September 2001
Sunday, 30 September 2001
Net surveillance ‘fatally flawed’: “Those who want a nostalgic return to the era of phone-tapping are either na?ve, or impervious to reason. If you want to stop terrorist cells communicating via the internet, dismantle it. Encryption is irrelevant. ”
Archived Memepool Post: Sep 30, 2001
Some people are so obsessed with rock stars that they turn into dangerous stalkers. The rest of us can just look thorugh the collection of pictures taken by someone who already knows the rock star. Britneeeey! (Posted to Culture)
Saturday, 29 September 2001
Spaceguard UK opens observatory “We’re not looking at the ‘fingers on the button’ sort of readiness. We’re looking at having 30, 40 years of notice.”
U.N. Council OKs Terror Resolution: “The resolution deliberately does not include a definition of ‘terrorism’ because members have not been able to agree on one.”
Democracy held hostage: “In light of the complexity and likely duration of this conflict, it is essential for the Bush administration to build a deeply entrenched public consensus – and this can’t be done by lying, hiding information, short-circuiting civil liberties or any of the other old ‘national security’ techniques of suspending democracy. Consensus, instead, must come over time from thorough and open debates, as Feaver recognizes: ‘Many of these debates will be specious, but not all will be. Indeed, the Second Cold War may be harder to fight than the last one, leaving ample room for responsible disagreements among reasonable people. We will have to nurture those debates, learn from them, and forge the best possible policy in an extraordinarily difficult political climate.’”
Copy protection bill divides industry, Hollywood
Thursday, 27 September 2001
Special reports | How the plotters slipped US net: “The Washington Post and other US newspapers have also reported that bin Laden has access to satellites more powerful than the NSA’s, and uses a communications company controlled by a relative to overcome US monitoring. Neither the satellites nor the company exist.”
Dimitry Sklyarov: Enemy or friend?: “It’s ironic that a Russian had to come to the U.S. to be arrested for what are essentially thought-crimes”
The Register: “to detect 90 per cent of terrorists we’d need to raise an alarm for one in every three people passing through the airport. It’s absolutely inconceivable that any security system could be built around this kind of performance”
IP: Re: Internet Wiretapping (fwd): “When Bill asked what their intended use was, they told him they wanted to build an association matrix for every pair of citizens in the nation – where 0 would mean the two had no known contact with each other, 1 would mean that they DID have a known contact directly with each other, 2 would mean they had contact via a mutual friend, etc.”
Anti-Terrorism: “Does it bother you that 62 percent of Pakistanis, according to a Gallup Poll, oppose their dictator’s decision to support the United States in this conflict - or that only 9 percent of people surveyed by Gallup in 27 Muslim nations favor airstrikes against Afghanistan? Does it bother you that the Pakistani and Saudi regimes are keeping their collaboration with us as secret as possible in order to avoid angering their citizens? We’re not just ignoring democracy as a goal. We’re deliberately circumventing it. Is that OK with you?”
Atom Experiment Brings Teleportation a Step Closer: “It is the first result where two macroscopic material objects have been entangled”
Tuesday, 25 September 2001
Jessica Stern Testimony: “Preparing for a War on Terrorism”: “But force is not nearly enough. Our goal should be to drain the swamps where extremists thrive, and that implies a combination of measures: stopping the flow of money to these groups, intelligence cooperation, and military force. But most importantly, it implies understanding that failed and failing states are important sanctuaries as well as sources of recruits for extremist movements. When we talk about Pearl Harbor, we should also be thinking of a Marshall Plan.”
Also worth reading: Jessica Stern’s past publications
Notes for new students written by the late Professor Gwyn Alf Williams: “The most important job is to break down the barrier between the world of books and the world of real life as you know it. Most of us erect some kind of wall between the two. Young people sometimes swallow stuff from books, they would never accept for a moment from a living person.”
Monday, 24 September 2001
Hackers face life imprisonment under ‘Anti-Terrorism’ Act: “Computer intrusion would also become a predicate offense for the RICO statutes.”
Terrorists" trade in stolen identities: “At the time of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre, he says, it was easier to blame Osama bin Laden rather than examine who else was involved. What documentary evidence the security agencies found supported Yousef’s story that he had lived in Wales. Security agencies now face a monumental task in unravelling all the identities of the hijackers and suspects to discover how many are false jackals.”
Sunday, 23 September 2001
Media Fundamentalism: “The faceless coward who did the drive-by shooting of an Indian Sikh in Mesa, Arizona - because to him, a turban’s a turban - is also a terrorist, one of an equally uncivilized kind.”
