Anil says that Smart Tags don’t work the way Walter Mossberg says they do. His telling is very inconsistent with Mossberg’s, which states that he saw links created by Smart Tags on a page at the Washington Post web site. Mossberg also quotes people at Microsoft saying that they will provide a way for publishers to turn off Smart Tags on their sites using a meta tag. I’m still awaiting the final word on this.

Coming back to the Robert Scheer column that everybody is probably already tired of. I reread it again today (the whole thing), and was wrong in dismissing it as fiction. It is true that the Taliban have been cracking down on opium poppy farmers in Afghanistan at the behest of both the UN and the United States (Scheer mentions only the US in his column). It is also true that the Taliban have attempted to justify the ban in religious terms, even though they were in the opium biz until they announced the ban in order to get Western drug dollars. Of course it’s true that the Taliban regime is brutal and repressive in just about every way you can imagine. The problem with the column is that there are some obvious, easily verifiable errors of fact that make it difficult not to dismiss the whole thing.

The New York Times review of the Iron Chef 21st Century Battle is excellent. For what it’s worth, I’m almost certain that the outcome was preordained.

According to Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is going to include their Smart Tags functionality from Office XP in the version of Internet Explorer that ships with Windows XP. It will scan Web pages that you view, and add links to Microsoft properties to certain words and phrases on the page. I imagine this would invoke a major fit from other companies publishing content on the Web, I wonder if Microsoft cares?

The record companys’ vision of how online music should work is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I can understand why they hated and feared Napster, but then why did they strike a deal with them? What value does Napster have if the music being shared is protected? Why would I share files through Napster that people can’t listen to without paying for them somewhere? And then there’s the whole other matter of people still not being able to create files that can’t be copied anyway.

Here’s a useful article for XMLheads: W3C XML Schema Made Simple. I’ve been using XML for a number of applications, but I have not yet dared to create a DTD or a schema for any of it.

jwz weighs in again on AOL and Netscape. He’s right.

This article from 1998 seems to indicate that the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention struck a 10 year deal with the Taliban to destroy opium poppy crops in exchange for $25 million a year. If this agreement was reached (and from what I’ve read, Afghanistan is cracking down hard on opium poppy farmers), then it’s actually the UN that is putting the drug war ahead of human rights concerns. (I still don’t know whether the US is also paying off the Taliban.)

More details keep coming in about the Robert Scheer column in The Nation that accuses the Bush administration of giving $43 million to the Taliban. I knew on Monday that Scheer had made an error of fact in stating that the U.S. gave $43 million to the Taliban in drug aid. Anyway, it turns out that Scheer was completely and totally off base. Brian Carnell of LeftWatch.com sent me an email with a pointer to his essay that dissects Scheer’s column, and also to a CNN story that describes the nature of the aid and how it will be distributed (by the UN). Bad Robert Scheer, bad. Anyway, this still doesn’t clear up the increasingly cloudy issue of whether we are giving drug war dollars to the Taliban, but that doesn’t change the fact that Scheer’s column was fiction.

The EFF is joining with Princeton professor Ed Felten to sue the RIAA and SDMI for violating his First Amendment rights by preventing him from publishing his research on the schemes SDMI uses to protect music files. The U.S. government is also included as a defendant in the suit because the DMCA is also being challenged. I really, really need to cough up the bucks to join the EFF.