Wednesday, March 31, 2004

um, hahahahahahahahahahah Found at Starbucks: The Pentagon's Papers - - Center for American Progress
Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time
"I came to this company a couple of years ago, all eager to be a part of the "team", got a nice kick up from my last job and a cool office with a view of the river. Yeah, that was a good day, came into work with my picutres and shit, degrees, put them on the wall, called my secretary and....yup, she was hot. I was pumped." [...] I Need a New Fucking Job
coudal on kubrick
MacWarriors TrailBlazer [via /.]
"Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe." newsmap
This comes to you courtesy of a Slashdot troll. and one level up....
http://www.trishharvey.com/
Ken | Freeform radio for the chronically impatient. Avant-garde pop, poppy avant-garde, loud guitars, lots o' Japanese and 45's played slow. Playlists posted in real time on the web so you can play along at home or work. Wednesdays, 9am to Noon | On WFMU

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

WELL, DUH. Harvard: 'File sharing doesn't hurt music sales' "Two US universities have released research that flies in the face of music industry claims that file sharing hurts CD sales: it "is not so", they say. Professors Felix Oberholzer at Harvard University and Koleman Strumpf at the University of California got together to track music downloads across 17 weeks in 2002. They matched their data on file transfers with the actual market performance of the songs and albums being downloaded. They concluded that even large amounts of file-swapping had little effect on album sales: "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates ? moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file-sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales," they wrote. "While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing." [...] Macworld UK - Harvard: 'File sharing doesn't hurt music sales'
"It seems that lawyers are using jail-house email lists to send potential clients letters offering their services. One couple, on finding their son who'd been missing for two days, '...was astonished that deputies failed to call them when their son was arrested -- though contact and medical information was in the young man's wallet -- yet managed to inform people who wanted his business.'" From the venerable Slashdot. Of course, I am posting this in relation to the abuse of the Biometric Net. I dont have to spell it out do I?
My name is Elena, I run this site and I don't sell anything in here and to tell the true, I don't have anything to sell. What I do have is my bike and this absolute freedom to ride it wherever curiosity and speed demon take me to. This pages maintained by author and with internet traffic site may be down sometimes [...] We are going through passport control. One need to have permission to enter zone of exclusion. I have one of nuclear research center. [...] D-I-C-T-I-O-N-A-R-Y tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack tack
Black Cows Milk
Listen to the SOUND of these guitars!!!! http://www.stellaguitars.com/
The UKPS constantly seeks improvements to the security features of the British Passport That's OK as long as it relates only to tamper proofing the document. improvements ... in the issuing process. Improvements to the issuing process should relate only to the quality of the physical passport. The use of biometric information to link a person to a passport will enhance security. NO. This is a typical brain dead journalist line, without meaning or substance. HOW will "the biometric information to link a person to a passport" enhance security, and the security of WHAT exactly? You simply cannot make statements like that and be taken seriously by anyone with half a brain cell. Firstly, they allow for detection of counterfeit or manipulated documents Fine and secondly, confirm the identity of the individual. If the document is issued correctly, and is not tampered with, it must be assumed that the holder is the person named on the document, whether it has biometric information in it or not. If the document has been tampered with, then the holder might not be the person named in the passport. This is the only type of check that needs to be made. Biometrics are not needed to ensure that the holder of a passport is the named person in the passport. Certainly, there is no need for a central database of all biometrics (photograph, fingerprint, iris scan) to check the identity of each person every time a passport is used. A simple test to see if the passport has been tampered with is all that is required. This is how you do it.
  • Each passport or ID document contains a cryptographically signed digital portrait of the holder, signed by the passport issuing authority.
  • When your passport is swiped, your picture comes up on the screen, loaded from the passport, and NOT a central database
  • The digital signature of the passport photo is also downloaded.
  • A PGP-like signature check is done against the public key of the national passport issuing authority, which is stored on the keyring of the swiping device.
  • If the signature is good, the document is genuine. If the signature is bad, the document is a forgery. This system does several things.
  • It decentralizes the management of photo authentication.
  • It stops the inevitable abuses of centralized databases.
  • Each passport photo is digitally unique. This means that every time that you get your photo taken for your passport, it is a different cryptographically signed number that ends up in your passport. You will never have a unique identifier tied to your identity, even though its your face in every photograph.
  • Big brother gets a kick in the balls.
  • Passport/ID fraud is basically eliminated, except for the fake ones made to order at the request of MI6 and the like.
  • There is no need for the centralized database that they are planning; the means exist right now, with military grade crypto and digitally signed photographs that will create a rock solid, absolutely authenticatable, user friendly, non big brother solution to passport fraud, that protects documents and does not erase our rights as free people. The crypto to do this is in the public domain, and so zero cost license wise. My solution is cheaper than the centrally held database solution. I am a genius. Bow to me. Now of course, there is nothing to stop people from collecting these signature numbers, but if that is the only part of the passport that is readable, and this readable part does not contain your name or any other personally identifiable information, it will be harder for people to create a database connected to your biometric ID. If you are the nervous type you could change your id every month; in any case, I devised this ID scheme merely to demonstrate that there is no reason to create a centralized database from the outset. There are other, better ways to manage document authenticity. All someone has to do is simply THINK about the problem. Unfortunately, the people who are behind the deployment of this disaster are the companies that sell the systems that will be used to fleece the population for decades to come. Money is the true root cause for centralization, that and the lust for absolute control that slobbering pigs like David Blindkid and John Asscroft dreamed about.
    Privacy Villain of the Week: 'Registered Traveler' enablers The Transportation Security Administration announced last week that it will be initiating a pilot test program of its long-touted "trusted traveler,' now rechristened 'registered traveler' program. The program will be a 'voluntary' (at the outset, anyway) internal biometric passport system set up at airports around the country. http://cryptome.org/tsa031804.txt The idea is being sold to potential volunteers on the basis that turning over your iris-scan to the Department of Homeland Security will allow you to go through a less harassing experience at the airport. How effective this will be at lessening hassle is unclear, however. The majority of the hassle at the airports for travelers comes at the metal detector gauntlet where air travel consumers must remove coats, keys, often shoes, take their laptop from its case, etc. Yet a TSA spokesman told Wired News, "the card is not a 'get out of security checks' card, and that those who register will still have to go through metal detectors. The program may, however, create designated lanes to speed registered travelers past long lines." http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,62777,00.html Additionally, with the TSA insisting on pushing the CAPPS II passenger screening program, all of them will undergo a background check every time they buy an air ticket anyway. So the value of the background check a "trusted traveler" goes through is unclear. Even if he has already turned his iris over to Sec. Ridge, any future 'anomaly' in his credit or phone records could conceivably put him into the special scrutiny category that entails more invasive searches. On the other hand, if TSA is being disingenuous and those who get the cards will undergo very little scrutiny, the system would be ripe for abuse, particularly by anyone with connections on the inside. Given all this, it is unclear what the usefulness of the card will be, beyond establishing a biometric database for the federal government. The only practical effect would seem to be harassment of those who do not wish to be scanned and traced, since they will have to wait in longer lines to go through identical search procedures. With what little information that has been put out by TSA so far, the program seems to be little more than a backdoor to a national biometrically-enabled ID program. And the required privacy notices for the program have not been issued by TSA, which says they "may not" apply since the program is voluntary. The dearth of information leaves air travelers even more in the dark as to what may lie ahead. Government's one-size-fits-all programs typically degenerate into one-size-fits-none, and security is no different. There may be a place for similar programs in a free and private air travel and air security market. But TSA is determined that command-and-control supplant market processes. Anyone who volunteers to be guinea pigs for this odd privacy-destroying program should think twice. There is nothing to indicate that surrendering privacy will lead to anything resembling more security under such a program. TSA hopes to get 5,000 volunteers for the pilot program. Don't do it. We don't need 5,000 unwitting privacy villains cultivating this process which deserves to die on the vine. By James Plummer The Privacy Villain of the Week and Privacy Hero of the Month are projects of the National Consumer Coalition's Privacy Group. Privacy Villain audio features occasionally available from FCF News on Demand. For more information on the NCC Privacy Group, see www.nccprivacy.org or contact James Plummer at 202-467-5809 or via email. This release available online at http://www.nccprivacy.org/handv/040326villain.htm [...] "Enabler" also means anyone who signs up for this atrocity. If no one signs up for it, it will die on its feet. The same goes for all ID cards and Biometric Net measures.
    http://www.september11news.com/WorldPapersUK.htm
    http://community.middlebury.edu/~schar/sundial/patent.html
    Blood Klaaatu tu An early morning rasta sci-fi russo-pop triplet for you!
    Hmmmm what I meant was a Klatuu type robot, to whom all responsibility for enforcing the law was irrevocably given just like it is in the movie. "What movie?" I hear you cry. Use Google I reply.

