According to The Register, a cracker going by the name of Beale Screamer cracked Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management scheme. The crack program, source code, an explanation of the crack, and a philosophical statement are all downloadable (in a single convenient archive) from the article. You can also download it from Cryptome now.

Charles Paul Freund suggests that we play on the widespread belief in the Islamic world that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks to portray Osama bin Laden as a Zionist agent (reader-submitted link), thus discrediting him among Muslims. It’s kind of interesting to think about as an intellectual exercise, but a bad idea to put into practice.

Israel is attempting to equivocate the assassination of Rehavam Zeevi by the PFLP with the attack on America on 9/11, and thus justify their attempt to topple the Palestinian Authority as being morally equivalent to our efforts to oust the Taliban to get to Osama bin Laden. This despite the fact that the “targetted killing” of Zeevi was a direct outgrowth of Israel’s own policy of “targetted killings” of what Palestinians refer to as activists and what Israel refers to as terrorists. Clearly the killing of Zeevi was wrong and unjustifiable, but to compare it to the unprovoked murder of thousands of innocents is disgusting.

This turn of events should also serve as a warning to those in the U.S. government who would seek to eliminate the law banning assassinations. The extra-judicial killing of non-combatants is not only barbaric, but also gives the other parties involved license to assassinate as well. Going back to a world where we simply kill those political figures around the world who we don’t get along with leads us right back to politics based on the law of the jungle. Examining the fact that Israel is already using our actions in Afghanistan to justify escalating their attacks on Palestinians should illustrate pretty well what sort of conduct American assassinations would inspire. I imagine that in every corner of the world, governments would treat assassinations by Americans as carte blanche to behave however they wish.

Someone wrote that the thing that makes Superman interesting is that he’s just a man, but because he’s so powerful, he must behave better than other men. I see the United States as being in the same position. Whether we like it or not we weild more power, and more importantly, more influence than any other country in the world. Other countries really do gauge their own actions by ours. At the same time, we face all of the same stresses that other countries do — we have our own domestic problems and our own domestic threats. Even so, we must strive for real justice and perceived justice. It’s our responsibility.

In honor of my own misadventures with VBScript today, a link to APress’s birthday card for VB’s 10th.

Today I’m writing an example for a book that retrieves XML documents from a database and parses them using the DOM. The catch is that I’m it in ASP, and I’ve never used ASP before. I’ve been surprisingly successful — I wonder if I can put ASP on my resume now?

This article (link submitted by a reader) mentions $100,000 funneled from a Pakistani terrorist to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack, but does not mention former Pakistan intelligence chief General Mahmud Ahmad by name. (I asked earlier for links corroberating a story I read in the India Times.)

The Oakland airport is going to deploy face-recognition technology in order to attempt to catch terrorists and criminals. Bruce Schneier has already explained why this probably won’t work.

Several Medecines sans Frotieres warehouses in Taliban-controlled areas have been looted in the last week, disrupting the distribution of aid to the Afghan people. The Taliban already kicked all foreign aid workers out of the country, now it looks like they’re raiding the stores of aid supplies that those agencies left behind for distribution by their Afghan employees. (Just saw a link to this article from the Guardian at Dangerousmeta about the Taliban seizing two UN food warehouses, too. When you’re stealing from international aid organizations that are providing aid to your country in the first place, you’re at the end of your rope. In even more recent news, the Taliban have returned at least one of the food warehouses to UN control.)

The BBC is reporting that friction is increasing between the Arab Afghans and the regular old Afghans. If the Arab Afghans go, then the Taliban goes with them. If these reports are true, then it also means that the Bush administration’s strategy in Afghanistan is working as designed. The question that remains is whether we or our allies can get the people of Afghanistan to agree to support a some sort of representative government that’s not interested in persecuting other ethnic groups or letting the country descend into lawlessness.

Microsoft has decided to blame the victim for their public humiliation at the hands of people who write viruses and worms that take advantage of their software. According to Microsoft flack Scott Culp, security professionals (link from Medley) bear responsibility for the attacks because they publicize security holes in Microsoft software and explain what, exactly, those security holes are. I think this pretty clearly illustrates why Microsoft’s products have so many security holes in the first place — the company’s employees refuse to take responsibility for their poor design decisions and inadequate testing.