Florida, which purged many eligable voters from its rolls in 2000’s overzealous felon-zapping process, is doing it again, and refusing to let anyone see or verify the list first.

Yeah, nothing to worry about there, I’m sure. Christ.

No, really. The INDUCE act is pretty broad in language, and I think we’ve learned at this point to NEVER believe bill authors who say “but we’ll only use this in special context XYZ, so you don’t have to worry! Of course, there’s no need to codify that in the bill! Trust us!”

There’s more coverage of Congress’ coddling of the RIAA/MPAA cabal at Wired. Not all these proposed laws are scary, but many are way out there. The PIRATE act will open the door for the Justice Department to file copyright infringement lawsuits, theoretically freeing the RIAA from the time and expense of suing all those 12-year-olds and grandmothers. Pay attention!

Update: there’s also an obsessively annotated version of the INDUCE act online, natch.

There is now an Internet Explorer based virus that is so dangerous and virulent that the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), a division (since 9/11) of the Department of Homeland Security, is formally suggesting that “Explorer users consider other browsers that are not affected by the attack, such as Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Opera.”

You can easily download Mozilla, or its browser-only sibling, Firefox, from Mozilla.org. Do so. They’re free.

A: When what you can and can’t do is explicitly controlled by another power.

A coalition of tech heavyweights — including Intel, Sun, Verizon, SBC, BellSouth, and others — are supporting a proposal by Virgina Representative Rick Boucher to substantially defang the anti-circumvention provisions of the much-maligned, anti-Fair-Use Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA is the law that makes it illegal to bypass copy protection for any reason, even if the goal is something traditionally protected by the doctrine of Fair Use, such as copying a CD for use on your computer (or, in an earlier era, dubbing CDs to tape for use in the car). The anti-circumvention provisions are the sort of thing that give Jack Valenti wood, but they’re terrible for consumers — and for innovation.

CNET’s coverage is well worth reading.

Pentagon seeks domestic spying powers. Sigh.

The case of Dudley Hiibel, discussed here back in February, has been decided by the SCOTUS.

The justices ruled 5-4 (interestingly, precisely the same 5-4 that gave us GWB) that citizens must identify themselves to law enforcement. So much for that “right to remain silent” stuff, I reckon.

The 9/11 commission has confirmed precisely what most seasoned intelligence analysts have been saying for nearly three years: there is no credible evidence connecting Iraq and the 9/11 plot. (More NYT coverage here.)

Of course, Cheney still insists he was right. Can this administration simply not admit an error?

Maybe this is an example of what Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change are talking about, eh?

Judge rebukes government in ACLU no fly list litigation.

Like, say, slip deeply scary Patriot II provisions into an appropriations bill.

JWZ posts the best pix.

David Berkowitz has been denied parole for the second time on Wednesday. The board gave no reason beyond, I suppose, Berkowitz being batshit crazy.

In a related — and disturbing — bit of news, it seems ol’ Son of Sam has a blog.

The school administrators in this story clearly have NO SOUL.

Another torture memo has surfaced. Supposedly. (Heh.)

Now, finally, TIA has come clean about the flight from Tampa to Lexington on September 13, 2001, that helped spirit Saudi nationals out of the country. There’s more to this than meets the eye, I’ll wager.

The Register covers a study reporting that 80% of all spam is generated by infected Windows PCs (i.e., “zombies”).

Remember all the criticism leveled at Clinton because of his lawyerly circumlocutions and overly-technical answers during the Lewinsky depositions? I sure hope the GOP does, because there’s a Pentagon memo from March 2003 that uses just such tortured logic and hyperlegalistic techniques to find a way around the laws prohibiting torture of prisoners. This puts us in the mind of the Daily Show’s Rob Corddry, who said of the Abu Graib pictures

There’s no question what took place in that prison was horrible. But the Arab world has to realize that the US shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a . . . well, we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: Just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do. Quoted here

The hits just keep on coming, though. Billmon did a little research into the primary author of this memo, an apparently devout and conservative Christian woman, and contrasts her personal statements of faith and such with the language of the memo. The difference, needless to say, is quite shocking. As a sample, here’s his final pairing:

