Thacker to his Aids Advisory Panel a former faculty member at Bob Jones University who has called AIDS “the gay plague,” etc. The offending phrases were recently removed from Thacker’s site, but Slate used the Web Archive to rescue the page before it was tucked into the closet, so to speak. It includes the following subheading:

Help for Homosexuals. A message on the nature of homosexuality and how Christ can rescue the homosexual. Includes statistics on homosexual behavior, tips for ministry to those practicing this “deathstyle” and information on the homosexual movement and its political agenda.

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Paul Lehrman, on the music faculty at Tufts, writes first to say that he’s not convinced my article on Open Spectrum is technically correct:

Check out two columns I did for Mix magazine on this subject: here, and here.

But he definitely does want to correct the story about Hedy Lamarr’s involvement in the invention of frequency hopping.

Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil worked out the idea for their jam-proof torpedo guidance system not while playing four-hand music (she didn’t play the piano at all to my knowledge), but over several weeks’ worth of private dinners (which Antheil’s wife wasn’t very happy about). But there is an important piano metaphor in the invention: not piano duets, but player pianos.The receiver and the transmitter would have the frequency-hopping codes on a tape or roll, which was fed through a sensing mechanism, very similar to the way a player piano roll carries musical information. Antheil was well-versed in player pianos: his magnum opus of the ’20s, Ballet Mécanique, was supposed to use 16 synchronized player pianos (only he never heard it played that way, since the technology didn’texist during his life time). I’ve been working for the past five years with this piece, and have managed to produce several performances of it using 16 computer-synchronized player pianos. It kicks butt. (More at http://antheil.org)

Thanks, Paul. My OS white paper retells the Lamarr story explicitly skeptically, so it’s great to hear a more reliable version.

Ah, the distributed expertise that is the Web. Gotta love it.

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Scott Bradner, one of the people who crafted this Internet thing we know and love, has an excellent article on the striking absence of the user/customer in Sony’s and Microsoft’s dreams of living room dominance.

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Gary Stock is all over the GOP AstroTurfing brouhaha. His page sends us to DredWerkz were you’ll find a password by which you can roam free at the GOP site.

First go to: http://www.gopteamleader.com/index.asp. Next, log in. Use the username: gop@dredwerkz.com and the password gopgop.

Then Gary recounts how he used the GOP Citizen Spam engine to send a message to the editor of the Kalamazoo Gazette warning him/her to watch out for letters to the editor that are actually spam-for-points sponsored by the Republican party.

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Mitch rants about file sharing in reaction to the court decision that Verizon has to give up the name of a user who uploaded music.

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Dan Gillmor’s column warns that the lack of competition in the access provider market may well lead to a stifling of content itself.

The question boils down to something fairly simple… Should giant telecommunications companies — namely the cable and local-phone provider — have vertical control over everything from the data transport to the content itself? Or should we insist on a more horizontal system, in which the owner of the pipe is obliged to provide interconnections to competing services?

Hmm, let me think about which I’d prefer….

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Jonathan is predicting that the result of the Highly Distressing ruling yesterday that Verizon has to identify a user the RIAA thinks is swapping files (No!) may be a protection racket: Jonathan foresees ISPs being forced to pay a fee per month per user of broadband or else face lawsuits.

Hmm, which would I prefer today, valium or hemlock?

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