Tonya and PQBON's WebLog
At this stage, it's possible the Dixie Chicks are abandoning their country music base, rather than the other way around. Rubin is best known for his work with funk-rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who had ruled the charts for the previous two weeks, and with deceased Nashville renegade Johnny Cash.
"I'd rather have a smaller following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith," Dixie Chick Martie Maguire told Time. We don't want those kinds of fans."
I've often wondered if the two sisters (Emily Erwin, and Martie Seidel) in the dixie chicks really felt the way Natalie Maines felt (with her anti-Bush comments) or if they were just supporting their bandmate. It seems that they do!
I'm a little stoked that the Dixie Chicks are working with Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin's work with Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, LL Cool Jay, and the Chilli Peppers (yes, I'm familiar with early NY rap. I still have Run DMC and LL Cool Jay on tape). That and the Dixie Chicks was kind of my first date with my wife after not seeing her for 8 years.
Also, I'm glad to see the Dixie Chicks aren't backing down. Yeah, at this point some of what they are doing is embracing the controversy to help sell disks but I think they would sell more if they toed the country line.
BBC NEWS | England | London | Police investigate 'hate' website
The website targeting the 19-year-old has received more than half a million hits since it went live.
The site alleges the young man from Barnet, north London, sold a broken laptop computer on eBay.
Here is the site.
Always becareful who you try to screw over. People tend not to like it, some will ignore it and hope karma will even it out in the end, some will take Karma into their own hands!
OK, so here is more of my screed against Sony, BluRay, and HD-DVD.
So here is an article about how evil both formats are, and how they are both about declaring war on the consumer.
I have to say, I'm not proud that Intel invented HDCP. HDCP is the bane of the consumer and new technology. It is good for only two parties... Content providers who can use it to force you to buy n copies your content (where n is the number of devices types you want to use it on). And the established device companies who can use it to push back and crush upstarts with new ideas.
Here is an article about Sony failing to keep its brand identity and hence forcing to to sell for lower margins.
Finally here is an article from PCWorld that glosses over the controversy but does cover some of the technical details of the two formats.
Court rules no whistle-blower free-speech right - Yahoo! News
Steven Shapiro of the
American Civil Liberties Union said, "In an age of excessive government secrecy, the Supreme Court has made it easier to engage in a government cover-up by discouraging internal whistle-blowing."
Other ACLU officials predicted the ruling will deter government employees from speaking out about wrongdoing for fear of losing their jobs.
So now it is even easier for the Bush administration to attack whistle blowers. As we are now plunging ever deeper into what can really only be described as the beginnings of a police state, this is one more blow people trying to keep the government honest.
CNN.com - A reporter's shock at the Haditha allegations - May 30, 2006
And so began the e-mails and phone calls between myself and my two other CNN crew members, Jennifer Eccleston and Gabe Ramirez: Do you remember when we were talking with the battalion commander and his intel guy right outside the school and then half an hour later they found an IED in that spot? Do you remember when we were sitting chatting with them at the school? And all the other "do you remember whens."
There was also -- can you believe it? -- the allegations of the Haditha probe.
This is exactly why the government has started to embed journalists.
I went on countless operations in 2005 up and down the Euphrates River Valley. I was pinned on rooftops with them in Ubeydi for hours taking incoming fire, and I've seen them not fire a shot back because they did not have positive identification on a target.
I saw their horror when they thought that they finally had identified their target, fired a tank round that went through a wall and into a house filled with civilians. They then rushed to help the wounded -- remarkably no one was killed.
The journalists are now part of the group. Not only can embedded journalists be controlled, it is easy to limit who they talk to and what they talk about. It also makes them very unlikely to talk to random locals. But, it also bonds them to the units they are attached to. This plants doubt, much the way your heard from Scott Peterson's former friends and coaches about how good a person he is and how he never could have killed is wife. You now have journalists in that role.
This weekend was effectively our wedding anniversary. We've actually been married for 6+ months longer then our anniversary date would indicate, also, the date isn't right, however, we decided that our anniversary would always be on memorial day. It was the day we met and the day that we had our wedding (also it gets me out of having to memorize another date!).