    Monday, March 29, 2004

    Addendum: When you do anything needing authentication, you can be asked to authenticate yourself, either with your passport or your European standardised Biometric Net card. For example, when you go to any big hotel, reception will scan your passport upon registration. Since all of these scans and the associated collected data, like what you ate during your stay in the hotel, or where you rented your car or bought that SIM card (and thereafter, all the calls you made on that number) will be collected against your Biometric Net Data, and since all of these will be held in publicly owned databases which will be for sale, when you enter an airport in another country, they will be able to access all of this at the speed of Google. If you buy "a lot" of booze, they will know this. If you buy pr0n, they will know this. If you are a man that is married to a man, they will know this. The british government has already said that it will keep a record of every time the proposed ID card is used to form an audit trail. This too will be available to any government that wants it. Of course, all of this will be available to anyone with enough money to bribe someone to access to a terminal. Think about it. On a related note: I know someone who was trying to find out why his mobile phone could not call France. He called the operator, and asked if there was something wrong with his account (which is a pay as you go account). Here is how the conversation went. She asked for the number he was calling, and he gave it. She said that there was nothing wrong with the account. Frustrated, he told a fib to get her to look harder at the problem; he said, "it was working yesterday when I called the same number!" She replied, �What time did you make that call?" "11am-ish" came the reply. She said, "there is no record of you calling that number yesterday at that time sir". WTF?! This means that 02�s non-supervisor level operators have access to a list of numbers you have dialled when you use one of their pay-as-you-go cards! Think about THAT.
    That privacy international release made me sick to my stomach. Some interesting things will happen in the future if this comes to pass. First of all, the role of an Airport will change dramatically. I will explain how it could be. Lets say that you own a car. You are going on a round the world trip, and you leave your car parked somewhere in NYC, perfectly legally. Whilst you are gone, the parking conditions change, and you get a ticket. You are not around to pay it. The fine doubles every week that you don�t pay it. Eventually, an arrest warrant is issued for you because you have not paid this ticket. As a part of your worldwide trip, you enter Germany the day after your arrest warrant was issued. The magic starts to happen. Your passport is scanned, and "at the speed of Google", they search for your biometric information against the one billion entries in every country that uses biometrics for their criminal and passport records. You are flagged as having an arrest warrant issued for you in New York City. You are immediately arrested thanks to a reciprocal arrangement between the Bundesflic and New York�s Finest. Now, this sort of thing happens a lot at airports. They are not only places where people disembark from airplanes, they are also places where people are held for deportation when they are flagged up in the international "Biometric Net". Many tens of thousands are languishing in airports all over the globe, which is perfectly legal thanks to the new laws allowing indefinite detention pending fast track justice or extradition. Airports are prisons; they are nets used to catch people for the slightest infraction. You think that the squalor of the detention centres at Calais are horrible, imagine being held in limbo for years because you have forgotten to pay some swinging tax or were not in town to vote. This is precisely what will have to happen, otherwise, the recieving country will either have to let you in, a known criminal, or, they will have to immediately deport you, which will not always be possible. Airports will have to create massive holding facilities for the hundreds of people they will catch each day. Of course, the same will follow for everyone that enters an airport wishing to escape get away on vacation. In those places where you are manditorially swiped to exit the country, you face instant detention if they find that you are a transgressor. Certainly, no airline will risk taking you anywhere if the burden of shipping you back to your place of origin is placed on them, should any transgression be found on the Biometric Net. All of this will happen to you even if you have done nothing, because the system will be open to abuse and attack, not to mention that biometric techniques are imperfect and prone to misidentification. Of course, there is the issue of what different jurisdictions consider "nothing" to be. Not being vaccinated is certainly not "nothing" in some places. Having a blog where you rant might not be considered "nothing" in other places. Right now, saying that you want to sh00+ th3 pres|d3 /\/ + is enough to get Moulder & Scully to pay you a visit at home. Lets not even talk about file sharing. They will be able to find and correlate everything about you with the Biometric Net, and this should bother you. Even if biometrics were capable of delivering 100% reliability, and the operators of the backend systems were Klatuu type robots who were infallible, the idea that this Biometric Net is being created is fundamentally wrong. Human beings are not cattle to be numbered; and we all know what happened the last time people were numbered in this way. I for one have already pledged that I will not allow myself to be put in this database. I will not support any government that has a hand in creating this Biometric Net, and if you have any shred of decency left in you, you will also refuse to be herded in this appallingly dehumanizing project. Finally, it should be of great interest to the curious just who is going to profit from the billions of biometric data that are going to be harvested every year. Who is going to profit from the management of the information? Whoever they are, they have tentacles reaching into the highest levels of every government on earth; this is the only way that such a project could be engineered. Also, the way in which the American public has failed to understand that they will either have to be biometrically scanned by their own government or scanned in everyone elses government is very curious indeed. It is also most curious that they have not understood that fundamentally, once this project starts the data of Americans will be stored all over the world against their will, forever, in unaccountable databases run by non-Americans Just for the curious.

