Blackmoor Vituperative

Shakira has released the English language, second volume of her Fijacion Oral (“Oral Fixation”) album. At the risk of appearing Anglocentric, I think this second volume is superior to the first. It’s an eclectic mix of rock and ballads. It doesn’t have the beat-heavy dance hits of some of her previous albums, and personally I would have liked to have had a couple of new songs to exercise to, but even so, it’s a really good album.

Check it out.

Earlier this year, I wrote about several major data breaches at ChoicePoint, then LexisNexis. Headlines screamed how thousands–and in the case of CardSystems, millions–of individuals had their names, social security numbers, and other personal information exposed to god-knows-who. These revelations came only because of a California law, SB 1386, which requires companies to inform California residents if any data breaches occur. The Senate is currently considering a national version of the California law, but a weaker House of Representatives bill is rapidly gaining influence in Congress. If the House bill passes and becomes law first, future data breach revelations will be silenced, and data thieves will be free to run amok.

(from CNet, Congress loves identity thieves)

In response to the illegal hacking of customers’ computers by Sony, Stewart Baker, recently appointed by President Bush as the Department Of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for policy, made a comment aimed directly at Sony and others who would illegally hack into their customers’ computers in the name of protecting their “intellectual property”:

In a remark clearly aimed directly at Sony and other labels, Stewart continued: “It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.”

(from The Washington Post, DHS Official Weighs In on Sony)

What I want to know is where are the criminal charges? Why aren’t these people being arrested? This was a premeditated, wide-scale hacking attempt on a huge number of computers — I want to see people put in handcuffs and taken away to pay for their crime. I want to see large men with shaved heads do to Sony executives what Sony has been attempting to do to us.

Sun Microsystems has Sun Java Studio Creator 2004Q2 (full license) and Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8 (full license) for free via download. This is probably a bit of counter-marketing spurred by the release of .NET 2.0 last Monday. However, Java at any price is a better deal than .Net. You literally could not pay me enough to work with .Net.

Education. In the long-run, it will determine the outcome of many political battles that are yet to come.

Right now, the civics education that is being presented in our public schools is aimed at convincing young minds that the Second Amendment is neither relevant nor applicable for today.

For example, We the People (a federally subsidized textbook that is being used throughout the country) chips away at our national sovereignty, praises our dependence upon the United Nations, downplays the Founders’ vision on the importance of federalism, and desecrates the Bill of Rights — both ignoring the Tenth Amendment and suggesting that our Second Amendment rights are no longer relevant.

Well, Gun Owners of America, Eagle Forum, and EdAction are hosting a congressional briefing to educate our elected officials on the importance of passing serious education reform.

One of the goals of this briefing is to push the Freedom in Education Act — draft legislation which, among other things, would return education to the localities by cutting off federal funding for all curricula, including the We the People textbook.

Federal funding, for too many years, has meant federal control. And federal control has resulted in the dumbing down of America’s school children, who have been led to believe that so-called “rights” as defined by the U.N. are more important than the rights listed in our own Constitution.

The Freedom in Education Act would provide a good, first step in the right direction. And it would do so without adding more federal control. Just the opposite… this bill removes federal control over an area that is vital to the preservation of our liberties.

“You’ll have people say, well this is not the proper role of the federal government, to insist that local jurisdictions show us whether or not children are learning. I reject that argument,” President Bush told the National Conference of State Legislatures in March 2001.

It has been said that the principles taught in the classroom in one generation will become public policy in the next. That’s why reforming education in this country is so important.

You can go to http://www.gunowners.org/fs0306.htm to read a more in-depth analysis of the problems in the We the People curriculum. And then, please take action.

Please ask your Representative and two Senators to attend the congressional briefing a week from today that is being sponsored by GOA, Eagle Forum, and EdAction.

You can visit the Gun Owners Legislative Action Center at http://www.gunowners.org/activism.htm to send your Representative and Senators a pre-written e-mail message.

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

(from On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study)

I suspected as much.

Yahoo has been complying with the Chinese government’s requests to help it censor and oppress its citizens for several years. In 2002, Yahoo voluntarily signed the “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry”, agreeing to abide by PRC censorship regulations. Searches deemed sensitive by the Chinese authorities, such as “Taiwan independence”, retrieve only a limited and approved set of results in the Chinese Yahoo search engine.

But the ante has gone up. Now Yahoo is helping the Chinese authorities actually imprison political dissidents — or even those who admit that such dissidents exist.

This journalist, Shi Tao, was sentenced in April to 10 years in prison for the horrible crime of passing on a memo via Yahoo Mail saying that the Chinese government was worried about unrest during the 2004 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. […]

I’m not sure what it will take to make companies rethink their “whatever the Chinese government wants, it gets” policies or to raise public consciousness enough to cause change — probably something on the level of a public execution followed by officials thanking the company that helped them nab the dissident.

You may also want to read the report from Reporters Without Borders.

What does this mean here in the USA? You may not think it means much. After all, even if companies like Yahoo are heartless mercenaries, our government would never ask companies to help spy on us, censor us, or oppress us. Right?

Susan and I are buying some property just outside Richmond, with the intention of building our dream house on it. If you have Google Earth installed, you can open this file and it will fly you to the location. If not, you will need to install Google Earth first (available at http://earth.google.com/).

We are currently considering a nifty name for our future castle and grounds. The name currently in the lead is “Mirkwood”, but we are open to suggestions.

Update: Alas, that property fell through. According to our soil scientists, the ground there is too wet to build on. I think the exact term they used was “marshland”. The search continues….

Here’s a galaxy that bears a strong resemblance to the evil spectre Timmy, from Mystery Science Theater 300 episode 416, Fire Maidens From Outer Space.

The “fertile constellation of Orion” better stay away from those “hot, young stars”… (buckawow-chicka-wowow).

I’ve been saying that things will get worse before they get better. They just got worse.

On Monday, October 31, alert users discovered that Sony BMG is using copy-protected CDs to surreptitiously install its digital rights management technology onto PCs. You don’t have to be ripping the CD, either–just playing it from your CD-ROM drive triggers the installation. The software installs itself as a root kit, which is a set of tools commonly used to make certain files and processes undetectable, and they’re the favored tool of crackers who are, as Wikipedia puts it, attempting to “maintain access to a system for malicious purposes.” In fact, root kits are often classified alongside Trojan horses. And Mark Russinovich, who created a root-kit detection utility and was one of the first to blog about the Sony intrusion, discovered another little gem when he tried to remove the DRM drivers. It broke his computer — disabling his CD drive.

(from CNet, DRM this, Sony!)

Folks, this is illegal (and I’m reporting it to the FBI). But will anyone at Sony be prosecuted for this crime? Don’t hold your breath.

Here’s a tip from me to Sony, RIAA, and the rest of the media robber barons: if you want to compete with services like AllOfMP3.com, do what they do, do it better, and do it cheaper. If you continue to pin your hopes on DRM, you will fail, you will be reviled, and your stockholders will suffer.