One might wonder how a newly married couple with a baby celebrates their one year anniversary. We did it by having a family weekend (well, Sunday and Monday). We went on walks, watched TV, took naps together, and played with Kathryn. We ate our last bit of wedding cake and shared the frosting with the baby. We also drank without baby a bottle of Champagne we saved from the wedding since Tonya couldn't drink at the wedding (as she was pregnant at the time!). The only low point of the weekend was a failed attempt to rescue a young domestic bunny we found on our walk.
Kathryn is just starting to take to non-bottle food. However, when she is hungry she doesn't have the patients for non-bottle food (no patients - I can't imaging where she gets that from!).
We saw a small bunny eating the plants next to the side walk on our walk on Sunday. At first I figured it was a young jackrabbit since, up in Folsom they are EVERYWHERE and it had a natural sandy color to its fur. However, it didn't run away or even freeze as we got close, when we got too close it moved but not in a panic just sort of to keep its distance (it didn't want to be more then 1.5 - 2 feet close to us. It was at this point Tonya noticed that it had a chain around its neck. We spent the next hour and a half trying to catch it. It spent most of the time hiding under a bmw that was just low enough we couldn't get to the chain or the scruff of its neck. It would eat from out hands and even let us pet it but nobody could snatch it up. During this time the number of people swelled to 6 trying to catch the bunny. A couple from the neighborhood, Tonya, Kathryn and I, and a nice young Indian woman (she even went to her house to get baby carrots to use as bait). The plan was to catch it and I would bring it home and keep it in a box with food and water for a few days to get in touch with one of the many bunny rescue orgs, but alas, the quick like a bunny is one of the nature similes that is true (in contrast to blind as a bat). We never did catch it. I just hope the owner finds it soon!
"Blade Runner" replicated on DVD again - Yahoo! News
The director's cut first came out on DVD before optimal formatting standards had been established, said Doug Pratt, editor of the DVD-LaserDisc Newsletter.
"Shortly afterwards, it went into moratorium. The early adopters who bought the title have long since wished to see it upgraded, while other fans, who came into DVDs later on, have been unable to find it at all. It is the only 'big' sci-fi spectacle currently unavailable on DVD," Pratt said.
I'm one of the few early adopters of DVD who owns Blade Runner. Actually, when I bought it there was almost nothing else out on DVD so I didn't have much choice. However, I definately want the new boxed set with all three versions of the movie. I don't even remember what the theatrical release was like. The ending was totally different but that is all I remember. It will be interesting to see what is different in the latest directors cut.
UPDATE: m pointed out that this is a strange release given that HD-DVD and BluRay are knocking on the door. I see two things 1) nothing says that when they say DVD they mean only DVD and not both DVD and high definition DVD (HDDVD and/or BluRay) 2) HD-DVD and BluRay suck! They are expensive and heavily encumbered with DRM. I think consumers are going to be less into both formats the more they get into iPod video and other portable devices. That doesn't even mention movie jukeboxes and the like which are by design broken by both new disk formats. I wouldn't be surprised if just like every other media format Sony has ever tried to drive, it crashes into the nearest trees charring the skin of all early adopters (Beta, MiniDisk, MemoryStick, UMD, and others...).
It remains to be seen if BluRay will be the destruction of the playstation legacy. I personally think it will. It has already driven the playstation cost to the level of failures like NeoGeo (Hey sony, when you say people will pay for the highend console, you should learn your history. Several well featured but expensive game consoles were beaten up and had there lunch money stolen by less expensive less featured consoles!)
This really should be a separate entry on BluRay and HD-DVD but I'm saving that for some time in the future when both are actually available.
What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraception for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for anyone--even for that poor 13-year-old pregnant girl in a group home in Florida. I would really like to hear the persuasive argument that this middle-schooler with no home and no family would have been better off giving birth against her will, and that the State of Florida, which totally failed to keep her safe, should have been allowed, against its own laws, to compel this child to bear a child. She was too young to have sex, too young to know her own mind about abortion--but not too young to be forced onto the delivery table for one of the most painful experiences human beings endure, in which the risk of death for her was three times as great as in abortion. Ah, Christian compassion! Christian sadism, more likely. It was the courts that showed humanity when they let the girl terminate her pregnancy.
