Well, this month has just flown by. Link-dumpy:

  • Jason Schultz (EFF) misquoted in recent LA Weekly article on RIAA raids
  • Visualizing Social Networks by Linton C. Freeman, UCI

    This paper documents the use of pictorial images in social network analysis. It shows that such images are critical both in helping investigators to understand network data and to communicate that understanding to others.

  • Locative Packets – debuting @ ETCON, coming up in… 3 weeks (!!!)

    The Locative Media Lab is co-sponsoring a Collaborative Mapping
    workshop

    at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology 2004 conference in San
    Diego, CA. We invite developers to join our experiment in collaborative
    geoannotation by connecting their applications to the workshop
    aggregation service.

    The workshop’s aggregator will offer a REST interface with a simple
    RDF/XML format for geoannotations, ‘locative packets’, with, we hope,
    the following aims:

    • A simple XML serialisation that different applications can produce and consume, without even having to be RDF-aware.
    • A shared ‘protocol’ which different applications can accept and send via HTTP POST, Jabber, …

    • Simple guidelines for RDF vocabularies to use in geoannotation.
  • Spamassassin Custom Rule Emporium! – although, why bother now that CRM 114 is now at 99.9%+ accuracy? (Postfix HOW-TO)
  • I’m an Expert – reaction to stupid alarmist CIO.com article on The Future of Security (is this where CIO’s get their harebrained ideas? I can imagine some PHB reading and nodding along to this article)
  • You mean stop the fraud – spam is fundamentally a fraud problem (although I suppose tweaking either the economics or the authentication model would be good fixes; post along those lines)
  • The Spammers’ Compendium

    Being a public exposition of tricks,
    secret ploys, ruses and techniques
    employed by those that send many
    scurrilous messages through the ether
    using the mysteries of electronics and
    other modern marvels to dazzle the eye,
    lighten the wallet and clog the recipient.

  • Clark’s True Colors – is this the alternative to Bush?

    Clark’s new book, Winning Modern Wars, is 200 pages long, all about the Iraq war. Yet there is only one instance in the entire book in which he gives a physical description of the death of a human being, that being a mention of some Marines in Nasiriyah who were found with bullet holes in their heads. Everywhere else, human beings are described as “targets” or “objectives” or even “high-value targets,” and their deaths are rendered with sports/ football metaphors (“going ‘downtown’ with air power,” “Red Zone” attacks, “the Big Win,” etc.) and bloodless euphemisms for words like “kill” or “assassination” (“destroy,” “decapitating strike”). Moreover, he never mentions civilian casualties without qualifying his statements–the “alleged mistakes of the bombing campaign,” the “hapless women and children reported to be victims of the bombing.”

    If this kind of talk sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Clark doesn’t hide it. “I’m a product of that military-industrial complex General Eisenhower warned you about,” he said with a smile a few weeks ago, during a speech at the UNH campus in Manchester. The general assumed–correctly–that the term no longer inspired revulsion in young audiences.

    He says it’s something else, but maybe this is what Clark means by the New American Patriotism. New faces, no memories. Fresh recruits to replace the defeatists. A new base for Big Win thinking.

    [this is disturbing]

  • Quarantining dissent: How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech – speaking of the dubya
  • And nailing his puppeteer Rove: The CIA Agent Flap: FBI Asks for Reporteres to Talk
  • State of the Union Scorecard – play along at home on Tuesday (or, if like me, you can’t stand the sound of dubya’s voice, read the transcript and play along on Wednesday)
  • The Doctor Is In – The Rolling Stone Interview with Howard Dean

    So you are just going to change the subject?

    Yeah. If we allow the Republicans to run the campaign based on divisive
    issues — like prayer in school, gay marriage and gun control — then
    we lose. The right wing will try to make a big issue of it, and they’ll
    get some votes from some people who would have voted for them anyway.

    Most people do not want to traffic in hate. And this election is going
    to be about whether we cater to the worst in us or cater to the best in
    us, and I intend to do the latter.

    A lot of people say that maybe we don’t have much economic
    pressure against the Saudis. They hold billions in U.S. Treasury notes.
    What if they responded by threatening to liquidate their investment in
    our government? Wouldn’t we be screwed?

    Balancing the budget would help that. I mean, this president has made
    us much weaker than we were when we got here: $500 billion deficits as
    far as the eye can see is a terribly weakening thing to the economy.
    Both the Chinese and the Saudis, and others, hold enormous amounts of
    T-bills. That’s a huge problem for us in an era with a declining dollar
    and a huge deficit. If most Americans understood what you just said,
    George Bush would be gone.

    See The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest:

    The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.

blogs: bIPlog – Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog, socialfiction.org – web/tech, Napsterization – P2P/social, Orcmid’s Lair – programming/tech