    PRIVACY INTERNATIONAL

    MEDIA RELEASE

    Files & Biometric Identifiers on More Than a Billion Passengers to be Computerised and Shared Globally by 2015 Civil rights groups warn of grave dangers in international biometric passport system. 29th March 2004 Embargo: 22.00 hrs GMT, 29th March 2004 A wide range of privacy, human rights & civil liberties organisations throughout the world have signed an open letter expressing grave concerns over a global biometric identity system being established on behalf of governments by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The letter, spearheaded by Privacy International and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) raises concerns about little-known plans to imminently create international standards that will require the use of biometrics and RFID (radio frequency) technology in all future passports. The measures, being decided this week at a meeting of the ICAO in Cairo, will esult in a distributed international identification database on all passport holders. The open letter has been signed by, among others, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Statewatch, the UK based Foundation for Information Policy Research, the Association for Progressive Communications and the US based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. The ICAO has agreed that the initial international biometric standard for passports will be facial mapping. Adequate memory space in newly issued passports will be reserved for additional biometrics such as fingerprinting at the discretion of every government. The EU is already calling for fingerprints to be included, along with an associated European register of all biometrics. National authorities will store and share these vast data reserves. The measures, supported by the US and the EU, will ultimately create an electronic ID system on hundreds of millions of travellers. Despite serious implications for privacy and personal security, the process is occurring without public engagement or debate. Rather than allowing this important issue to be decided by parliaments, governments have delegated the setting of standards to the ICAO, a UN-level organization that is responsible for the standardization of travel documents, passenger data systems and air travel requirements. The legislative drivers for the ICAO system are already in pace. The USA-PATRIOT Act, passed by the U.S. Congress after the events of September 2001 included the requirement that the President certify a biometric technology standard for use in identifying aliens seeking admission into the U.S., within two years. The schedule for its implementation was accelerated by another piece of legislation, the little known Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act 2002. Part of this second law included seeking international co-operation with this standard. The incentive to international co-operation was made clear: "By October 26, 2004, in order for a country to remain eligible for participation in the visa waiver program its government must certify that it has a program to issue to its nationals machine-readable passports that are tamper-resistant and which incorporate biometric and authentication identifiers that satisfy the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)." These laws gave momentum to the standards that were being considered at the ICAO by requiring visa waiver countries (which include many EU countries, Australia, Brunei, Iceland, Japan, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, and Slovenia) to implement biometrics into their Machine-Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs), i.e. passports. Based on projections from current passport and travel statistics, biometric details of more than a billion people will be electronically stored by 2015. Some of the countries sampled for this estimate are: United States 90 million United Kingdom 54 million Japan 64 million Canada 24 million Australia 13 million Russian Federation 50 million Ireland 4 million Taiwan 17 million China 60 million The Privacy International open letter warns: "We are increasingly concerned that the biometric travel document initiative is part and parcel of a larger surveillance infrastructure monitoring the movement of individuals globally that includes Passenger-Name Record transfers, API systems and the creation of an intergovernmental network of interoperable electronic data systems to facilitate access to each country's law enforcement and intelligence information." Privacy International has warned of "unprecedented" security threats that could arise from the plan because of potential access by terrorists and organised crime. Furthermore, the biometric standard being adopted is "fundamentally flawed" and will result in a substantial number of passengers being falsely identified as potential terrorists or wrongly accused of holding fraudulent passports. Dr Gus Hosein, Senior Fellow with Privacy International, warned: "This is a potentially perilous plan. The ICAO must go back to the drawing board or hold itself responsible for creating the first truly global biometric database". "Governments may claim that they are under an international obligation to create national databases of fingerprints and face scans but we will soon see nations with appalling human rights records generating massive databases, and then requiring our own fingerprints and face-scans as we travel." He continued: "In January 2004 when the U.S. began fingerprinting and face-scanning foreign visitors and storing this data for over fifty years under the US-VISIT program, many countries responded with alarm. With the biometric passport, however, every country may have its own surveillance system, accumulating fingerprints and face-scans and keeping them for as long as they wish with no regard to privacy or civil liberties." _______________ Notes to editors: The open letter is available at http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/terrorism/rpt/icaoletter.pdf and a background information package is available at http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/terrorism/rpt/icaobackground. html Contact Information: Simon Davies, Director Privacy International, +44 (0)7958 466 552 email simon@privacy.org Gus Hosein, Senior Fellow Privacy International, +44 (0)20 7955 6403 email gus@privacy.org Passport statistics and projections have been derived from the following sources: United States: http://travel.state.gov/passport_statistics.html United Kingdom: http://www.ukpa.gov.uk/images/UKPS_plans_03-08.pdf: Japan: http://www2.tjnet.co.jp/intl/news/000214-28/specialreport1.html#anchor67 2995 Canada: http://www.ppt.gc.ca/faq/index_e.asp#150 Australia: http://www.dfat.gov.au/dept/annual_reports/99_00/2/2/2.1.html Russian Federation: http://www.gks.ru/scripts/free/1c.exe?XXXX68F.4.1/010120R Ireland: http://www.politics.ie/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2757 Taiwan: http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:GSkSd0uIgOkJ:www.chinatopnews.com/Politics/ China http://www.chinaonline.com/industry/tourism - Privacy International (PI) www.privacyinternational.org is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations. PI is based in London, and has an office in Washington, D.C. Together with members in 40 countries, PI has conducted campaigns throughout the world on issues ranging from wiretapping and national security activities, to ID cards, video surveillance, data matching, police information systems, and medical privacy, and works with a wide range of parliamentary and inter-governmental organisations such as the European Parliament, the House of Lords and UNESCO.
    Congress Moves to Criminalize P2P By Xeni Jardin Wired News, Mar. 26, 2004 PT Congress appears to be preparing assaults against peer-to-peer technology on multiple fronts. A draft bill recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof. The bill, obtained Thursday by Wired News, also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing. In addition, on Thursday, Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) introduced a bill that would allow the Justice Department to pursue civil cases against file sharers, again making it easier for law enforcement to punish people trading copyright music over peer-to-peer networks. They dubbed the bill "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004," or the Pirate Act... All these efforts by Congress to impose severe penalties are misguided, said P2P United Executive Director Adam Eisgrau. "As the 40 percent increase in downloads over the last year makes alarmingly clear, like it or not file sharing is likely to (continue) on a massive scale no matter how many suits are brought and what the fine print of copyright or criminal law says," Eisgrau said. "Second, putting a tiny percentage of tens of millions of American file sharers behind bars or in the poorhouse won't put one new dime in the deserving pockets of artists and other copyright owners." http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62830,00.html Pathetic Impotent Republicans Actively Testing Everyonespatience Poor Ignorant Retards Attaching True Evil Pandemically Infected Rats Aspirating Tepid Ecoli I expect only THE BEST substitute acronyms from the BLOGDIAL intelligencia.
    http://www.mathcaddy.com/mp3/lessig/Chapter_4_Pirates.mp3 http://www.smellthecandy.com/files/lessig_chapter9.mp3 http://suwcharman.getfluent.co.uk/blog/ch_8_transformers.mp3
    Aisha Mohammed New mother Last month Aisha Mohammed, from north-west London, was in the hospital with a kidney problem, 16 days after the birth of her daughter Hauwa, when six police officers arrived at the door of her ward and handcuffed her. "I had just put my baby down in another ward and was going back to my own room to have a lie-down as I was feeling so bad," Ms Mohammed. "A nurse argued with them that I was ill and could not be discharged but they insisted I must go with them. The one female officer followed me into my room and I had to get changed in front of her. "I was in terrible pain but they took me to the police station, where they took my belongings and said they would throw me in a cell. I was really frightened." She did not understand why they had arrested her at first but it soon became clear it was over a dispute she had had with a neighbour some time ago, which had already been dismissed by a judge. "I was in the police station an hour and a half and when I got back to the hospital social services had taken my baby and I had to go and get her back. "I was crying all the time. I was worried about my baby, I was in pain and I didn't understand what was going on. Only one policeman said sorry. But they made me feel dirty, like a criminal, like a piece of shit. I think it was racist, because I am Muslim." [...] If that was your momz, what would you feel? http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1180063,00.html

    Sunday, March 28, 2004

    Couples will have rights to pensions similar to married couples, will not have to pay inheritance tax on property passed between them when one dies [...] The price for this is total submission to the state. A tad expensive. and will have access to hospital records similar to that allowed for a spouse. [...] You can make your hospital records available to whoever you want as long as you do it in writing, in advance. If you want everything to be done for you automatically and by the state, then you ask for what has just been given. If you want to be in control of your own life, you plan in advance, make provisions and keep the state out of your affairs. The distress caused by the lack of rights for gay couples was highlighted by Trevor Bentham, who lived for 22 years with the actor Sir Nigel Hawthorne. Bentham had to pay a six-figure tax bill on Sir Nigel's half-share of their home, a 15th-century manor house in Hertfordshire, when the Yes Minister actor died. [...] He would not have had to pay anything if the property was held by a holding company, shares in which were owned by the two parties. Couples who then want to split will have to go through a dissolution in the courts, similar to a divorce. If there are children, maintenace payments will have to agreed. [...] They are now sanctioned and controlled by what the courts want. Idiots!
    Binexx.com is an online betting exchange for binary bets. A binary bet is a unique way of trading the financial markets without exposing yourself to unlimited losses. A binary bet is a spread bet married to a fixed odds bet. It is called a "binary" bet because there are only two outcomes of the bet, either 0 or 100. The bet settles at 0 if the event does not occur and at 100 if the event does occur. binexx.com works like a stock exchange but caters for binary bets. It gives the user the opportunity to make their own market and offer it to other clients of the exchange. It is a marketplace where traders meet and trade the financial markets, whether it is stocks, indices or currencies. binexx.com gives you the opportunity to create your own prices and have them matched against buyers and sellers in the market. [...] http://binexx.com/
    Someone almost clever said: I am angry and depressed today. I've always been a patriotic American, I've always loved my country. Some of my earliest memories are of reading the Declaration of Independence and children's histories of the War for Independence. As part of that patriotism I've also tried, from a young age, not to blind myself to my country's failures to live up to its ideals: slavery, Jim Crow, internment of the Japanese, Joe McCarthy are all thing I've spent a lot of time abhorring -- my list of "never agains". Today is another day that history will see as a black mark on the conscience of America: Thomas Butler was sentenced to two years in prison today. Thomas Butler -- Doctor Thomas Butler -- was one of this country's foremost researchers into Yesina pestis, better known as the "Black Plague". When 30 vials of Black Plague went missing from his laboratory, Dr. Butler informed the FBI and cooperated with the investigation. When the FBI and prosecutors decided they needed a scapegoat -- possibly because the disappearance was widely publicized -- Dr. Butler was arrested. When Dr. Butler refused to lie by accepting a plea bargain, the prosecutor, apparently in order to force a plea bargain and save face, piled on 57 charges, most of them having nothing to do with the missing vials of Black Plague. The other charges involved Dr. Butler's compensation for work outside his university; the prosecutor alleged these contracts deprived the university of money, even though such contracts are commonplace at the university. In January, Dr. Butler was convinced. The jury acquitted Dr. Butler on the main charges of smuggling Black Plague. The charges for which he was convicted were incorrectly filling out a Federal Express form by characterizing plague samples as "laboratory materials" rather than "commercial merchandise", and charges related to the contracts. Incredibly, the jury convicted Dr. Butler on 44 of those charges, but found him not guilty on 10 others -- for precisely the same kind of contracts. Clearly, we have a case here where the jury was trying to split the difference. And again, no one has ever been prosecuted before for these very common contractual arrangements -- this is purely a case of the prosecutor piling on charges in order to get a conviction on something even if that conviction has nothing to do with the original grounds for the arrest. If you consider yourself a patriot -- if you plan to exercise your right to vote this November -- you owe it to yourself and you owe it to your country to read Dr. Thomas Lehman's account of Dr. Butler's trial and conviction. Dr. Lehman, a university scientist himself, is familiar with the contracts over which Dr. Butler was convicted -- and make sit clear what a horrifying farce this has been. And then you need to get angry. Angry that one of the best researchers into bio-terrorism will spend the next two years in prison -- and will be barred from research the rest of his life. Angry that that makes you not more safe, but far less safe, because Al Quida's researchers are not in jail. But more fundamentally, angry that the American "Justice" system is a farce that send innocent men to jail in order to save face for overzealous cops and prosecutors. http://slashdot.org/~orthogonal/journal/64822
    http://draves.org/bomb/
    Giant X-ray used in drugs search The x-ray machine shows up anything hidden under clothes A 7ft-tall X-ray machine was used for the first time by police who arrested 35 people during a raid on two pubs in north-west London. More than 400 officers took part in the operation to scan suspects for drugs and weapons in Harlesden High Street. Equipment was brought in on articulated lorries on Friday night, and suspects had the choice of being strip-searched or scanned. [...] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3573933.stm Hmmm invasive body search BEFORE arrest?! by all means, have these machines in the police station to search people AFTER they are arrested, but you CANNOT have mobile scanners in trucks mass x-raying people in a "drugs sweep"!