This is an unabashidly leftist view of the HPV vaccine and the fact that the right doesn't want you to have it.
Student faces expulsion for Web post
The student's mother said the district suspended her son for 10 days for inappropriate comments and vague threats. She thinks the school is overreacting. "I asked, 'If this is such a serious threat, did you call the FBI?' They said, 'No, we don't have time for this.' I asked, 'Did you call the Joliet police?' and they said, 'no.'"
Schools these days scare me. There are innumerable cases of schoold suspending or expelling kids for non-school activities and it just seems to be getting worse. This article doesn't point to the students blog but it does indicate that the student did NOT threaten violent behavior or in anyway organizing against the school. IT appears he simple expressed negative opinions about the school in a general way.
Skepticism surrounds NSA mining records - Yahoo! News
Such uncertainty makes George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove disregard surveys such as the May 12 Washington Post-ABC News poll that found 63 percent of Americans supporting the call database as an anti-terrorism tactic.
"No one is asked in the polls, `Would you approve of anything the government can do with your information? Is it OK that the government engages in various forms of snooping into your life that you would not be told or informed about?'" said Solove, author of "The Digital Person." "It's hard to really opine on something you don't know all the details of."
This is largely an article about social network analysis not being usefull on raw data with no starting point, however it covers some interesting broader issues.
However, with a seed point you don't need everyones call logs. The phone company already has that and you can supena them or get a warrent from the FISA court, you can even do it first and get the warrent later under FISA. Pregathering all this data at the NSA (who has a record of freely sharing ALL its data with all other excutive organizations) is just an excuse to hold more information and bring us closer to the republican orwellian police state.
Wired News: Whistle-Blower's Evidence, Uncut
Wired news has decided to release the entire contents of the evidence they were able to gather on the EFF vs ATT lawsuit.
Ledger-Enquirer | 05/18/2006 | Juvenile Court to handle sodomy charge
"She (her daughter) never did say how it first occurred. She came home with a book explaining how to do things, a book she bought. I was cleaning her room and found the book under the bed," the mother said. "I made her get rid of the book. Even a teacher took it away from her in class and returned it to her. I asked why they didn't call me and let me come pick up the book."
The mother said her daughter left the Web site Myspace.com on the home computer and she noticed information about such relationships on the site.
She said her daughter is "angry and confused" and going through therapy but is getting better.
So basically this mother is freaking out that her daughter is either experimenting or is a lesbian. This is exactly the kind of thing that bothers me about statutory rape type laws. Now the "perpetrator" is probably going to labled a sex offender for at least the rest of her teen years. She may even have to register for the rest of her life depending on how the judge feel about monosexuals.
UPDATE: Based on the fact that this is being handled by Juvenile court I suspect that the "perp" is 15 or 16. If she were 17 or definately 18 this would be an issue for the adult courts (from the artical: "Because both were juveniles, Boswell said he can release very little information about the case and that the charges will be handled through Russell County Juvenile Court."). Consentual sodomy was overturned however, sodomy as rape is still alive and good. Many states rape laws are very specific about what constitutes rape and have sodomy laws for things other then vaginal intercourse.
Wired News: AT&T Whistle-Blower's Evidence
I've posted the entire wired story in the extended just incase AT&T succeds at getting the geni back in the bottle. (AT&T is trying to have the information withdrawn and squashed from the court case.)
Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the company, which alleges that AT&T illegally cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic-surveillance program.
In this recently surfaced statement, Klein details his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T office in San Francisco, and offers his interpretation of company documents that he believes support his case.
For its part, AT&T is asking a federal judge to keep those documents out of court, and to order the EFF to return them to the company. Here Wired News presents Klein's statement in its entirety, along with select pages from the AT&T documents.
AT&T's Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens
31 December 2005
I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it's been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.
AT&T Deploys Government Spy Gear on WorldNet Network
-- 16 January, 2004
In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.
