Monday, December 02, 2002

I just discovered Basketball Pipeline, and I mean to keep checking back. 11:02:49 PM    comment []

Online activism — a lot more than just petitions (AP). Includes comments from Howard Rheingold (still in conversation at The Well's Inkwell.vue.) 12:01:16 PM    comment []

You'll be seeing this one a lot, I suspect: Ex-Aide Insists White House Puts Politics Ahead of Policy (NYT) In an interview with Esquire magazine, Mr. DiIulio [who was appointed by President Bush to lead the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the second week of the new administration but quit six months later amid struggles with Congress and Christian conservatives over the direction of the president's plan to give more federal money to religious charities] said: There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis. . . . There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism, he says. What there is, he says, is on-the-fly policy-making by speechmaking. Mr. DiIulio, a Democrat, did not directly criticize Mr. Bush in the article. A White House spokeswoman said White House advisers had not seen the article and would not comment on it. 12:01:13 PM    comment []

Just caught up with a great post of Steve Johnson's from a bit back. The Two Threads is about the experience of participating in multi-threaded conversations, face-to-face and in a chatspace, while seated in a circle at Clay Shirky's. Informal presentations, conversation, pointers, asides, jokes. Good review of what it felt like, how f2f and virtual were different, what changed when the laptops closed. Nice. 11:01:08 AM    comment []

Bag and Baggage has notes on Mickey Kaus' talk at Revenge of the Blog. The question Is that enough to go with? is not an issue for the blogger. Half-finished ideas are sort of the point. Put the idea out there, let people tell you if it's good or not. 11:01:05 AM    comment []

U.S. Jewish group intercepts "electronic Jihad" call (Reuters) The militant Islamic group Hamas is urging followers to conduct a three-day "electronic Jihad" on Jewish Web sites, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said on Wednesday. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean at the Los Angeles- based Jewish organization, told Reuters that one of the centre's researchers had come across two Web sites in Arabic referring to a campaign of hacking into Jewish sites starting on November 29. Now, I got word of this from BNA News this morning. It's Monday. The Reuters story was Thursday, and attacks were supposed to begin Friday. The story was picked up (I Googled electronic Jihad) by ABS-CBN News, ZDNet (US, UK, AU), Hindustan Times, Yahoo, CNET, Free Republic, Nabou.com, News Cuts, as well as services in Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and more. It was Thanksgiving weekend in the United States, so maybe there's a reason nobody followed up on the story here, but what about the rest of the world? Where are the attacks? I don't see any mention of the attacks, or even of the warning, at http://www.wiesenthal.com/ . My Google results give no follow-up reporting of any sort, as best I can make out. Oh, there's also a National Review piece by James Robbins, The Jihad Online: Mouse clicking your way to martyrdom, from July. Maybe this isn't a new story, but recycled worry mongering? Ya think? I hate this kind of ''reporting.'' 11:01:02 AM    comment []

It's intellectual property piracy day at the New York Times: Arrests Illustrate a Growing Concern Over Bootlegged Recordings, by Lynette Holloway, is about Spin Music which if law enforcement authorities are right . . . was one of the biggest bootlegging operations on the East Coast, taking in $2.5 million a year in profit. A trial involving the store manager, Ralph J. Marino, 71, and his family will offer a glimpse into what prosecutors say is a major music piracy enterprise. In State Supreme Court in Hauppauge, N.Y., prosecutors will try to show how pirated CD's are made, distributed and sold. Holloway also notes, Music executives, seeking to explain a decline in CD sales, have often cited free digital downloads and Internet file sharing. But they are coming to believe that old-fashioned bootlegging is a huge problem, too, costing the industry tens of millions of dollars. The piece also talks about what happens on the streets, and how street-level vendors, since they do cash business, are targets to be taken down by competing IP piracy organizations or by plain ol' robbers. Then, there's Russia Battles Video Piracy; But the Pirates Shoot Back, by Sabrina Tavernise. Like the Spin Music piraqcy story, it describes what happens when real thugs are involved in a black market for intellectual property. Completing the trifecta, but appearing on the first business page, we find Black Market for Software Is Sidestepping Export Controls, by John Schwatrz. A black market has emerged for scientific and engineering software powerful enough to fall under United States export restrictions. Such software can be used in a wide range of tasks like designing rockets or nuclear reactors or predicting the path of a cloud of anthrax spores. Intellectual property isn't just Napster, and it isn't just copying Madonna's songs, one Justice Department official said, adding, It's the software that allows you to model the fuel flow in a fighter jet. Like the others, this piece talks about physical distribution of pirated intellectual property, though it also discusses virtual distribution. Unlike the other cases, it describes situations where business may have to be transacted virtually, with money changing hands at a distance. One might well wonder about the confluence of these stories. I do, anyway. 10:00:52 AM    comment []

Microsoft paper touts Unix in Hotmail's Win2k switch, by Thomas C Greene, The Register UK. Greene quotes copiously from the MSFT internal whitepaper, posted on the Web by Security Office, which says it discovered the item and numerous other confidential MS documents on a poorly protected server. The whitepaper is about switching Hotmail, which MS acquired in 1997, from front-end servers running FreeBSD and back-end database servers running Solaris to a whole farm running Win2K, and, according to Greene, reads like a veritable sales brochure for UNIX, but concludes that the company ought to set the right example by ensuring that each division should eat its own dogfood. Pretty damning comparisons that Greene cites. Have a look at the Register piece or read the whitepaper yourself. (The platform transition was blinked at X-Ray Net at the time.) 10:00:48 AM    comment []

Brook, Andrew and Ross, Don (eds.), Daniel Dennett Reviewed by: Dave Beisecker, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2:59:43 AM    comment []