    Friday, March 26, 2004

    GADDAFI'S GEMS

    # If they come as warriors, we will fight them. If they come trading cheese, we will buy cheese. Gaddafi invites the Jews he expelled in 1971 to return to Libya and invest # We do not love conflicts. You love conflicts. You have bullfights. Capitalists have changed eggs and honey into shampoo. You use cocoa fat as cream for your hair. That is misuse of God's blessings. An eloquent speech against the West at a Cairo summit for African and European leaders in 1998 # American soldiers must be turned into lambs and eating them is tolerated. Response to the American bombing raid on Tripoli in April 1986 # If Abu Nidal is a terrorist, then so is George Washington. # If the United States wants seriously to eradicate terrorism, the first capital that should be pounded with cruise missiles is London. Gaddafi says Britain's asylum laws make it the shelter of terrorism From The Times
    Noam Chomsky's Vancouver speech is here.
    From: BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com Subject: Please Consider My Experience When Voting in 2004 Date: March 26, 2004 1:40:09 AM CST To: undisclosed-recipients:; Reply-To: BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com Resume of George W. Bush February 26, 2004, 05:15 PM Past Work Experience: I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I produced a Hollywood slasher B movie. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas; the company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock. I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money. With my father's help and name, I was elected Governor of Texas. Accomplishments as Governor: I changed pollution laws in favor of the power and oil companies and made Texas the most polluted state in the Union. I replaced Los Angeles with Houston as the most smog-ridden city in America. I cut taxes and bankrupted Texas government to the tune of billions in borrowed money. I set the record for the most executions by any Governor in American history. I became U.S. President after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes with the help of major Enron money and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court. Accomplishments as President: I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury. I entered my office with the strongest economy in U.S. history and have turned every single economic category downward -- all in less than two years. I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history. I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most resented country in the world, possibly the largest failure of diplomacy in World history. I am the first president in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record. I set the the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one year period. I am supporting development of a "Tactical Bunker Buster" nuke, a WMD. I am getting our troops killed, under the lie of Saddam's procurement of Yellow Cake Nuke WMD components, then blaming the lie on our British friends. I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. president. In my first year in office over 2-million Americans l Records and References: I have at least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine. My Texas driving record has been erased and is not available. I was AWOL from the National Guard. I refuse to take a drug test or even answer any questions about drug use. All records of my tenure as Governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed, and unavailable for public view. All records of SEC investigations into insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view. All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review. Please consider my experience when voting in 2004. Show you care about our country's future and forward this to every voter you know. Protest is patriotism.
    how many states was that meau2?
    Someone clever said: You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know, that US govt would never give away one of their citizens to another countries authorities....

    That's because we don't need to. The U.S. is perfectly capable of

    When I was a kid, I used to mock my leftist acquaintances (hi Anne!) for their devotion to the Soviet Union despite the Soviet Union's abysmal record on human rights and liberties as detailed, among many other places, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago [britannica.com]. While I also derided Joe McCarthy and his ilk, little did I guess that a Republican administration would start off the twenty-first century with a scramble to enact laws as threatening to liberty as the Soviets'.

    Under current American law, you can actually get ten years in Federal prison -- for editing a book written in country under U.S. embargo. [hartfordadvocate.com] That's right: editing a book written by a Iranian or a Cuba or a Syrian or a North Korean -- or even adding illustrations to such a book -- is now a criminal offense in this the "land of the free and home of the brave".

    And to and insult to injury, the same administration that is trampling our traditional liberties

    How about protecting the Bill of Rights and the Twin Towers first, and worry about denying gays their pursuit of happiness as part of a cheap political appeal to your Fundamentalist base after you've explained where those WMDs got to?

    Oh, I nearly forgot: on Wednesday, President Bush used the occasion of a media dinner to joke about not finding the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that were his excuse for going to war. [washingtontimes.com]

    Mr. President, there are more than 500 young American service men and servicewomen who fought and died in Iraq who won't ever be able to laugh at any jokes again. They went to Iraq because they believed your word about the WMDs, Mr. President. And to you safely back in Washington, it's all a joke, Mr. President.

    This administration may be laughable, but it's not funny anymore. http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=101798&cid=8678028

    The Maximum Leader!

    On Libya-IRA solidarity [Having supplied assault rifles and Semtex explosive to the IRA in the 80s, Gadafy was was asked if he had increased IRA aid because Britain helped the 1986 US air raids on Libya]: Yes, of course ... The Americans are acting with the mentality of cowboys and a civilised country like Britain should not be in the same policy with the Americans. But Thatcher played with the cowboys and therefore it did a lot of harm to Britain. Yes, she is a cowgirl. � Observer, 1987 On Libya-IRA non-solidarity This act [the bombing of Manchester] should not be supported. Should it be confirmed that the IRA was behind the bombing, it would mean that the IRA deviated a great deal from liberating Ireland. � Libyan state news agency Jana, June 1996 On getting fed up with a nuclear programme We got rid of it. It was a waste of time. It cost too much money. � Speech to a Libyan audience and a visiting US congressional delegation, Jan 2004 On controlling WMD Using double standards will create unpredictable upheavals beyond control. � The Libyan leader's website algathafi.org On New Year's The people of the Earth, and even the angels of heaven have despaired of the meaningless exchange over hundreds of years of the greeting, Happy New Year! Every ruler repeats this greeting, and yet goes on striving to make the year one of misfortune, rather than happiness. � New Year Message to World Rulers, 1975 On bad luck No one has imposed sanctions on us or punished us. We have punished ourselves. [The unfortunate paradox of Libya's previous policies was] all these things were done for the sake of others. � Speech to a Libyan audience and a visiting US congressional delegation, Jan 2004
    Clotho by Hilary Thomas, Clarksville Middle School Cite, rate, or print article Send comment Used sources Clotho, a goddess from Greek mythology, is the youngest of the three Fates, but one of the oldest goddesses in Greek mythology. She is a daughter of Zeus and Themis. Each fate has a certain job, whether it be measuring thread, spinning it on a spinning wheel, or cutting the thread at the right length. Clotho is the spinner, and she spins the thread of human life with her distaff. The length of the string will determine how long a certain person's life will be. She is also known to be the daughter of Night, to indicate the darkness and obscurity of human destiny. No one knows for sure how much power Clotho and her sisters have, however, they often disobey the ruler, Zeus, and other gods. For some reason, the gods seem to obey them, whether because the fates do possess greater power, or as some sources suggest, their existence is part of the order of the Universe, and this the gods cannot disturb. http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/europe/greek/articles.html?/articles/c/clotho.html
    March 26, 2004 True fiction Welcome to Planet Gaddafi By Hugo Rifkind In 1976, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi published his Green Book, a collection of his thoughts on the world. Our correspondent sees it updated in 2004 ON HIGH STREET PIZZA CHAINS Some things remain inescapable truths. The sun shall rise and set, the tides shall flow, the cockerel shall wake with the dawn, and the pizza served in high-street pizzeria chains shall continue to get smaller and smaller. Truly, it is a metaphor for the declining human soul. Yet where does this pizza go? Where are these mozzarella fields, these mountains of anchovy? Is it not obvious that we pizza-eaters are the victims of an international US-backed Zionist conspiracy? Just as the Jew has chipped away at the West Bank and Gaza, so he has also diminished the outer-rim of the pizza pie. Except for the ones with ham in, of which he is not fond. ON SPACE TRAVEL TO MARS What can we bring to Mars? Are there not already trees on Mars? Are there not lakes, rivers, seas and fish? Are there not fields on Mars, of crops and livestock? Are there not oil wells, hypermarkets, satellite TV stations, saunas, boxing rings, museums, whelks? Are there not? No? Well. I must be thinking of somewhere else, then. From The Times
    Shit! Chomsky has blog; plain text of course and perfect: Voting 2004 We have several choices to make. The first is whether we want to pay attention to the real world, or prefer to keep to abstract discussions suitable to some seminar. Suppose we adopt the first alternative. Then there is another choice: electing Bush or seeking to prevent his election. Naturally, Bush has an overwhelming funding advantage, thanks to the extraordinary gifts he lavishes on the super-rich and the corporate sector generally and his stellar record in demolishing the progressive legislation that has resulted from intense popular struggle over many years. Since US elections are pretty much bought, he will therefore win, unless there is a very powerful popular mobilization to overcome these enormous and usually decisive advantages. That leaves us with a choice: help elect Bush, or do something to try to prevent it. It's a matter of judgment, of course, but mine is that those who favor electing Bush are making a very serious error. [...] http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/