Walker: “Making moral decisions in the workplace where it is easy to go along and get along takes courage. It takes moral strength and courage to say, ‘I’m not going to do this because I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.’ ” The report: Officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders “may be inferred to be lawful” and are “disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.” Billmon, supra

Billmon’s not alone, of course; Josh Marshall’s post on the subject points to a Wall Street Journal article (paid registration required) that begins “Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.” Think about that for a minute. Actually, the memo itself includes the real money shot here:

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a “presidential directive or other writing” that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”WSJ

Yes, that’s right. This memo asserts that the president’s powers extend to setting aside laws. Their copy of the Constitution must have some additional articles or something, because I don’t recall that being part of the deal. Josh has this to say:

So the right to set aside law is “inherent in the president”. That claim alone should stop everyone in their tracks and prompt a serious consideration of the safety of the American republic under this president. It is the very definition of a constitutional monarchy, let alone a constitutional republic, that the law is superior to the executive, not the other way around. This is the essence of what the rule of law means — a government of laws, not men, and all that. [Emph. added.]

The suggestions that (a) we need to find a way to make torture legal and (b) that the president may do as he pleases are patently counter to everything I know and love about this country. That a government employee working on behalf of you and I, the citizens of this great experiment in government, set about trying to justify these positions absolutely sickens me.

This is who we’re dealing with. This is who wants to run the country for another four years, this time with no worries about re-election. If they’re pushing the Constitution this far now, consider what they might do as lame ducks.

We woke at Heathen Central today to the news that Reagan’s body had finally given out; it’s a fair bet his family had their goodbyes long ago, since that’s the cruel lot for folks with Alzheimer’s. The news will be awash with coverage all day today — the Times obituary is enormous and, to this non-Reaganite, appropriately even-handed.

The real historical event to remember today, though, is not the passing of an ancient former president (he was 93). Sixty years ago today, Operation Overlord began. The logistical challenges of an invasion of that size were absurd, and the odds poor for the first few to emerge from Higgins boats on the French beaches. Still, it was in every sense what had to be done. In the short list of truly pivotal moments in the 20th century, June 6, 1944 must be near the top.

Ambrose’s definitive book is worth reading, even if you’re sick of Tom Brokow crowing about the Greatest Generation. On a page not updated since 2001, I wrote:

I suppose we all know at least a little about the subject, but Ambrose makes the whole thing real. The scale of the invasion is staggering; more ships, for example, were involved that day than existed in the whole world during Elizabeth I’s reign. Ambrose’s book is part oral history and part analysis, and the mix is almost compulsively readible. Veterans tell their stories through Ambrose, and he pulls no punches. Before Speilberg shocked audiences with the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, Ambrose painted the picture in interviews with those who were there. Ambrose also has a taste for the odd fact. I think my favorite is the story of 3 Koreans captured by American invading troops on D-Day. The German Atlantic Wall was manned largely by conscripts and captured POW’s, most of whom were guarded by actual Germans with orders to shoot if they didn’t fight (once the watchers were out of the picture, however, most of these Poles, Hungarians, Russians, etc., promptly and gleefully surrendered). These poor Koreans had, presumably, been captured by the Chinese in Korea-China skirmishes and subsequently sent to fight the Russians — who of course captured them and send them west to fight the Germans. And, of course, the Germans captured them and sent them to the doomed Atlantic Wall. The really sad part is that they were almost certainly repatriated back to Korea by the U.S., where they ended up fighting again just a few years later. Wow. (9/00)

The next time you’re in New Orleans, take a break from drinking to visit the National D-Day Museum near the French Quarter. It’s astounding.

Working on my German car’s brakes, and then drinking Cuban beverages.

Tom Clancy, that most Republican of military-fetishist authors, is now slamming Bush’s war in Iraq.

