Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. - A.J. Liebling
{ Daily Archives }
It is sickening, but American adults owe to it themselves to view the Daniel Pearl execution video to understand the evil with which we are at war. The New Republic correctly urges us not to succumb to a “generalized squeamishness about the reality of the universe that the video shows: about the facticity of evil. This fear must be fiercely resisted, if we are to have clarity about the struggle in which we now find ourselves.”
QuickTopic is an excellent, easy-to-use discussion system.
Good overview of Razor v2 anti-spam database, which is accessible through SpamAssassin.
Why I’m glad I’m not a lawyer: Yes, the shoe-bomber judge really believes that a plane is not a vehicle.
There are mysterious labyrinths under the streets of Moscow and reports of strange activities there.
The second unworkable anti-spam idea of the day. SSMTP would give additional trace information to make it easier to track down spammers, except that there is absolutely no adoption model in which it adds value. Early users of a product have to get value or you’ll never get to a large number of users.
4 years ago, Gilder predicted the role out of CDMA in China presaged the end of GSM. Shockingly (not), China Unicom’s network has not taken off: “How many in China will be willing to pay [US$300-400 for a handset], change their phone number and maybe not get as good network coverage?”
When will people learn that even dog standards like GSM are good enough? What matters is universal adoption, not minor (claimed) technical improvements from things like CDMA. If you’re not an order of magnitude better than the entrenched standard, don’t even bother.
Reverse filtering, i.e., only allowing email from someone who is in on your allowed list or who takes the extra step of replying to a confirmation, is not practical for almost anyone, since it eliminates spam by making email a less effective communications medium. Besides, if it were widely adopted, spammers would start implementing auto-confirmations.
William Safire in the NYT reveals that:
Worst of all, the N.S.A. will soon be revealed to be a huge vacuum cleaner aimed to listen to or look at key words but with no way to go through most of the millions of communications it does collect every day. Hold your hand as high as you can above your head to indicate how much data our present system collects. Then drop your hand to your knee — that’s how much gets translated into English. Then point at your ankle: that’s how much goes to our intelligence analysts at the C.I.A. in time to be useful. As far as F.B.I. counterintelligence in the U.S. is concerned, that’s in your little toe.
I’m glad he believes that an independent commission will be formed to evaluate the pre-9/11 intelligence failures, especially if it is focused on forward-looking changes rather than finger-pointing. As he says, “How do we use this hindsight to gain foresight? Neither by leak warfare among scared bureaucracies nor by their triumphant seizures of incoming hoodlums accused of ‘planning’ to build a panic bomb.”