    Oregon county bans all marriages

    Confused by the twists and turns of the US gay marriage issue, Oregon's Benton County has decided to err on the side of caution and ban all weddings. Until the state decides who can and cannot wed, officials in the county have said no-one can marry - even heterosexual couples. They hit upon the plan to ensure that none of the county's 79,000 residents are subject to unfair treatment. Gay marriage has proved controversial, deeply dividing US public opinion. [...] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3564893.stm Thats one way of doing it! Marriage should have nothing to do with the state. "Gay Marriage" was completely extralegal, and now, they are begging to bring their relationships under control of the law. They are TOTALY insane. If they want to have a commitment to each other, in terms of property, they can form corporations and then sign all of thier property over to that entity. When the couple dissolves, you dissolve the corporation, and split the assets. Bringing the state into your life, deliberately, is probably the most stupid thing you can do, because you allow someone elses morality and ideas control you, instead of your own sense of decency and fairness being your guide. The state cannot confer legitimacy to anything, and if you believe that it does, then you dont really believe in yourself, and shouldnt be married at all. Gay parents who make children can name their children anything they want, so there is no problem about whose name children will bear, also, the idea of a child being "illigitimate" is out of the window in society and the law, so that is not a problem. Custody of children is sufficiently catered for by current law, especially if one of the parents is the biological father or mother. Adoption is another thing; some jurisdictions do not allow Gay couples to adopt. Take the state to court, by all means to fix that, but this has nothing to do with marriage. Keep the state O.U.T. of your business, and you can live by your own rules with the tools and structures that already exist to bind people together contractually. Bring the state in, and you chain yourself, and your decendents to the whim of legislators and the thick-as-shit electorate, who elect film actors to rule over you.
    The US has vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the assination of the spiritual leader of Palestinian militant group Hamas. [...] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3568349.stm Business as usual!

    Thursday, March 25, 2004

    If the deadline is not extended, the letter says, the U.S. economy could "suffer gravely" if travelers "vote with their feet" and go elsewhere. [...] CNN
    Those two photographs have alot in common. One factor is that both the leaders on the right have had their children murdered by the United States Government.
    I see the tower like a small vertical town for about seven thousand people to work in and enjoy, and for hundreds of thousands more to visit. This is why we have included shops, museums, offices, restaurants and residential spaces. The shape of the tower is generous at the bottom without arrogantly touching the ground, and narrow at the top, disappearing in the air like a 16th century pinnacle or the mast top of a very tall ship. I don�t believe it is possible to build a tall building in London by extruding the same shape from bottom to top. It would be too small at the bottom and too big at the top. Likewise, symbols are dangerous. Often tall buildings are aggressive and arrogant symbols of power and ego, selfish and hermetic. The tower is designed to be a sharp and light presence in the London skyline. Architecture is about telling stories and expressing visions, and memory is part of it. Our memory is permeated by history. This is my vision

    Wednesday, March 24, 2004

    And this is for you, Alison. Aw heck, this is for everyone! This is not my garden, but it inspires me so. A perfect solution for the nobly ground that doesn't welcome grass! I love how the crocus burst forth, all smiles. One day, its just tender green leaves, the next, trumpeting aubergine and sassy saffron. Ssssppppprrrrinnnngggggg!

    Tuesday, March 23, 2004

    WOW. Yahoo! News - Jackson Wanted to Play Car in a Movie
    clutch your piz-illow tight.
    Some DJ has mixed metallica with jay-z
    JESUS.
    Hmmm Timesonline has gone "free" registration. There is already a user called "motherfucker". Bah!

    A threat to liberty or a threat to terrorists?

    by Danny Lee The Times, 23/3/04 THE introduction of identity cards to help the fight against terrorism is moving up the Government's agenda after the Madrid bombings and with anxiety rising in the approach to this summer's European elections. "I sincerely hope that the Government will not proceed to a full identity-card system," Roger Smith, director of Justice, told an audience of politicians and lawyers in a debate on identity cards, crime, terrorism and civil liberties at the Law Society yesterday. "The current technology is flawed; the benefits speculative; practical hurdles huge; cost high; and the culture of English-speaking, common-law countries uniformly hostile to such an imposition on the privacy of citizens..." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,200-1044779,00.html
    "They kill our leaders, it is a war against Islam. There is war in Iraq and Palestine. I say to the Muslim nation they have to wake up from their sleep and they have to shake the ground of these Zionists and Americans who stand behind them," he said. "Yassin is a man in a nation, and a nation in a man. And the retaliation of this nation will be of the size of this man." [...] In other words, small, withered, old and parapalegic. File this tough talk under: "The Mother of all Battles" "We killed them, we made them drink poison and taught them a lesson that history will never forget." "My life is for Taliban" etc etc. http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1175879,00.html

    Government will track ID card use

    Alan Travis, home affairs editor Tuesday March 23, 2004 The Guardian The pattern of everyday use we make of our identity cards, known as the audit trail, will be logged and kept on a central computer to allow abuses to be investigated once the scheme is introduced, a senior Home Office official indicated yesterday. Stephen Harrison, the head of the Home Office's identity card policy unit, said yesterday there were also plans to introduce mobile electronic fingerprint and eyescan units to allow elderly and infirm people in rural areas to register for identity cards without travelling long distances [...] http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,1175638,00.html No one will be able to claim that they were not warned. And of course, those mobile scanners will be used by the Police, just as I said in an earler post.
    this was on mefi, but it's worth a repost. awesome. Waxy.org: Daily Log: InfocomBot for AOL Instant Messenger

    Monday, March 22, 2004

    hi, you made one good movie and your music sucks. that's no call to be pompous, attention-grabber. vincent gallo interview [via newstoday]
    You'll never get to Heaven if you're scared of getting high

    Just why is my bank putting its spoke in?