So, here’s the primer on the whole Washingtonienne (cached copy) dustup, in the event you haven’t been brought up to speed.:

• There exists, or did, an anonymous blog called Washingtonienne, written apparently by a 24-year-old intern somewhere on the Hill, largely for the amusement of her friends.
• In said blog, the author was, er, particularly frank about her sex life on said Hill.
• In true American fashion, she was also frank about the fact that she accepted, er, gratuities for some of these liasons, and that the liasons in question occasionally included persons with rather prominent positions in government, though none were named explicitly (she used initials).
• Eventually (last week), of course, the blog goes public, linked initially and most (in)famously by the popular DC blog Wonkette (copiously, in fact: here’s a link to an omnibus post there).
• On the 21st, Wonkette interviewed Washingtonienne by phone, and identified her as Jessica Cutler. A day or so later, they have a much-publicized night on the town from which the picture at right is taken.
• Around the same time (and mentioned in the interview above), the occupational jig is up; her boss, identified as Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH), fires her over “inappropriate use of Senate resources.” There’s a euphamism if ever I heard one, but we’re not sure her hoo-hah counts as a “Senate resource.” (Of course, the possibility remains that they were referring to staff computers, but it’s more fun to pretend otherwise.)
• The press orgy begins in earnest, complete with Post coverage and an interview — also featuring Wonkette — at Fox News, which is predictably SCANDALIZED by her behavior. More likely, they’re just sorry they didn’t think of the idea first.
• Busy bloggers continue to try to ascertain who here erstwhile companions were, including the aforementioned Wonkette and the improbably named I Love Jenna Bush. This part we suspect will be very fun to watch.
• Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that a NY literary agency is interested in talking to Cutler about a tell-all, and a blog called The National Debate quotes rumors suggesting Playboy wants both Cutler and Ana Marie “Wonkette” Cox for a spread, supposedly verified by a postscript to a Post story stating Hefner’s enterprise had called looking for Cutler’s contact information. The NYPost ran a summary of the whole affair, along with their own pix, natch.
• Update: Wonkette is a property of Gawker Media, and another of their blog properties (NSFW) reports that they saw Cox at the water cooler, and that she, at least, is thus-far unaware of any nude pictorials in her future, which is of course a non-denial denial as far as Cutler herself is concerned.

Say it with me: I love this country.

The Great Satan known as Clear Channel has somehow acquired a patent on recording a concert live, and then selling CDs of the show on site. How, exactly, is “capturing a digital stream and sending it to a batch of CD burners” patentable?

More commentary at DNALounge.com and, of course, Slashdot.

The nutjobs at Christian Exodus want to entice thousands of like-minded fundies to move to a state (smart money’s on South Carolina) and take over its electorate so they can leave the Union and establish a theocracy.

Didn’t a good chunk of bigoted nutjobs try this, oh, 150 years ago? Think it’ll work any better not?

Last night, Bush promised to demolish Abu Graib. While clearly a brazen political move, it’s still what should have been done a year ago; using Saddam’s torture central as, well, our own torture central makes it awful fucking hard to pretend we’re the good guys.

Remember that Unitarianism-isn’t-a-religion crap from last week? In the face of widespread condemnation, the comptroller — Carole Keeton Strayhorn — has reversed her position.

(Via Atrios and Off The Kuff.)

Several sites I review have mentioned a new “service” offered at DidTheyReadIt.com. Basically, these folks purport to offer a plan wherein the sender of an email can know, absolutely, 98% of the time, whether or not their email has arrived, if it’s been read, for how long, and where (geographically) the recipient is.

Sounds both compelling and a bit scary, doesn’t it? Well, here’s something else it is: BULLSHIT.

Now that’s a technical term, you understand, so let me break it down for you; I’d hoped a skeptical press would have done this for us, but the coverage so far has been fawning and utterly naive. Shouldn’t journalism — particularly technology journalism — involve more than quoting q press release?

Anyway, what they’re talking about is universal return-receipts. Closed email systems have offered these for years, which is why you can click “request receipt” in Outlook when you’re sending mail to Sally down the hall in Accounting. Even then, though, Sally (usually) has the option to cancel your return-receipt request. The important point, though, is that this works only in a homogenous system — i.e., where everyone uses the same email program — because there’s no universal way to request a return receipt. To make it work, requesting mail clients must add “headers” telling the receiving program that they want one, and the receiving program must understand those headers AND comply with the request.

