At least the firefighters from across the nation who assembled for FEMA emergency support are being put to good use.

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

Also via Metafilter, an amazing report from two EMS responders who attended the worst-planned conference in American history.

Via Metafilter, highly worthwhile article by a reporter who tried and failed to publish a book warning of the danger in New Orleans.

Macintouch reports that the FEMA web site requires IE 6 in order to fill out the form for disaster assistance.

I’ve already refrained a few times on some Bush commentary regarding New Orleans, but Bitch PhD says a few things for me. Nice juxtaposition of commentary from W, alongside the commentary from the mayor.

Interesting post via Slashdot about tracking down the theft of a mobile phone. More to the point, illustrative of the kinds of data that modern cell phones move back and forth, and how they can be traced.

Reuters reports that coffee is the leading source of antioxidants for Americans.

In which case, I must be damn near anaerobic.

All I have to say is, whoever it was at the Hershey Foods Corporation who decided to drop the lemon flavor from the standard package of Jolly Ranchers needs to be embedded in a block of blue raspberry and left on an anthill to think about the error of his ways.

I’m catching up on a Washington Post article from May 22 today, titled “Contracting Rush For Security Led To Waste, Abuse”. It basically documents how DHS and TSA got about $100 million in value for every billion it spent. The following really jumped out at me:

The contract for airport bomb-detection machines ballooned to at least $1.2 billion from $508 million over 18 months. The machines have been hampered by high false-alarm rates…. After the bomb-detection machines were put in airports across the country, some of them began to register false alarms. Screeners were forced to open and hand-check bags. Lines backed up, infuriating passengers and airline managers. The false-alarm rates have since come down, according to counter-terrorism experts and government scientists familiar with the machines. They say the reason is that the machines have been calibrated to be less sensitive, cutting the false alarms but also making the machines less effective. “When used the way they’re supposed to be used, they’re almost as good as a dog,” said a government technology expert intimately familiar with the machines, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Okay. The article doesn’t say how many machines were purchased for $1.2 billion, but it seems to me that if they’re almost as good as a dog at their best, somebody might have asked how much a dog costs.

So — have you been wondering just what people are talking about when they say that Ajax is the hottest thing since BitTorrent? No? Then you must not be reading the same websites I do.

The PowerPoint slide: Ajax describes using a static web page with dynamic content — i.e., Google Maps, which fetches map data and sticks it into an otherwise unchanging page. My personal fave Ajax app is Backpack (although GMaps is a close second).

If you’re curious to know more, check out the excellent Wikipedia article, or refer to the essay that gave Ajax its name.

Clearing out some very old notes for blogposts, so apologies that some of what’s to come is stale-dated. Starting with: if you haven’t read this already, EFF’s legal guide for bloggers is a must-read for anyone running a website.

This Wired article on the online community for the rich and famous is fascinating, in a sort of “slow down for an accident” kind of way.

Google provides a form to send an SMS. Been looking for one of these as my Bluetooth connection to my cell phone sometimes goes wonky, and it’s always faster to keyboard than to do pen input.

Courtesy of Mind Hacks (which I’m reading on the Safari Bookshelf), a brain-melting optical illusion of a rotating face mask.

I’ve been doing some writing recently about the difference in post-WWII America and today’s version, with an eye to contrasting the Marshall Plan to our more militant stance today. With that in mind, I point you to Joi Ito’s essay on the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima in the New York Times:

My mother used to talk about the American occupation of our hometown in northern Japan when she was a child. Our house, the largest in the area, was designated to be the Americans’ local headquarters. When the soldiers arrived, my great-grandmother, nearly blind at the time, was head of the household, my grandfather having died during the war.

My great-grandmother and my grandmother faced the occupiers alone, having ordered the children to hide. The Japanese had been warned that the invading barbarians would rape and pillage. My great-grandmother, a battle-scarred early feminist, hissed, “Get your filthy barbarian shoes off of my floor!” The interpreter refused to interpret. The officer in command insisted. Upon hearing the translation from the red-faced interpreter, the officer sat on the floor and removed his boots, instructing his men to do the same. He apologized to my great-grandmother and grandmother.

It was a startling tipping-point experience for them, as the last bit of brainwashing that began with “we won’t lose the war” and ended with “the barbarians will rape and kill you” collapsed.