    James Erlichman is in a rage after being told by Lloyds TSB to prove his identity or have both his accounts frozen Saturday March 20, 2004 The Guardian I admit it. I am a convicted criminal. Indeed I have been twice convicted for the same crime. Maybe, that's why Lloyds TSB bank thinks I may be an international terrorist involved in money laundering and has now threatened to freeze both my deposit and current account. The bank has just sent me a letter warning that I must report to the nearest branch by March 22 2004 armed with my passport or similar identification. Otherwise, my fate is dire: "If you have not responded by then, we may have no choice but to stop you drawing money from your ac count." Excuse me, can a bank threaten to freeze anybody's bank account, just like that? Let me confess to my criminal convictions. Twice, in 25 years, the police have caught me driving through red lights in London - on a bicycle, yes a push bike. Guilty, your honour. First offence trying to get home to cook dinner. Second, trying to arrive at the BBC to broadcast on time for a morning programme. Not exactly evidence of international terrorism. Otherwise, my criminal record is blank. So why did Lloyds TSB make this demand? Allegedly, it has to with "an industry-wide initiative supported by the government and our regulators the Financial Services Authority" to defeat international terrorism and international money laundering. Two prime questions arise. Who else has been fingered besides me, and why? To start at the beginning, Lloyds TSB had actually sent me a similar demand a few weeks prior - warning that I must comply, but making no threat to freeze my account if I didn't. However, I was still annoyed enough to ring the bank to inquire and to complain. You will know the story: After numerous number-choices punched into the phone and 15 minutes later, I was put through to a human being - in the UK, I think. Nice woman. She listened to my story, reassured me that this was not a government requirement, just an "initiative" and suggested that I just drop the demand in the bin, which I did. You can imagine my fury when I got the reminder letter threatening to freeze my account by March 22. So I marched down to my local branch in North London, waited in a queue for 30 minutes, before finally engaging with a member of staff. She was less than pleasant. She invoked "government regulations on terrorism" and I volleyed with "I will not be bullied by my bank". The queue behind me erupted into applause and cheers of support on my behalf, which resulted in my being escorted into the manager's office. Don't blame him, he was from another branch, but yes, he did know about the demands for customer identification. I put to him what I thought was a salient fact: Some money in my account had come from America in US dollars. The reason was my Dad had died and had left me some money, all of which was above board. His financial life was modest and his will was cleared and signed off by the US Internal Revenue after 9-11 so money laundering was not an issue. "I am both a British and US citizen," I told the manager, "but did the dollar origins of the money instigate this inquiry?" No, he replied, the demand was random upon any British citizen with a bank account. So, I asked: "Do you expect an old lady with arthritis to hobble to her bank, stand in a queue for 30 minutes to confirm her identify at random - clutching her passport if she has one - just to insure her life savings are not frozen and kept from her?" He was silent and it would have been too unkind to press him to answer. So I left it there to pursue these crucial issues with the bosses at Lloyds TSB and with the Financial Standards Authority. These are the responses: The FSA said: "We do have tough rules against money laundering which all UK banks must adhere to. However, we encourage them to take a common sense approach. We certainly do not require them to reconfirm the identify of every customer." Over to Lloyds TSB. But their answer was unclear - a classic obfuscation. "This is an industry-wide initiative to fight crime and terrorism. It involves the government, law enforcement agencies and financial services organisations. It is not our intention to cause people concern. We would like to reassure anybody that has been asked to supply ID that it is a formality and does not mean that we suspect them of criminal activity." All this still did not reveal the legal requirements of bank customers to give their banks proof of identity. No laws are cited, just "initiatives", whatever they are. Nor can I tell you how many other British citizens are being harassed in a similar and "random" way. For my money, the FSA should have been clearer in its instructions to the banks in the ways they should co-operate against money laundering. Lloyds TSB, in its turn, should now learn how to treat customers with courtesy - if it wishes to keep them. An astonishing article from The Guardian Our bank has recently brought in a rule saying that you need to show ID to withdraw money from your account. They say that there has been an increased level of fraud, and that showing ID will help reduce it. If the amount is over �1000 you have to show two forms of ID. Obviously thinking that two forms of ID are "more powerful" than one is completely absurd. If you show ID like a passport, it should be good enough for one pound or 1000. Its clear that they do not understand how ID works. Having said this, this is a private entitity that is trying to stop a very specific problem. They are asking us to do this to protect our money, and so it is a reasonable request. They should however, ask you to bring in your switch card and swipe it in front of the teller and then put in your pin; if its good enough for a cash machine it should be good enough for a live human transaction. But this is not what I want to talk about. The above story from The Guardian is an example of a completely unreasonable request, that should ideally trigger the following response: The author should have gone to another bank, described what happened to him, and opened a new account. He should have immediately transfered all of his money to this new account, and then he should have written a letter to his old bank saying precisely why he moved his money. They would then be free to freeze his account. In Hell. Part of "The British Disease" is the reaction that he displayed in his branch of Lloyds TSB, as was the reaction of the people in the queue - sheep like applause. Complaining to the authorities is almost a british passtime, like complaining about the weather. Both are pointless; and if this man thinks that by writing an article in The Guardian he is going to change the policy of Lloyds he is insane. The banks are in the business of Money. Removing your money from your bank is like denying Dracula access to blood. Anyone who gets one of these letters should instantly move their money out of their Lloyds TSB account; I guarantee you that after the 100th account closure these letters would not only be stopped, but Lloyds would send out letters countermanding the order and apologising to stop the hemmoraging. By keeping his account open and merely complaining to a powerless functionary the author is sending the wrong signal; he is saying, "I will make noise, but you are the boss and you will get what you want, no matter how unreasonable", which is totally incorrect. The author is the client, who is paying for a service. Anyone can open a bank account anywhere in the world; you can order a form online that will be sent to you. No one needs to put up with this hysterical nonsense, randomly sweeping accounts is a violation, the threat to freeze an account is commercial suicide - or it shold be, "The British Disease" being the only thing stopping reality from slapping Lloyds TSB in the face. If you think that this sort of thing is an isolated incedent that will go away you are wrong. This is just the begininng. Many serivces are going to start to ask you to identify yourself, for no good reason, just as they do in France when you want to buy a SIM card. The only way that this will be stopped is if the consumers refuse to hand over their money AND their ID. The rule should be "dont ask for ID and you can have my money, or ask for my ID and you dont get my money". This is the ultimate sanction that everyone has, and perhaps, when people start to feel the power that non compliance confers to the consumer, they will make make the leap and understand that they dont have to put up with any service they dont like, no matter who provides it, when they refuse to pay.

    Counter-terrorism Security blankets

    Leader Monday March 22, 2004 The Guardian The horror of the Madrid bombing earlier this month brought into sharp focus Britain's domestic defenses against terrorism. For too long there had been an airy assumption that because Britain's security services had been practiced in fighting domestic terrorism, this country was more secure. Yet the magnitude of the Madrid bombings was far larger than anything experienced here in recent years - the tragic events at Atocha station could easily be repeated at Paddington, King's Cross or Waterloo... The greatest danger in Britain is that policymakers and politicians will grasp for easy answers - and the easiest and most obvious of all is the imposition of identity cards. Home secretary David Blunkett is due to publish a draft bill on identity cards, and the concern is that the events of Madrid could be used as an argument to include emergency powers for the government to introduce a compulsory card scheme. This would be a case of using the wrong reason to introduce a bad policy. The fact that Spain has compulsory national identity cards made no difference on March 11. [...] http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1175003,00.html

    Sunday, March 21, 2004

    A lesbian university student who auctioned her virginity on the internet to pay for her studies is reported to have had sex with the highest bidder. [...] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/3554121.stm

    Saturday, March 20, 2004

    4 Inbound Blogs, 4 Inbound Links to BLOGDIAL : We are the best Blog last updated 1 hour 3 minutes ago. Query took 0.347 seconds Ranked by freshness | Rank by Blog authority | Force Keyword Search Results page: 1 erciubeo 0 inbound blogs, 0 inbound links Last spidered 79 days 8 hours 8 minutes ago The 10 most recently published blogs: 11:55 AM hey there 11:54 AM T h e B R I E F I N G A Fight to The Finish the bloggy Blogdien BLOGDIAL Tomfoolery of the Highest... stop breathing...3...2...... ::: In LOVE in WI ::: From Safety to Where...? [IMG ] [IMG blogs of note] Feel like browsing? Here are some blogs we've noticed (Link created 79 days 8 hours 8 minutes ago) (Cosmos) mrmule.com 0 inbound blogs, 0 inbound links Last spidered 100 days 16 hours 36 minutes ago ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Subject: your blog we like it! http://www.irdial.com/blogger.html ./laterz ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ thats why! (Link created 103 days 2 hours ago) (Cosmos) mrmule blog 1 inbound blog, 1 inbound link Last spidered 101 days 18 hours 16 minutes ago ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Subject: your blog we like it! http://www.irdial.com/blogger.html ./laterz ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ thats why! (Link created 115 days 5 hours 52 minutes ago) (Cosmos) username=username password=password 0 inbound blogs, 0 inbound links Last spidered 211 days 24 minutes ago blogdial (Link created 211 days 5 hours 32 minutes ago) (Cosmos) Taken from: Technorati: Web Services for bloggers.