This works fine when everyone uses the same program, and can even work for mail sent over Internet because the mail transfer mechanism of the Net doesn’t actually pay much attention to the message en route, so programs can add all sorts of information to the message without interfereing with its ability to get from A to B; a return-receipt request is just one example.

But what happens if you send mail requesting a return receipt to a person who doesn’t use a mail program that understands (or cares about) Outlook’s special headers? Nothing. They’re ignored. Put simply, to make universal return-receipt work, you’d have to create a universal return-receipt header standard, and then get every mail client to play along, which will never happen for a whole host of reasons.

So how are these folks doing it? Well, they’re not. They’re relying on a technique used widely by spammers to measure the rate at which a given piece of spam has been read. It’s not a terribly robust method, and it’s particularly poorly suited to this problem. The sender (or DTRI, in this case) adds a link to a particular image to the mail in question, and then waits for the web server to register a hit. A web request includes an IP, which can then be used to determine location (though only with very sloppy accuracy; if I dial in from Hawaii using an ISP in New York, it’ll show me in Manhattan — and at last count everyone on AOL looks like they’re in Reston, Virginia).

By configuring the web server’s handling of these images carefully, they can force a refresh every so often, and get a fairly inaccurate read for how long the mail was open. All in all, it’s terribly sloppy, and almost guaranteed to fail.

The core problem, though, is that for DTRI’s method to work, you must read your mail in HTML, which is by no means universal; we all know that Sally down the hall loves to send green-on-pink mail with a flower border, and frankly we’re sick of it. Fortunately, most mail programs can be configured to display the plaintext alternative (if there is one), or to ignore the bulk of the formatting, and it doesn’t take too many of Sally’s Happy-Hour messages to send us to this particular preferences menu.

Aside from that, though, there’s the issue of the image itself. Images can come with emails one of two ways: they can be included in the mail itself (which makes the mail huge), or they can be linked to images stored on a web server somewhere, which is what DTRI does. This is the real dealbreaker: even particularly promiscuous, insecure clients like Outlook no longer load non-embedded email images by default. It only takes one super-graphic porn spam to send most folks to that particular setting, in any case. Add to this the fact that its use by spammers makes a mail with such a link look like spam to automated filters, and you begin to see the problem.

Yup. That’s it; for this, DidTheyReadIt.com wants fifty bucks a year. I’ve got a better idea: if it’s really that important that you know if someone read a given communique, send it by registered mail. Not email; use the paper kind. It’s good for shit like this. Email is — and probably always will be — essentially asynchronous. Accept it. And don’t be taken in by charlatans like the folks at DidTheyReadIt.

(So why does this method work for spammers, or does it? I’d say it probably does, because they’re measuring something else. DTRI wants to measure individual mails, but a spammer just wants to know if some of his mail got through the increasingly-elaborate filter gauntlet. He can afford to assume that only a small percentage of those who read his mail loaded the image, and extrapolate a more accurate “read rate” based on his hits. For obvious reasons, this is worthless to DTRI.)

More
A little surfing led me to a couple other services purporting to offer precisely the same service: ReadNotify.com and MessageTag.com. Neither of these will work any better than DidTheyReadIt.com; all the information above applies to them, too.

Also, it looks like ZDNet actually has reasonable coverage, referring to the web bug technique as dead technology. Heh.

He’s banned digital cameras, cameraphones, and the like from military installations in Iraq.

Hey, Don? I’m pretty sure that’s solving the wrong problem. Accountability is good; it was the absence of such that enabled the abuse scandal, and only the existance of the clandestine photos made the truth undeniable.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR has been billing the government for driving empty trucks around Iraq — on trips through hostile territory.

The Texas State Comptroller has decided that Unitarianism isn’t a religion, at least for tax purposes, because it “does not have one system of belief.” Accordingly, the Denison Unitarian Church has been denied tax-exempt status in Texas.

You know all the whining the RIAA is doing about record sales being down? Turns out it ain’t necessarily so, as they actually sold more in Q1 ’04 than in Q1 ’03.

