"The biggest security concern of Americans today is not Iraq or Osama. It's the fear that America itself could be weakened by short-term, greedy decisions, taken by politicians squandering our hard-won surplus or corporate executives squandering our pensions and undermining our markets. And Americans are right to be concerned. Because without a strong America holding the world together, and doing the right thing more often than not, the world really would be a Hobbesian jungle."

Good op-ed by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.  He's wondering why the Democrats aren't offering us an alternative to the path set before us by Bush and friends.  Me too.

"Although some will accuse Mitnick of creating a handbook that teaches crooks how to break into organizations, the truth is that we all need to understand these con games to protect against them. To stress this point, his last two chapters contain policies, procedures, and training that companies can implement to further protect themselves. In keeping with his premise that the most damaging security penetrations are the result of deceit - not technical penetration - almost none of Mitnick's suggestions is technical in nature."

A good review by Simson Garfinkel of Kevin Mitnick's new book, "The Art of Deception".  Now I'm not big on the whole "Free Mitnick" schtick and hoo-ha - the kind of thing that leads to this sort of silliness.  Sure, his case was handled badly, but he is a crook.  However, his insights into social engineering are probably more useful than 90% of the computer security books on the market today, as he is an acknowledged master of the art.  I haven't seen the book yet, but its on my wish list.

"LawMeme has a two part article (more to come) on reading and interpreting Legalese for geeks, titled "Law School in a nutshell". Here is the Part 1 and part 2"

Good articles, and a good site that I wasn't aware of before thats now been added to my subscriptions.

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On Thursday Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Rep. John Doolittle (D-Calif.) introduced the Digital Media Consumers Rights Act to preserve specific fair-use rights to copy digital works as well as "circumvention" rights to bypass copy protections. With no chance of passage this year, the bill's introduction prepares the ground for battle in the next session of Congress.

Another bill introduced to give us digital consumers some rights and roll back a bit of the DMCA.

Federal regulations prohibit any broadcaster from owning more than eight radio stations in a single market. But here along California's southern border, industry giant Clear Channel Communications Inc. has figured out a way around the rules--and that has left its smaller competitors fuming.

More dirty tricks from Clear Channel. 

[via BlogCritics]