Saturday, 22 September 2001
Research slaps crypto-banning Feds: “Having exhaustively examined two million images on eBay, not one was found to contain steganographic content”
Friday, 21 September 2001
Users rip MS license changes: “Microsoft is causing pain and resentment in their customer base. Their customers probably are going to have to upgrade–they don’t really have a choice. There has to be an alternative for customers to switch to, and there really isn’t.”
Archived Memepool Post: Sep 21, 2001
A common barrier to Western understanding of Islam has been language: unlike the many translations and revisions of the Bible, Islam suggests the Koran (or Quran) is only authentic in the original Arabic. However, translations are available. (Posted to Culture)
Wednesday, 19 September 2001
Java Man: “One way to explain the industrial revolution is as the inevitable consequence of a world where people suddenly preferred being jittery to being drunk.”
Lost Moon-landing tape found: “After landing, the flight controller had to decide whether to remain on the Moon or to leave after one minute.”
Tuesday, 18 September 2001
Why Japan’s Crash Won’t Happen Here: “The Japanese government has magically turned a big problem into a monumental one”
Pocket Monster: “Like most consumer success stories, i-mode is geared to the people who use it.”
The Big Terrible: “On Sunday I interviewed Jordan’s King Abdullah, one of America’s real friends. He had three wise messages: We can win if you Americans don’t forget who you are, if you don’t forget who your friends are and if we work together.”
Monday, 17 September 2001
Flash Worm Analysis: “a small worm that begins with a list including all likely vulnerable addresses, and that has initial knowledge of some vulnerable sites with high-bandwidth links, can infect almost all vulnerable servers on the Internet in less than thirty seconds”
Internet Surpasses Its Original Goal: “To judge by the availability of media sites, many of which were inaccessible in the hours just after the first plane hit the World Trade Center on Tuesday morning, one might assume the Internet had failed the test. But in fact, according to firms that analyze Web site traffic and performance, while some sites slowed, the overall flow of data across the Internet was not degraded by either damage to critical fiber optic lines or the clogging of those lines by Web users.”
Sunday, 16 September 2001
The bigger they come the harder they fall
Saturday, 15 September 2001
Black hole’s wild ride: “The rogue black hole is devouring a small companion star as the pair travel in an elliptical orbit that takes it from the outer reaches of our galaxy to its inner regions.”
Tuesday, 11 September 2001
The Seattle Times: Editorials & Opinion: America under attack: “The Statue of Liberty was still carrying a torch aloft as smoke engulfed Manhattan. Those who misunderstand us, who seek to destroy us, have not taken down the Statue of Liberty. What she represents has always been America’s best response to villainy and tyranny.”
Monday, 10 September 2001
Judge trumps bureaucrat over workplace surveillance: “Maybe his honor deserves a video camera in his office and courtroom so he can be observed on the job the way millions of us are, and confronted with its evidence during periodic ‘evaluations’.”
240 Minutes Of Lame: “Among the luminaries slated to sit in the audience were Sally Jessy Raphael and the cast of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ as well as William Shatner and ‘Baywatch’ star David Hasselhoff. (Jackson sat flanked by Elizabeth Taylor and Macaulay Culkin.)”
Sunday, 9 September 2001
Fischer Cited As Internet Chess Player
Saturday, 8 September 2001
The telecoms crash: “The financial follies of the dotcom era may have captured the public imagination but they are dwarfed by the losses being sustained by the global telecommunications industry. … A large telecoms operator has gone bust on average every six days for the past six months.”
Friday, 7 September 2001
New Copyright Bill Heading to DC: “Forgetting all the reasons why this is bad copyright policy and bad information policy, it’s terrible science policy”
AskTog: Good Lawyers, Bad Products - “in their fanatic pursuit of zero liability, they’ve set up the ideal conditions to actually kill people”
Still Crazy After All These Weeks: “Airline food sure is awful; psychiatrists can diagnose all human behavior as an insurance-billable disease.”
The Fatal Weakness of Libertarian Thinking: “Capitalism works well only in a carefully constructed cradle of law and regulation (Russia being one case in point). Greed is not good.”
Thursday, 6 September 2001
Security workers: Copyright law stifles: Count the number of incorrect and/or deliberately false statements (every one contradicted by historical fact) made by industry representatives.
Devon Island Experiment Unlocks Secrets of Living on Mars: “I had a complete misconception about the nature of time in a Mars station. Your time is always filled up. We had to actually make an effort to carve out communal, leisure time”
Archived Memepool Post: Sep 6, 2001
Wondering why we’re naming things after an ex president who isn’t even dead yet? Head on over to the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project to get the skinny on the man who “defeated communism”. (Posted to Politics)
Wednesday, 5 September 2001
Russia Warns Computer Experts on U.S. Travel