Remember the predictions made by some people that enemies are needed to justify spending outrageous amounts of money on missile defense? Well, the shoe is dropping. Dubya broke the news to South Korea’s president that we’ll be abandoning arms reduction talks with North Korea. Pathetic.

It looks like Bush’s faith based charities plan is in all likelihood doomed to fail. The reason is that people from certain religions can’t stand it if people from other religions also get money.

I missed The Merchants of Cool on Frontline this week (stupid, stupid, stupid), but the Web site is a pretty amazing resource. I’ve only just started sifting through it.

Perl, the language of choice for people who want to express banned algorithms in as little code as possible. A couple of Perl hackers have rewritten DeCSS in 7 lines of Perl, and many people are now including the code in their email signatures. Let the MPAA put that in their pipe and smoke it.

The guys at Aimster are using judo against the record companies by protecting themselves using the DMCA. Basically, they’re encrypting their communications so that if the record companies attempt to circumvent that encryption, they’ll be in violation of the DMCA — a law that recording industry wanted very badly. I wish we could come up with more ways to bludgeon industry with the consumer-unfriendly laws that they’re always spending big bucks to get pushed through Congress.

Here’s the reassuring email I received from Bibliofind this morning concerning the compromise of their credit card database.

Do people really only believe 9% of what they read online and 16% of what they read in newspapers? I find it hard to believe, given the number of people who get burnt by stock fraud when they act on tips read on investor message boards.

There was an interesting story on NPR this morning about a guy who turned the human DNA sequence into music by assigning notes to the proteins that make up DNA. The music was actually quite interesting to listen to.

Man, the credit card numbers of 98,000 Bibliofind customers were compromised when the site was cracked recently. Ugly. I shopped there awhile back, and I’m hoping that they removed my data from the system before the attack.

MacWeek is finally dead. It suffered the indignity of ceasing to exist as a print publication awhile back, and now even the web presence is gone. RIP.