The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it, and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties last year:
"As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant." The New York Times, 9 November 2002
To mollify critics, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) spokesmen have repeatedly asserted that they are only conducting "research" using "artificial synthetic data" or information from "normal DOD intelligence channels" and hence there are "no U.S. citizen privacy implications" (Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General report on TIA, December 12, 2003). They also changed the name of the program to "Terrorism Information Awareness" to make it more politically palatable. But feeling the heat, Congress made a big show of allegedly cutting off funding for TIA in late 2003, and the political fallout resulted in Adm. Poindexter's abrupt resignation last August. However, the fine print reveals that Congress eliminated funding only for "the majority of the TIA components," allowing several "components" to continue (DOD, ibid). The essential hardware elements of a TIA-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into "real world" telecommunications offices.
In San Francisco the "secret room" is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service, part of the latter's vital "Common Backbone." In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the "secret room" on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The "secret room" itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.
The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the "secret room," which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room. In practice this has meant that only one management-level technician works in there. Ironically, the one who set up the room was laid off in late 2003 in one of the company's endless "downsizings," but he was quickly replaced by another.
Plans for the "secret room" were fully drawn up by December 2002, curiously only four months after Darpa started awarding contracts for TIA. One 60-page document, identified as coming from "AT&T Labs Connectivity & Net Services" and authored by the labs' consultant Mathew F. Casamassima, is titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco and dated 12/10/02. (See sample PDF 1-4.) This document addresses the special problem of trying to spy on fiber-optic circuits. Unlike copper wire circuits which emit electromagnetic fields that can be tapped into without disturbing the circuits, fiber-optic circuits do not "leak" their light signals. In order to monitor such communications, one has to physically cut into the fiber somehow and divert a portion of the light signal to see the information.
This problem is solved with "splitters" which literally split off a percentage of the light signal so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet referred to above: Circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the "secret room." The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform -- in fact it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter -- its only purpose is to enable a third party to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the internet.
The above-referenced document includes a diagram (PDF 3) showing the splitting of the light signal, a portion of which is diverted to "SG3 Secure Room," i.e., the so-called "Study Group" spy room. Another page headlined "Cabinet Naming" (PDF 2) lists not only the "splitter" cabinet but also the equipment installed in the "SG3" room, including various Sun devices, and Juniper M40e and M160 "backbone" routers. PDF file 4 shows one of many tables detailing the connections between the "splitter" cabinet on the 7th floor (location 070177.04) and a cabinet in the "secret room" on the 6th floor (location 060903.01). Since the San Francisco "secret room" is numbered 3, the implication is that there are at least several more in other cities (Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego are some of the rumored locations), which likely are spread across the United States.
One of the devices in the "Cabinet Naming" list is particularly revealing as to the purpose of the "secret room": a Narus STA 6400. Narus is a 7-year-old company which, because of its particular niche, appeals not only to businessmen (it is backed by AT&T, JP Morgan and Intel, among others) but also to police, military and intelligence officials. Last November 13-14, for instance, Narus was the "Lead Sponsor" for a technical conference held in McLean, Virginia, titled "Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception and Internet Surveillance." Police officials, FBI and DEA agents, and major telecommunications companies eager to cash in on the "war on terror" had gathered in the hometown of the CIA to discuss their special problems. Among the attendees were AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Sprint and Verizon. Narus founder, Dr. Ori Cohen, gave a keynote speech. So what does the Narus STA 6400 do?
"The (Narus) STA Platform consists of stand-alone traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message.... These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP (internet service provider) cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device" (Telecommunications magazine, April 2000). A Narus press release (1 Dec., 1999) also boasts that its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology "captures comprehensive customer usage data ... and transforms it into actionable information.... (It) is the only technology that provides complete visibility for all internet applications."
To implement this scheme, WorldNet's high-speed data circuits already in service had to be rerouted to go through the special "splitter" cabinet. This was addressed in another document of 44 pages from AT&T Labs, titled "SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure," dated 01/13/03 (PDF 5-6). "SIMS" is an unexplained reference to the secret room. Part of this reads as follows:
"A WMS (work) Ticket will be issued by the AT&T Bridgeton Network Operation Center (NOC) to charge time for performing the work described in this procedure document....
