Sunday, August 25, 2002

I'm one of the people who asked David whether he was still alive and well. I was really glad to get his answer. 8:35:59 AM    comment []

Why It's Worth Taking the Heat, by Claudia H. Deutsch (NYT). Five questions for Debra L. Dunn, senior vice president for corporate affairs at the Hewlett-Packard Company and one of its delegates to the United Nations-sponsered Earth Summit conference, in Johannesburg. Q. Wouldn't it be easier to just avoid this event? A. Not if you take a long-term view of success. You can either hide from criticism or engage in dialogue that will move things forward. We can give specific examples of projects we've done in places like India and Senegal, in which we use communications technology to promote literacy and create jobs. And we can learn what other companies and governments have done. It makes no sense to keep relearning from scratch things that others learned before you. 8:35:58 AM    comment []

Y'know, I don't watch as much CNN as I used to do, so I haven't noticed this phenomenon myself. Here's a thought from queso: It seems to me that we're in for at least a month of "shocking" pieces by CNN about various and sundry things seen on the recently-discovered al Qaeda tapes. Why do I think that? Because almost all the stories state that there are 64 of the tapes, and so far, CNN is revealing about a tape or two a day to us. On Monday, we had the tape showing dogs dying by poison gas; on Tuesday, we learned about Osama bin Laden's declaration of war on the west. Yesterday was the day of urban terrorism training, and today's revelation is the instructional tape on the assembly of explosives (released late yesterday on their "War on Terrorism" pages, but now carrying the lead on the website). Sounds plausible. It's troubling that the flow of ''news'' should be predicatable in just that way. 8:16:06 AM    comment []

Hoover's F.B.I. and the Mafia: Case of Bad Bedfellows Grows, by Fox Butterfield, NYT. It was an extraordinary situation: The Federal Bureau of Investigation had evidence ahead of time that two well-known gangsters were planning a murder and that the head of the New England Mafia was involved. But when indictments in the case were handed down in 1967, the real killers — who also happened to be informers for the F.B.I. — were left alone. Four other men were tried, convicted and sentenced to death or life in prison for the murder, though they had had nothing to do with it. This is mind-blowing. What could more undermine confidence in federal law enforcement? 8:04:55 AM    comment []

Fascinating: Ray Ozzie had a lawyer at Groove, Jeff Seul, draft a weblog policy for employees. [Scripting News] 8:00:24 AM    comment []

Great point from New Architect: Wireless, Defenseless. To work, the public mobile Internet has to be open, letting people join and drop out at will. This means that public wireless communication will be vulnerable to sniffing, so there's no longer any excuse for failing to use end-to-end encryption for email, Web, and login protocols. [Tomalak's Realm] 7:55:52 AM    comment []

From Radio Free Blogistan: Dvorak Doesn't Get It. I remember when the Internet started being big news and a lot of the reports back from it discussed some cursory overview of an arbitrary aspect of the Internet as if this random facet was the whole thing. The old "blind men and the elephant" metaphor. This April PC Magazinine article from Dvorak, "Deconstructing the Blog is mildly amusing but neither succeeds as pure satire nor hits the nail on the head as legitimate criticism. A little of both, sure, but nothing a decent blogger couldn't have produced easily. What most surprised me was his attribution of longstanding jargon (such as "grrl") to the blogosphere. Had he never heard of riotgrrls? Similarly, he writes in his facetious list of advice, be sure to use: screed, grok, gonzo, meme, and other bloggerisms OK, now. "Screed" is a real word. He should look it up. "Grok" goes back to Heinlein and has been faux-hip ("hep") for years, decades. Gonzo is a '50s/'60s era play on "real gone," the title of a movie, piano genius James Carroll Booker III's nickname, and the sobriquet for a type of journalism practiced by folks like Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s and '70s. I believe there's a gonzo porn genre as well. Lastly, "meme" may be a popular concept in Blogistan but its hardly a bloggerism. I recommend that Dvorak read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and then get back to us. [Radio Free Blogistan] 7:54:19 AM    comment []

Is This One Nation, Under Blog? Weblog software use grows daily -- but bloggers abandon sites and launch new ones as frequently as J.Lo goes through boyfriends. Which makes taking an accurate blog count tricky. By Lia Steakley. [Wired News] That's true enough. There are a lot of abandoned sites, companion sites that aren't obvious companions, and so on. But what's the big deal about getting an ''accurate blog count,'' anyway? 7:51:19 AM    comment []