Sunday, June 29, 2003

'An Oxford University professor has provoked outrage by rejecting an application from an Israeli PhD student purely because of his nationality' (from The Telegraph).
'Stock markets around the world are on course for their best quarter for nearly five years amid growing optimism about prospects for the global economy after the end of the war in Iraq' (from Financial Times).

North Korea has enough plutonium to make six to 10 nuclear weapons

'North Korea has enough plutonium to make six to 10 nuclear weapons and could test such a weapon by the end of the year, a former US negotiator with the Stalinist state said in an interview published today' (from news.com.au).

Monday, June 23, 2003

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, gets silly and vengeful; seems he's not a student of federal hacking law and the good reasons it was created: 'The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet... Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.... He [Hatch] said damaging someone's computer 'may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights'

' (from The Washington Post).

Friday, June 13, 2003

To call the USA Today Cover story about the 'real end of the war in Iraq' bad journalism would be to insult bad journalism; it is really an editorial, not an appropriate cover story. To expect a nation that has been ravaged by three major wars in the last 23 years to be subdued in a handful of weeks is so naive as to cross the line from wishful thinking and move firmly into lack of thinking. As you read, keep an eye out for how the journalists (Kelley, Strauss, Kasindorf and Valerie Alvord) betray their sources by revealing in the newspaper the worries Luis Sanchez was keeping from his fiancée, Keri Nettle, about his deployment, instead of telling her themselves when they interviewed her, or honoring his wishes to keep quiet (from USA Today).

Thursday, June 5, 2003

Vice Magazine brings us this article, which I excerpt here:
TERRORISM - Oh, and like a bomb is going to get you... We lost 80 times that many people [the number killed on Spetmber 11 by terroist attacks] to cigarettes and car accidents last year. All right, we should definitely fight to stop terrorism and it's really bad and everything, but as far as anything happening to you - fegeddaboudit. I call bullshit on terrorism [emphasis added].
An article that mentions Titan Key's intriguing anti-spam software that sounds like it can effectively stop automated messages from being sent to an address without stopping e-mail sent by human beings (from Wired).
Internet Battle Raises Questions About the First Amendment (from The New York Times).
The identity of Salam Pax, author of the Dear Raed blog, seems to have been partially revealed: journalist Peter Maass writes 'Salam Pax, the most famous and most mysterious blogger in the world, was my interpreter' (from slate.msn.com).

Wednesday, June 4, 2003

Tuesday, June 3, 2003