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.

QOTD:

You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you’re small, because those mannerisms aren’t what made the companies successful. They’re actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it’s become too big. It’s like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, “I want to be rich, too, so I’m going to start walking with a cane and I’m going to act crotchety and I’m going to get liver disease.”

—Wil Shipley, Delicious Monster

FBI collects dossiers on the ACLU and Greenpeace as part of the war on terrorism.

Little known Boston fact: the T is a world-famous pioneer of MorseLED™ message displays.

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been to Boston, and I think this might be my first aimless day wandering around it. There’s an inherent charm here that I’m trying to determine whether it’s local, or if I’m just putting traveler’s gloss on what I’m seeing.

Certainly, the Public Gardens need no gloss. It’s beastly hot here today (i.e., what I’d be getting if I stayed in Washington), but the Gardens have plenty of shade and a steady breeze. The feel here reminds me of Hyde Park in London; it’s a bit more bedecked with benches and human amenities than is the British custom, but it has the same sense of calm. Washington has her fair share of parks, but the closest thing we have to a place like this is the Tidal Basin, which unfortunately is not in my part of town. And the Basin somehow doesn’t have the human scale that I’m seeing here.

A few mundane thoughts that damn near everybody has in airports, but which I can’t help writing about while I’m airblogging.

We take this miracle a bit too much for granted. I’m flying to Boston; the neighboring gates were going to Tampa and Seoul. Boston, Tampa, Seoul. Those don’t seem to belong in the same sentence. The excitement experienced by the waiting passengers didn’t seem to correlate with the destination.

My neighbor across the aisle is a young teenager who barely looked out the window when we took off. This strikes me as unnatural for adults, let alone for children.

We are asked to fasten our seat belts whenever the sign is lit, or whenever we are seated. Therefore, we should fasten our seats belts when we are not seated because the sign is lit.

Note this sign at Dulles, directing you to a Starbucks. You approach it from the entrance to Terminal B, and if you follow the sign immediately and turn right, you will not look to your left and find there is another Starbucks immediately behind you. Luckily, I already had my venti coffee from the third Starbucks in the kiosk that was just past security.

Prior to takeoff, I was told to shut off my electronic devices, but I could still use my cell phone until they shut the doors. My electronic device is also a cell phone; if a cell phone is not dangerous, then clearly my smartphone is less so when not being used for a call. And yet it does not fall into the set of all electronic devices.

Further evidence that I am an idiot: I have six movies to watch on my laptop. I have the complete works of Mark Twain on my cell phone. And yet, when they told me to shut off my gizmos, I realized that I had brought nothing to read that was not battery-powered.

While I was in the bathroom, they handed out mints on the plane. The mints were strong enough that the actual cabin turned minty fresh; I could tell what the flight attendant was handing me without asking. And when they brought around the hot towels (a very nice touch on a no-frills fare), they had dropped some dry ice in water to give the tray the proper steaming presentation.

This is my first flight on Independence Air, and all in all I’m pleased with them so far. I respect any airline that allows its flight attendants to refer to a water landing as a “dip in the Atlantic”, and I’m even more impressed by the graphic that accompanied the plane evacuation instructions. Yes, that’s a broken-up plane outside the window, and they even put an “i” on the ruined tail rudder. That’s ballsy.

But their computer systems can use some work. I signed up for their frequent flier program when I bought my ticket, but it was rejected when I tried to use it. I figured it was a computer glitch, and went to gate to resolve it when I checked in.

Thirty minutes later, the gate agent is still having the same problem. Turned out that my FF account, like just about everything else in my life, was under the name “Jeff”, but I had ticketed myself with my passport-kosher legal name of “Jeffrey”. The only people who call me Jeffrey knew me when I was less than three feet tall. Problem number two was that the name on my frequent flier account is apparently engraved in stone and cannot be changed. So I was reticketed as Jeff and sent on my merry way.

Me: “So, when I come home, will TSA know that ‘Jeff’ on my ticket and ‘Jeffrey’ on my passport are the same person?”

Indy Air (paraphrasing): “Sure hope so, because we don’t.”

My Lord, did I screw up this trip.

So I’m standing in a TSA line imported straight from EuroDisney in August, when suddenly on the fifth repetition the canned announcement about prohibited items sinks into my cranium. I blame the early morning departure time. It was 11 AM; who is up at that ungodly hour?

But eventually I hear the word “lighter” and realize that I’ve got one of those. A rather nice one, with sentimental value. Credit where credit is due, I got no argument when I surrendered the lighter (easily replaceable) and kept the case (the important part).

But then came the metal detector, and my repeatedly setting it off, and my subsequent wanding. Obviously, my travel skills have atrophied, because this is what I was still wearing: left pocket, pack of cigarettes in foil, aspirin container (scraps of foil left on rim); right pocket, unidentified something in my wallet, and back it went into the X-ray; shirt pocket, an errant dime; right hand, class ring; waistline, belt buckle and cell phone belt clip with metal clasp.

That was after I had cleared myself of all metal. Steve Austin would have gotten through easier than I did. But eventually I made it, less one lighter. Those of you who feel smokers deserve all the hassles they get may commence experiencing schadenfreude now.

Upon arrival at Dulles Gate B, I headed off to the smoking lounge for a last hit before the flight, where I found dozens of travellers who had passed through security while retaining their deadly incendiary objects, and who shared them freely with me. A flight attendent told me, between puffs, that they had to be careful because TSA raided the lounge from time to time and confiscated the lighters.

To which I commented, “All of these people have committed a felony by getting those lighters this far. If they were serious about the law, they’d come in here and do mass arrests.” It’s nice to see that even TSA acknowledges that their security is just for show.

Bonus points to me for not actually referring to the cost of my lighter as the Reid tax while at the checkpoint—although seeing as how I’m writing this from the plane, perhaps a few points should be stricken off.

Two more Jeffposts to the Whatever today: Fifty years ago, and today, and Vigilant.

I’m en route to MacWorld Boston, so watch this space for a roadtrip report commencing shortly.