What perhaps makes this more remarkable is that the Americans themselves had been brainwashed to believe the Japanese were warmongering subhumans, and yet somehow they retained the dignity to offer this courtesy. I have no doubt that many individuals in the military have the same inclination; would that our policies reflected such.

Via Boing Boing, New Scientist reports that the malaria virus makes its victims more appealing to mosquitoes. Either evolution in action, or Intelligent Design folks like W must believe in a God who is truly a vicious bastard.

“What’s surprising is that this is not to the advantage of anybody but the parasite,” says Jo Lines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. “This tremendously important interaction for the person and the mosquito—both can die as a result—is being engineered by the parasite.”

Something I wrote up for Dave Farber’s Interesting-People list. This is part of a discussion about a Washington Post article on terrorist’s use of the web.

Agreed that the Post article was long on fear-mongering and short on facts. But there are some really interesting dynamics going on here. I did some work with a researcher in the field a year or so ago, which I never had time to follow up. Here were my initial impressions reviewing some of the terrorist sites:

• Across the board, the sites that I saw showed a level of technical competence that would put most decentralized nonprofit networks to shame (which I think is the closest analog in the noncriminal space). Granted that I don’t think the best and the brightest CSS designers are al-Qaeda operatives, but this also wasn’t FrontPage 97 work.
• Pursuant to that observation was a clear separation of form from content. Several sites had digital photography taken from the POV of the insurgents, posted within 24 hours of being taken. (At least, so it was claimed; I’m not qualified to confirm that these weren’t months-old photos.) Some of this could have been done with a zoom lens by someone who was on the outskirts, but some other photos seemed to only be possible if the photographer was under fire or at least in the thick of the attack. This raised several interesting points:
  1. that al-Qaeda had propaganda networks in place sufficient to motivate people to risk their lives for such material;
  2. that these networks were capable of moving the product from early-2004 Iraq to a location where they could be sent over the Internet. I’m presuming here that the public Internet cafes are not a safe location to do this, so that would mean private operatives with satellite communications, or a conduit to move the data storage physically outside of the country. (Naturally, as Iraq’s infrastructure improves, this problem resolves itself.)
  3. again inferring from the competence of these sites, the webmasters are almost certainly not in a danger zone, meaning either combat or fear of being detected or interrupted. The sites are not published in haste. Which implies a sophisticated system of combining “combat journalists” with a home desk.

• Many of these websites are highly transient; a site can be taken down in the space of days by the ISP when its content is reported (or may be taken down by the authors before the authorities can find them). The nontransient sites are the ones that tend to have the scary propaganda of the “we will bury you” variety; it’s the short-lived sites that have the red meat, such as bomb plans. Since the network relies on these transient sites, that implies a darknet P2P system, probably by IM or email to equally transient addresses, to spread the word about where to go for information. I’m guessing here a structure similar to the infrastructure supporting 1980s BBS systems used to disseminate child pornography; they thrived, but there wasn’t a text file you could download giving out those phone numbers. And they had similar consequences for the users, and transience of the “web sites”.
  1. Corollary: sites that can be found by a Haifa researcher or the Washington Post can also be found by DHS and similar international agencies. This is known to the wiser people in the audience of these websites, who also know that in some cases they may risk incarceration or death by being identified as part of its readership. It’s safe to assume, then, that the less transient and better-known the site, the less likely it will actually attract the more dangerous terrorists. Tracing these connections can have a honeypot effect to trap the new converts, the careless, or the ignorant—which is valuable, but should also be recognized for its limitations.
  2. given the sophistication I’m reading into the publication process, one then wonders why some sites, with some dangerous information, are not transient. That is, a legitimate terrorist site that remains available must be known to be under surveillance by any intelligent criminal publisher. But some inflammatory sites do remain live. AFAIK, this never occurred in the child porn systems I mentioned earlier. Potential reasons:
     1. these are published by the stupid criminals. It’s a bell curve, somebody’s got to be on the short side.
     2. these are published as honeypots by law enforcement groups to see who shows up.
     3. these are published as honeypots by terrorists to allow them to do counter-espionage and see what tools are used to watch them.

As I said, after a few days of meetings with the researchers whom I met, I was distracted from follow-up, so all of the above is complete conjecture with little actual data to back it up. Criticism and factual evidence for or against greatly appreciated.

This Modern Major General parody of Britain’s ID cards is not to be missed, especially as the US is not much further behind with REAL ID.