Forget the confusing percentages, here’s an oversimplified example: I shipped 1000 units last year and sold 700 of them. This year I sold 770 units but shipped only 930 units. I shipped 10% less units this year. And this is what the RIAA wants the public to accept as “a loss.”

Erin tells us that Randy Johnson’s performance yesterday is a big deal, but we confess we’re still not sure what distinguishes a “no-hitter” from a “perfect game.” In any case, the Big Eunuch Unit — a former Astro — did the latter.

Presumably, at some point Ralph Glaister said something about “oh, yeah, and turtles will fall from the sky, too.”

(Via JWZ.)

The Italian State Police have been given a 500 horsepower, 10-cylinder Lamborghini Gallardo, which they plan to use for special situations.

Finally, there’s a solution!

From jwz: “Man Fatally Bitten by Sexually Aroused Horse“

Mark Miller, a physics student at UT, filed a FOIA request regarding the network of tunnels underneath UT’s Austin campus.

Then the goon squad came to visit.

Paris’ Pere Lachaise would like to show Jim Morrison the door, but they’ve wanted to do this for years. We visited in 1995, and found his gravesite festooned with flowers, cigarettes, condoms, whisky, joints, and hippies.

Of course, Oscar Wilde’s grave is “decorated” as well, so there you go. Lachaise is huge, too; I’d tell you how long it took us to find Jim, but that would be embarrassing.

Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker piece is all over the news, largely because it’s (thus far) the only real public discussion of the military’s horrific behavior toward prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Read it.

In a development sure to excite German metal fans everywhere, it appears that some wealthy Indian youths are using scorpion stings to get high.

I mean, damn, can’t they just do bong hits like everyone else?

Hey, kids! See if you can find the unfortunate — and hopefully inadvertant — historical reference in this fishwrapper headline!

The Sinclair Group has ordered its seven ABC affiliates not to air Friday’s Nightline, which will consist largely of the names and photographs of men and women of the US Armed Forces killed thus far in Iraq.

The ACLU filed suit a few weeks ago challenging the FBI’s methods of obtaining some business records, but provisions of the act itself prevented them from announcing the suit.

“It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court,” Ann Beeson, the ACLU’s associate legal director, said in a statement. “President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it.”

(WaPo story; use nogators@nogators.com / nogators for access.)

IKEA Claims Another 10,000 Lifestyles.

“For me, it started slowly,” Westin said. “I had Poang — it’s a form of chair — and I just couldn’t seem to get rid of it. That led to a lot of other things I’m not particularly proud of. I indulged in Leksvik, Branas, even a Svingen. If you don’t know what those are, consider yourself lucky.”

This story about the birth of Marcia Gay Harden‘s twins includes pronunciation guides for the names of two of their three children.

Or, more accurately, Slate wonders, and we agree.

Restaurant Magazine has announced its ’50 Best Restaurants in the World,’ and for the second year running, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry took the top prize.

Other US notables include five New York establishments, none of which are surprising: Gramercy Tavern (No. 11, also singled out as a great value), Daniel (12), Jean Georges (18), Balthazar (40), and Craft (44). American cuisine matriarch Alice Waters isn’t neglected, either, but we expected her influential Berkeley bistro Chez Panisse would come in higher than 37 (or at least higher than LA’s Spago, at 35). Our Jackson office will be pleased to note the inclusion of Charlie Trotter’s eponymous eaterie in Chicago (32), which also has the distinction of being the only listed American restaurant not in California or New York.

It’s not news that Bush has finally agreed to testify in front of the 9/11 commission. What you may not know the conditions for said testimony, among them:

• Bush and Cheney will appear and be questioned together;
• Said questioning will be behind closed doors;
• No transcript or recording will be made; and
• Neither official will be under oath.

But don’t worry about that last part. Scott McClellan has already assured us that they will “tell it exactly how it happened.”

Right, Scott. Right.

Wired News reports that Diebold may face criminal charges in California over its touch-screen voting machines.

Diebold KNEW it was breaking the law in California.

Timmy the tortise, who found fame as a ship’s mascot during the Crimean War, passed away at his Devon castle home, where has lived since the late 19th century. He was 160.