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Bin Laden pipes up
So Osama bin Laden breaks his radio silence with an audiotape. Experts tell us it seems to be real and it seems to be bin Laden himself. It makes reference to recent events so it is unlikely to have been recorded a long time ago.
My colleague Joe Conason will have a lengthier piece on this up later this evening. In the mean time, various press accounts have wondered why we are hearing but not seeing the al-Qaida leader. For instance, here's Nicholas Kulish in the Wall St. Journal: "The qustion remains why, if Mr. bin Laden is alive, no videos have been released."
One possibility, of course, is that bin Laden is ill and not in good enough shape to show his face -- it would dishearten his faithful followers. But another possibility that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is that bin Laden and company learned their lesson from their videotape releases of last fall.
As you may recall, Western experts analyzed the rock formations behind bin Laden and tried to figure out his location from every possible clue on screen. The choice of audio this time might be simple prudence. Bin Laden has managed to elude American pursuit thus far, and he is presumably even less eager to be located today than he was a year ago.
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Spam-a-rama
Several years ago, when Salon's technology coverage was published under the now-antiquated label "21st," I assigned crack reporter Andrew Leonard to look under the hood of a spam operation. We published Spam Bombers in Sept., 1997. Spamming tools have only gotten more sophisticated since then, and the volume of spam has exploded.
Today's Wall Street Journal offers an interesting update on our old "Among the Spammers" feature, profiling a "spam queen" named Laura Betterly. It's a good piece (and this link will let you read it even if you're not a Journal subscriber -- thanks to Slashdot), but it left me with some questions. Ms. Betterly claims that her income from her spam business will be $200,000 this year. Yet each example of a particular spam deal or mailing cited in the article provides a measly payoff. The only deal that seems to offer substantial return -- $1,555 in commissions on one week's worth of mailing for a particular client, which Ms. Betterly somehow extrapolates to a total take of $25,000 -- is a spam message that, ironically, sells antispam software.
All of which just makes me wonder whether our friendly spammer is borrowing a page from the playbook of online porn merchants, who have been known to inflate their earnings.
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Keeping up with the blogses
Mark Hoback, on Fried Green Al-Qaedas, is providing regular tours of Salon blog-space. You can also access good updates from Christian Crumlish's Radio Free Blogistan's "Salonika" channel, which is aggregating salon-blog-stuff from multiple channels.
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Out and a-blog-out
From the Raven: "Xtreme" Blogging! "I'd like to find the guy that coined that usage, because if I did, I'd wrap him up in kerosene-soaked rags and set him on fire while dragging him down the street tied to my rear bumper and I'd cut him loose into a gator-infested swamp, smoking, bleeding, and screaming. It would be Xtreme.... This isn't just the devaluation of a word, it's a full-scale linguistic holocaust." Raven traces it back to the '70s usage "Terminate with extreme prejudice," which of course was a line from "Apocalypse Now."
Kat Donohue takes on Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Shania Twain.
Portrait of a "fringe family" in difficult straits, from Rayne.
ExplodedLibrary.info reports on anti-linking policies at the L.A. Times.
Julie/Julia: "Something about the physicality of cooking, especially something complex and/or plain old hard to handle, is enormously sexy. Beef marrow bones are sexy. Chopping up a lobster is sexy. Making a three-layer cake is sexy."
Tips for writers from Gareth Branwyn. [link courtesy Boing Boing]
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Blog worthy
Steven Johnson's books -- "Interface Culture" and "Emergence" -- represent some of the most thoughtful and idea-laden writing on technoculture you'll find anywhere. Johnson, who was co-editor of the late lamented Feed as well, is now blogging away at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com.
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