We heard yesterday about the high-end cruise ship that escaped an attack by pirates off the Somalli coast; what didn’t hear until today, though, was that they repelled said pirates with a nonlethal but powerful sonic blast weapon. (Via BoingBoing)

Cheney Seeks OK To Torture. Excerpt:

November 05,2005 | WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session

As it turns out, the military has been dumping dangerous weapons and waste off our coasts for years, usually without anyone in the local or state governments knowing anything about it.

The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste – either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.

Security expert Bruce Schneier has yet another column about the hazards and probable failures of the new RFID passport design.

Coffeebeer.

They’re using black-hat rootkit techniques to install and hide their copy protection scheme on CD purchasers’ systems. Lovely. (Via BoingBoing.)

(Translation for nongeeky readers: When bad people try to intrude on and take control of other people’s computers, they sometimes use a class of software package called a “rootkit,” which is named for the “god” level account present on Unix-like operating systems (“root”). Rootkits typically modify the system to achieve whatever theintruder’s goal might be AND conceal the hack from the computer’s rightful owner by deleting log entries, hiding files, and modifying the programs a user might use to detect the intrusion. If this sounds like serious electronic breaking & entering, that’s because it IS.)

So, once again: Leave Windows if you can, and do NOT buy copy-protected CDs. Ever. As we see here, putting a copy protected CD in your Windows box may well do serious damage to your computer’s software — damage that is not accidental.

More on Sony DRM, wittily and scathingly written.

Offensive and rude as always, his Samuel Alito: Another Motherfucker for America tell us much about Bush’s latest nominee:

Samuel Alito is such a motherfucker that he supported the rights of cops to strip search a ten-year old girl who was not named in a search warrant because, as he stated, “[I]t is a sad fact that drug dealers sometimes use children to carry out their business and to avoid prosecution,” which also means that it’s a sad fact that the girl’s got no rights to unreasonable search and seizures. Which means, really, none of us do if we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. [Note: I belive the child was in her own home.] […] And, according to the Washington Post, on September 24, 1986, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Sam “Motherfucker-in-training” Alito helped author a Justice Department policy that “said that discrimination based on insufficient medical knowledge was not prohibited by federal laws protecting the handicapped. Employers, it said, may legally fire AIDS victims because of a ‘fear of contagion whether reasonable or not.'” The Justice Department’s position was rejected by many states, including some that reacted by barring discrimination against people with AIDS. Alito, whose work helped foster some of the hysteria about AIDS during the Reagan era, said, “We certainly did not want to encourage irrational discrimination,” but the reaction to it “hasn’t shaken our belief in the rightness of our opinion.”

Forbes has published (use Bugmenot or this local PDF) an astoundingly, resoundingly stupid piece on how to “punish bloggers” — or any internet site — when they run afoul of your corporate talking points. Nowhere in their recommendations do we find “don’t be a dick,” which is kind of surprising considering the content of most of these “brand-bashing” sites. Instead, Forbes focusses on silencing critics without regard to the content of the criticism. Lovely.

Included in their “blog defense” plan are such gems as digging up dirt on the blogger to discredit him or her as well as blatent misuse of the DMCA to intimidate ISPs and hosting companies into taking the blogger’s site down. We suppose simply NOT operating in a way that inspires sites like Untied.com is just not in the cards. BoingBoing has an excellent collection of rebuttal links, including a fine piece by Dan Gillmor.

It’s worth noting, too, that the author is a well-known anti-Open Source bigot, and was one of the lone voices defending an article about Pamela Jones (local PDF) of Groklaw that was little more than thinly veiled attack-and-intimidate piece. Jones’ site covers the SCO-IBM trial, and while Lyons attempts to paint her as a partisan IBMer, the facts of the case have always been on her side (as is evidenced by every single ruling in the years-long case so far). From Gillmor’s piece:

One sidebar, attacking a pro-Linux blogger, inveighs against bloggers’ alleged attacks on free speech because they complained about journalism they found wanting. This could have been an interesting story to cover, but Forbes turns something fairly subtle into a cartoon. One of the problems with the story the Linux folks were attacking was some unsupported innuendo, which the Forbes piece actually repeats in an especially slimy way. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that the Forbes reporter [Daniel Lyons] has a long history of jabbing at the open source folks.)

One word? Cretin. Way to go, Forbes!

George Takei is gay.

The creepy slashfiction fringe of Trekkie fandom is now nearly drowning in its own froth.

Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the SCOTUS. Frankly, this makes me think more highly of her than anything else I’ve heard, as she is manifestly unqualified for the job.

In Raleigh, NC, a Pet Cemetary is being, um, evicted so they can build a hotel.