A random observation. ‘hypocrisy’ is a word many people do not know how to spell.

Why haven’t I pointed to this interview of Jessica Littman on digital copyright yet? Oh, that’s right, because lots of other stuff has been going on.

Snopes.com already has a page up on the list of songs supposedly banned by Clear Channel. My entry yesterday was not fundamentally incorrect (I correctly avoided the use of the word “banned”), but this article makes it clear where the list originated and that there was nothing nefarious about it.

I just wanted to say that I’ve been very encouraged by the job Bush and his foreign policy team have been doing in building an international coalition before any action against our attackers. Not only will having a large coalition behind our actions give them more legitimacy, but I believe that our desire to preserve the coalition will force us to be smarter about the actions we do take against whoever it is we take action against. Going off half cocked and invading Afghanistan will instantly blow up any coalition that includes Muslim countries, so it’s good to have them in the coalition.

Andrew Brown’s article on fighting terrorism is the best I’ve read so far. Very pragmatic and wise.

I’m looking for information (especially case studies) on the type of data warehousing and data mining performed at credit card companies. If you know of any good resources, please send me email.

You might have heard that Clear Channel Communications, the corporate monster that is gobbling up and homogenizing radio stations around the country, has created a list of inappropriate songs that shouldn’t be played in the wake of the terrorist attack. E! Online has a list of the songs that they’ve recommended not be played. Eric Boehlert wrote an excellent series of articles for Salon on Clear Channel earlier this year.

Meet the most disgusting woman in the world: Laili Helms. Helms, the niece of corrupt former CIA director Richard Helms, lives in suburban splendor in New Jersey, and acts as the unofficial ambassador for the Taliban in the United States. While the women of Afghanistan live under conditions of unbelievable repression, she does PR work for their oppressors. It shouldn’t surprise you that she doesn’t share the lifestyle of the Afghani women whose treatment she attempts to justify.

Dan Gillmor now states that he will no longer open email attachments at all. It’s not an insane stance to take at this point, but it really sucks that virus writers have put users in this predicament. Email attachments are useful. Hell, sometimes even executable attachments are useful. In this case, the computing monoculture is what’s to blame, not Microsoft, per se. If we all used Linux on our desktop and mutt as our email client, somebody would write shell script attachments which read our mutt address books and sent the results to everybody. Yeah, there are some huge security holes in Outlook that make the lives of virus writers easier, but the big problem here is user cluelessness and the fact that there are people out there willing to write email viruses. What’s really galling is that you can’t even tell people to only open attachments from people they trust due to the address book hijacking. Maybe getting rid of attachments altogether is the best option. Another option might be requiring people to cryptographically sign email with attachments in order to get them past your email server. Of course, on an alternate track, people are working their asses off to limit our access to crypto software. What a fun world.

America’s Tragedy as seen by the World