    Friday, March 19, 2004

    Guardian Unlimited Film | Front | Passion players
    NEW FACE IN HELL Wireless enthusiast intercepts government secret radio band and uncovers secrets and scandals of deceitful type proportions. [...] That is a lyric by Mark E. Smith! According to a comment forking from this cool blog. Mark E. Smith...Totally Wired!
    Kempa.com: Vinyl Data

    Wednesday, March 17, 2004

    i'd still like to ask them why they stopped making good music.
    May I See Your ID? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF The New York Times, March 17, 2004 Someday we'll look back with shame at the infringements of civil liberties in the last few years. There's been a broad pattern of injustice to individuals (mostly Muslims) in the name of protecting security for the rest of us. Think of the detention of more than 1,200 Muslim immigrants in the U.S., the jailing of children in an extralegal zone in Guant?namo, and the unending imprisonment, without access to lawyers, of "enemy combatants," even when they are American citizens. But that ground has been well poked over. For me, the tougher question is whether there are some areas where we should be more aggressive about sacrificing our liberties. In fact, I think there are two where we could significantly increase our security with a negligible cost in freedom. First, we should adopt a national ID card. Surprisingly, this is anathema to many conservatives. If the right is willing to imprison people indefinitely and send young people off to die in Iraq in the name of security, then why is it unthinkable to standardize driver's licenses into a national ID?... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/17/opinion/17KRIS.html File under: "They are already half way up your ass, why not push it all the way in?"
    ClickOnDetroit.com - News - Report: Witnesses Call Attacker's Death 'Street Justice'
    Security breach lets criminals view Canadians' credit reports

    Tuesday, March 16, 2004

    Dr Reid said: "Although people may have concerns about the implications of this announcement, I would emphasise again that this action is being taken because of an uncertain but slight risk." http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1127610,00.html The BBCTV news tonight said "there is no scientific evidence of a link between vCJD and blood transfusions" But with MMR, where there is "no scientific evidence of a link" everyone is being encouraged to take the MMR shots in spite of the risk! This ban on blood transfers, spanning a quarter century of donors is of course easy to lay down because there is no money to be made out of blood transfers, no ban on MMR is possible because there are many many millions of pounds to be made out of vaccinations. If the two things were measured on risk alone, both would be banned since the same standards of evidence should apply across all science, not just the science you like.

    Monday, March 15, 2004

    "Pavarotti, at 68, may claim sympathy for geriatric infirmity but the slow-mo act of elephantine death is an operatic abomination that he has practised and pefected over three decades of tenorial gigantism." whoa. Outsized talents
    The Thin Air
    If John Kerry "looks French" and "French Fries" now = "Freedom Fries" then John Kerry "looks like Freedom".

    Friday, March 12, 2004

    "I do believe in time," says physicist Brian Greene, author of "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality." "I just think our intuition about it is wrong." Second Thoughts
    Musical hallucinations were invading people's minds long before they were recognized as a medical condition. "Robert Schumann hallucinated music toward the end of his life and wrote it down," says Diana Deutsch, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego. "He said he was taking dictation from Schubert's ghost."
    The new Pentagon papers A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war. Salon.com | The new Pentagon papers

    Wednesday, March 10, 2004

    our new night... click the image to have a look at the space.

    Tuesday, March 09, 2004

    There is a bill being debated in the HOC this month on child pornography. This link will take you through the press coverage of Eli Langer, who was charged in 1993. The discussion is valuable, and perhaps the point of his show? I have to say it makes me incredibly uncomfortable, mostly because it is the same law that will govern both artists and sex offenders. But one quote rings for me: 'Meanwhile, censorship continues. But, as Marcia Pally writes her book, Sex And Sensibility (Ecco Press, 1994): "age-blaming, sexual and non-sexual, will not prevent rape or drug wars, nor will it fell sexism. It has no business being the basis for legislative or judicial remedies .... "Image-blaming, which casts women as victims of words and pictures, is another manipulation of the powerless. Like female frailty, it identifies many things from which women must be guarded and lays claim to make protection."'
    freyja
    You are Freyja! Goddess of Love you are very
    beautiful and very wise. Your knowledge of
    magic rivals that of Odin himself. You have
    loved and lost and your tears form the amber we
    find here on earth.

    Which Norse God are You?
    brought to you by Quizilla Well, Dav, I saw this and thought of you.

    Saturday, March 06, 2004

    Technobabble THERE IS ONLY one way to deal with a teenager who swaps Britney ringtones with her friends: raid her home, freeze her assets, and use anonymous witnesses to denounce her in court. No, this is not some absurd parody of the music industry?s ruthless bullying of 12-year-old file-swappers. If a controversial EU directive becomes law next week, such heavy-handedness will become the norm across Europe whenever copyright owners claim to be the victims of ?piracy?. After intense lobbying by the music and film industries, the European Union is proposing tough new sanctions against a wide range of copyright infringers. Its Directive on Intellectual Property Enforcement, due to be voted on by MEPs next Tuesday, is perfectly reasonable as far as it affects criminal gangs that sell pirated DVDs or unlicensed software. Where it could prove dangerously repressive is its failure to distinguish clearly between these organised gangs and the unintentional, amateur copyright infringers. The directive, being pushed through by Janelly Fourtou, MEP (whose husband happens to run the Vivendi media empire), could prove even more draconian than the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), lately being used to sue American schoolchildren. Because the directive does not define the scope of ?intellectual property rights?, it could theoretically let EU states jail millions of ordinary consumers who swap song files, scan photographs or play copy-protected CDs on their PCs. As critics such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation have calculated, anyone who unwittingly infringes copyright ? even if it has no effect on the market ? could potentially have their assets seized, bank accounts frozen and home searched. It is easy to see how the proposed sanctions will be used to strike fear in ordinary consumers and legitimate small businesses. There will be well-publicised raids on file-swappers? homes, without any prior court hearing. Academics who question the security of commercial software will find themselves accused of breaching the owners? rights. Free-software groups will face legal challenges from larger firms based on unwarranted intellectual-property claims. And over time competition, and consumer rights, will be further whittled away. Copyright is never an easy subject to get people excited about. But if you do not welcome the idea of a British DMCA, tell your MEP before the vote next week. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-8088-1024547,00.html
    Wow. Now we need this service to run like Blogdex does, so that we can see how urls spread, as they are spreading. We need each of the nodes to be interactive, so that we can go straight to the posts hosting the watched links. We need a less opaque initial interface; a list of watched urls, the most poular, sorted to eliminate power rule boredom etc....I love it. What these tools do is show how urls spread. What they cannot do, is show you how to get your url to spread. http://www-idl.hpl.hp.com/blogstuff/index.html

    Friday, March 05, 2004

    "News.com is running a little piece about Microsoft's forays into researching aspects of social computing. With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links, political groups finding potential donor lists, marketing departments finding affinity groups, and other easily imagined data mining opportunities could open the doors for information abuse and misinterpretation of individual ties. What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?" http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/05/1619237&mode=thread Its just like this extremely cool service except: Its for everybody to join. Only Google and the CIA will have access to the broader picture and its associated cool interfaces. All the users build it for the CIA, instead of the CIA having to build it for themselvs.
    Tracks off of the new Aqualung CD prove once again, as if it needee prooving, that LESS is MORE, and MORE is a BORE. This new CD has a DRUMMER on it. It has some Very Poor and Stale® Jeff Lynne / Beatles influence piss splashed over it, and it totally lacks the texture that made the first CD so beautiful. If he were under MY tutilage, we would have recorded it with LESS equipment of an even MORE Inferior Quality™ to make sure that that stinking rancid piss stream wouldnt come anywhere near the works. What a shame. Still, I say, if you have even one good recording in you, and it gets out, this is a miracle of sorts.
    Someone clever said: Everyone here should know that popularity is inversely proportionate to intelligence. Only intelligent people like other intelligent people. The idiots are just resentful. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99412&cid=8475389
    ROTFL, like WSB said, "Lets cut it up and find out what it REALLY says"!!!