"This procedure covers the steps required to insert optical splitters into select live Common Backbone (CBB) OC3, OC12 and OC48 optical circuits."
The NOC referred to is in Bridgeton, Missouri, and controls WorldNet operations. (As a sign that government spying goes hand-in-hand with union-busting, the entire (Communication Workers of America) Local 6377 which had jurisdiction over the Bridgeton NOC was wiped out in early 2002 when AT&T fired the union work force and later rehired them as nonunion "management" employees.) The cut-in work was performed in 2003, and since then new circuits are connected through the "splitter" cabinet.
Another "Cut-In and Test Procedure" document dated January 24, 2003, provides diagrams of how AT&T Core Network circuits were to be run through the "splitter" cabinet (PDF 7). One page lists the circuit IDs of key Peering Links which were "cut-in" in February 2003 (PDF 8), including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, AboveNet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet and Mae West. By the way, Mae West is one of two key internet nodal points in the United States (the other, Mae East, is in Vienna, Virginia). It's not just WorldNet customers who are being spied on -- it's the entire internet.
The next logical question is, what central command is collecting the data sent by the various "secret rooms"? One can only make educated guesses, but perhaps the answer was inadvertently given in the DOD Inspector General's report (cited above):
"For testing TIA capabilities, Darpa and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) created an operational research and development environment that uses real-time feedback. The main node of TIA is located at INSCOM (in Fort Belvoir, Virginia)…."
Among the agencies participating or planning to participate in the INSCOM "testing" are the "National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the DOD Counterintelligence Field Activity, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Special Operations Command, the Joint Forces Command and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center." There are also "discussions" going on to bring in "non-DOD federal agencies" such as the FBI.
This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!
Some jurors saw Moussaoui as minor in 9/11: report - Yahoo! News
The juror told the Post he was one of three people on the panel who wrote a "mitigating factor" on the verdict form, saying that Moussaoui, 37, had "limited knowledge" of the September 11 plot.
"He may have been part of a parallel operation, a second wave of attacks but he wasn't anywhere close to flying a plane on 9/11," the juror said.
I'm still trying to figure out how he even qualifies for life in prison. From the publicly available information he is guilty of obstruction of justice, and MAYBE conspiracy to commit murder. However, his actual connection to 9/11/2001 seems tenuous. Especially given how hard the prosocution tried to make the case that meerly knowing there was going to be an attack without any of the details that they seem unable to prove Moussaoui knew, would have prevented the attack.
He is a despicable person. (One that I'm not all together convinced isn't mentally ill.) However, that shouldn't qualify him for life in prison or execution. After all I think our president and most of his cronies are despicable people but that alone doesn't qualify them for perminent loss of freedom. In this country we aren't supposed to lock people up just because we don't like what they have to say or what they think or even what they want to do. We are only supposed to lock people up for what they do.
To me this case was largely about holding someone accountable. Even if it was someone who only knew it was going to happen (IIRC he didn't even actually know when/where it was going to specifically happen just that it was going to.) The governement has failed to capture the masterminds behind this attack or the attacks in Iraq (notice how many times they have captured the 2nd most important Alqaeda in Iraq?) so they needed to hang someone, especially now that most of the country knows that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11/2001.
The good news to me are these lines:
He also told the newspaper that a number of jurors questioned whether "the death penalty is really an appropriate punishment for lying."
...
"It was very difficult to hear. It was like attending one funeral after another for days on end," he said. "But we had to move beyond our own emotions and really focus on the law."
However, I would have felt better if this sentiment had been at the original tial not the sentencing trial. Because unlike in movies like The Rock we aren't supposed to lock people up as a preventative measure.
Cash's final song to appear on "American V" - Yahoo! News
Due July 4 via American Recordings/Lost Highway, the album was recorded with producer Rick Rubin in the months leading up to Cash's September 2003 passing.
"These songs are Johnny's final statement," Rubin said in a statement. "They are the truest reflection of the music that was central to his life at the time. This is the music that Johnny wanted us to hear."
The final American album. Given how good the other four are this isn't going to be hard sell for me.