Thursday, January 16, 2003

Uganda Telecom Offers 'Freenet', by Davis Weddi, New Vision (Kampala). freenet is a service that enables every uganda telecom landline to immediately access the internet without a registration or the payment of subscription fees, [Askan] Schmeisser [marketing and sales manager, Uganda Telecom] said. This means that every uganda telecom customer can immediately access the internet from his computer wherever. The customer does not have to contact anybody of any company in order to get the internet,Schmeisser added. He explained that freenet is free of registration, free of set-up costs, free of subscription fees and free of contacts. He said the service is as cheap as a local call and it is available 24-hours a day anywhere in Uganda. 11:35:03 PM    comment []

Steven Johnson's Use the blog, Luke: The collective future of blogs lies not in dethroning the New York Times -- but in becoming a force that can make sense of the Web's infinity of links. In Salon, last May. Bloggers needn't be anchored to the headline-news mentality. Think of them as less like a newspaper substitute and more a kind of guardian angel, hovering over your shoulder as you surf. 8:33:47 PM    comment []

In his Journal, Joe Conason asks the question that was on my lips this morning as I read about President Bush's statements condemning affirmative action as favoritism: The president opposes affirmative action. So how does he defend the institutional favoritism that got him into Yale? Conason includes this trenchant information: (According to Cecil Adams, who write The Straight Dope column, Bush's score was almost 200 points lower than the average for Yale freshmen circa 1970.) Bush's middling SAT score, incidentally, is roughly the same as that for most of the black students admitted to selective schools in a major Mellon Foundation study that began in 1976. 8:33:41 PM    comment []

Gizmodo reports: the Integra NAS-2.3 from Onkyo has an Ethernet port and an embedded 80GB hard drive so it can both stream music off of your PC, or act as a digital music server in its own right. It can support up to 12 simultaneous streams, so people in different parts of the house can listen to different songs stored on the same box. And for the geeks, it runs on Linux. Also see Onkyo Embeds Linux in Your Living Room, by Loyd Case, ExtremeTech. Check out the front view (larger) and back view (larger image). 4:33:07 PM    comment []

Over at the Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen weblog, discussion of a hypothetical cookbook book club. For my part, I would want to include Vladimir Estragon's fabulous Waiting for Desert (apparently out of print). 3:32:52 PM    comment []

Googling chicago movie is likely to get you Eszter's blog, it seems. 3:32:49 PM    comment []

American Civil Liberties Union Report: Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society, by Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt (23-page pdf -- wouldn't open for me in Opera; I had to use MSIE). 11:32:11 AM    comment []

Spammer Exposes Customer Data, by Beth Cox, Ecommerce News. A notorious spammer who pitches pirated software from Symantec's Norton product line over the Internet has left vast amounts of customer data exposed for the world to see. . . . A random sampling of customers whose data was exposed includes Nancy in Riverdale, N.J., Kristen in Vail, Colo., Darlene in Chugiak, Alaska and Elbert in Honolulu. Overseas customers included Michael in Tel-Aviv and John in Belfast, Ireland. The data was contained in text files, suitable for import into a database software program. And of course it's likely that all the e-mail addresses were harvested for future spam efforts. One customer, a woman in New Orleans contacted by a reporter, was startled to learn that her personal information was available on the Web. It's all a surprise to me, she said. The woman, who operates a hepatitis C awareness organization, confirmed that she had placed such an order and added I hope I get it. She seemed to have no idea that she had ordered pirated software. 9:31:56 AM    comment []

Michael Moore on the Daily Show [bOing bOing] 7:27:54 AM    comment []

Plastic's Second Birthday - Past Babyfood, Not Yet Housebroken. Plastic::Media::Plastic: As Plastic moves into its terrible twos, we take a minute to look back on its second year of life. [Plastic: Most Recent] 7:26:16 AM    comment []

Commentary and analysis from Dan Gillmor's eJournal: Supreme Court Endorses Copyright Theft. That's one way to look at the abysmal decision, announced this morning, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that... 7:25:33 AM    comment []

Court Deaf to Public-Domain Pleas. The Supreme Court's decisive ruling to uphold a law extending copyrights for 20 years will force public-domain advocates to compete ever more fiercely with the powerful entertainment lobby. Michael Grebb reports from Washington. [Wired News] 7:24:57 AM    comment []

Context clue from bOing bOing: New Harry Potter out in June, will enter public domain in mid/late 22nd Century 7:24:17 AM    comment []

Justin: so many of my smart friends don't play video games Why is that, he wonders. Maybe there's something about games that keeps these people from playing. Maybe I am wired differently - with a gamers' mind. I grew up with computers - maybe active gameplaying is generational. But still I have young friends who spend eight hours or more a day on their computers, and they don't play video games. These friends might be busy. But they make time for movies, television, or books. As long as they don't play games, they can't share with me a large part of my cultural experience. How are video games different from the rest of popular media? As long as so many of my smart friends don't play games, I will continue to suspect that as a gamer, I might most resemble a twenty year old boy shouting profanities at a monitor, competing for killcounts. (emph added) 5:31:12 AM    comment []

North Dakota Contemplates a Law Prohibiting the Use of Fake Degrees, by Dan Carnevale (CHE). The North Dakota Legislative Assembly is on track to pass a bill that would punish anyone trying to use a degree from a diploma mill as a legitimate credential. The Education Committee of the assembly's House of Representatives passed the bill, House Bill 1068, on Tuesday. The bill may be taken up by the full House later this week. Under the bill, anyone who uses a fake degree for employment, education, or other personal gain could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor. No specific punishment is laid out in the legislation, leaving the courts free to administer fines or jail time. The bill defines as a diploma mill any institution that is not accredited by an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, or by a foreign equivalent. 4:31:03 AM    comment []

A Sociologist Unravels the Ties Binding Organized Crime: The new study Crime & Social Organization shows that lawbreaking groups— whether Enron executives, Mafia dons, or FBI agents— share certain traits. Mob Rules, by David Taylor, in The Village Voice. 12:29:09 AM    comment []