    Statement

    by John Tilbury Yes, I am talking about a predatory, aggressive, individualistic, dominant culture whose avowed aim is to impose itself, through threat of annihilation, on the rest of the world. It is a culture I have experienced, or perhaps more precisely, endured on every visit to the US. I often feel ill at ease there and (like Sam Beckett!) am relieved to leave. Now, as for the suggestion by some of my friends that 'the greater totality of peoples and culture within its (the US) borders might be of other (and more important?) dimensions (than the US administration)' � the fact is, as we have experienced ourselves many times, people in the US are kept in abject ignorance in relation to the world at large. (A young English friend of mine, teaching in North Carolina for a year on a teachers� exchange programme, was hauled up in front of the Director of the school, the day after the US attack had begun, for unfurling a map and pointing out to her 7 year-olds where Iraq was) Even those that have/had �reservations� have been hoodwinked by the propaganda that the US has striven to cooperate with world governments through the UN (which we know they control through all manner of skulduggery, bribery and corruption, threats - ����������which all boils down to the simple watchword: be bought or be slaughtered), whilst those who claim to oppose it have sunk into a shoulder-shrugging quietism. And I say this in full knowledge of, and respect for, those activists in the US who are struggling to stem, if not reverse, the tide of permanent war which is at the core of the US Imperialists� (yes, let us choose our words carefully and accurately) agenda. But what the shoulder-shruggers can do is to organise paid seminars, workshops and festivals for the likes of us in the noble pursuit of sharpening the sensibilities and deepening the emotional responses of a relatively privileged audience. While in our name, in relation to the current crisis, possibly or probably, at that very moment, with our money and through our labour, the most appalling atrocities are being planned and perpetrated. Because this cannot be war. War is a misnomer. It is mass slaughter. My contention is that by submitting oneself to the formal procedure of entering the US, by presenting oneself and one�s passport to American custom officials for acceptance and approval (and now to be finger-printed: 21.1.04), one is conferring a status of legitimacy, of normality, on a situation which is abnormal. (Nor, for that matter, would I knowingly travel on an airline which hires �sky-marshals�) Furthermore, in making music there we are not �informing and enlightening the peoples of the USA�; we are in fact providing them with an alibi, a temporary escape, a haven, from the harsh realities of the consequences of the ideology in which they are subsumed. Just as the Orchestras who played Beethoven in the Third Reich did. (�Art is a substitute for action, especially good action; it need not be diligently assimilated or transformed into our own personal understanding and practice.� Iris Murdoch.) [...] Mmmmm John Tilbury writes good!
    Damn, I'm in a good mood today. And all of those billions; do they come from:
  • a money tree?
  • a crock of gold at the end of a perpetual rainbow?
  • some other magical place?
  • It comes directly from YOUR POCKETS. This is the fact that no one that cares wants to face, this is the dirty secret that the Stop War loosers will not confront; it is the Homosexuality of the 21st century, the love that dare not speak its name, the love of feeding the war machine. Every member of Stop War is feeding that machine, all the protesters, campaigners speakers - they all contribute to it, never address it, behave like it is not happening. Its pathetic. Its not even a little surprising that stop war is organizing yet ANOTHER demonstration"
    Central London Saturday 20th March, 12 Noon, from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square Outline of events leading up to the national demonstration Download petition Sign petition on-line Order your leaflets and posters
    Is it just me, or are they really the most insane people in creation?!

    Thursday, March 04, 2004

    ***** ***** wrote: > Dear Irdial representative > > I am a final year undergraduate at Sussex University studying BA Music > and Media Studies. I am writing a dissertation on record companies and > their role within popular culture. I am contacting record labels to gain > relevant and actual information that can help me form a concise opinion > on the topic. Therefore, I would be incredibly grateful if you could > spare some time to answer my questions below. I appreciate that you are > very busy and may not have time to do this, but any information at all > would be greatly received. > 1.) To what extent does the company allow artistic autonomy? Much more than other labels. > > 2.) What marketing strategies does Irdial employ for both new and > existing signings? How does the company know and address their demographic? We do not employ marketing strategies. Marketing and music are two separate things. We do not deliberately address any demographic. Demographics and music are two different things. We are a company that offers music to the public. We are not a marketing company or a statistical analysis company. > > 3.) "Music is not simply received as sound, but through its association > with a series of images, identities and associated values, beliefs and > affective desires. Marketing staff are acutely aware of this and > strategically attempt to create these links - between the music and > image and the artist and consumer." (quote from Keith Negus) Where does > Irdial stand on this opinion? That opinion is just that; an opinion. Arguably it is people like "Keith Negus" who have stabbed the heart of popular music expression, by foisting their seductive opinions on companies that should only respond to music and not the vaccuous opinions of marketers and salary addict statistic manglers who are desperate to find a place in the "music industry". > > 4.) Do Irdial advertise anywhere? No. > > 5.) Recorded music has become viewed as a commodity - with use and > exchange values attached. To what extent does Irdial attempt to displace > this and return the full artistic value to music? We are the record label that we would like to be able to buy from. Since that label did not exist before Irdial, we created it. Our mission is to release music that we love. It is our sole mission. The percieved value of what we do is in the mind of the recipient only, and more often than not, it is a pure illusion. > > I apologise if you view this as a waste of time, but any response would > be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time. > I answered your questions with pleasure. I hope you pass. ./a
    Its rather good to quote:
    The lifestyle guru Carole Caplin, who once exerted great influence over Cherie Blair, claims today that �extremely powerful forces� consisting of �leading figures in the medical establishment, senior civil servants and government health advisers� have suppressed debate on the vaccine and �discredited anyone questioning MMR�.
    I dont buy this at all. Bliar should have jabbed his child in public.
    ...the Blairs feared Leo would be used as a political tool to promote government policy.
    Bliar claims that he is s Christian, and so should have had no problem at all injecting his son in public as a sacrificial lamb. I wont believe that that boy has had MMR. Maybe they faked the vaccination records? This "leak" is very convenient, coming at almost the same moment that seven out of ten of the researchers pulled their paper form The Lancet. They could easily arrange a faked vaccination record, and its likely given that:
    Cherie Blair, who has indulged in plastic hip-reducing �therapy pants�, acupuncture earrings to beat stress and a crystal pendant to promote calm, is known for her scepticism over many aspects of conventional medicine, including the benefits of vaccines.
    People fake vaccination records all the time in the USA where you are not allowed to send your child to school if she has not been jabbed. NO $ALE!!
    The doctors issued a public retraction on Wednesday. However, it was not signed by three of the co-authors. 7 doctors do not want to be sucked into the vortex that is destroying Dr. Wakefield maybe? Maybe in the interest of the public, the same trials should be run again, WITHOUT a conflict of interest? Maybe MMR should be dropped altogether so that there is no risk at all? Single jabs for free. What is the problem with that?!

    Wednesday, March 03, 2004

    Yes, but even if they are iNsAnE enough to invite a known rapist into their beds with a pot of vaseline, there will always be alternatives like the Chinese DVD standard so if you need to manufacture a DVD player, you could do it without paying a new Micro$oft tax. Frankly these people havent got a clue. They should be putting their efforts into the new OOG video work, the launch of which is several years down the line. They will be able to exert influence on how it develops, and it will be a free solution, with whatever DRM they want to add in. They could even use Helix from Real. ANYTHING other than WMP9.
    great news!
    but the one you gave was Yes indeed, which is why I said:
    on a Tinyurl
    Tinyurl seems to spit out different size urls....either way, it really can deliver a "gynirmuss numba" of unique URLs. What would be cool is an API so that you can turn long urls into tiny ones directly in your email client....
    The maximum number of thing able to be recorded by the identification numbering system, which gives a unique five digit code to each thing comprising a number, two letters, a number and a final letter.� You get the marks. Its the total number of possible Tinyurls' that Tinyurl can deliver, based on a Tinyurl that Tinyurl spat out.
    Original memo from the NSA in the USA asking for GCHQ's interception of communications from Angola, Cameroon, Chile Bulgaria and Guinea prior to the second UN vote on Iraq (which failed), see: http://www.statewatch.org/news/2004/feb/memo.pdf
    Kind of off topic, but I wanted to say, meau meau, the post you wrote last week about the Loos architectural style was very cool. Okay back to our regular programming ....