Anne Applebaum explains why French voters turned to the Francophone version of Pat Buchanan in the general elections last week.

Dan Gillmor on privacy. One of the easiest things you can do is not give your money to companies that don’t take your privacy seriously. Yeah, it may make things more inconvenient for you, but it’s a question of where your priorities are.

Bug 92997 for Mozilla is particularly interesting. It’s a tracking bug that has dependencies on all of the bugs that make Mozilla advocacy harder — in other words, all of the bugs that make Mozilla look dumb.

Salon has an interview today with Robert Young Pelton today. Pelton is an author everybody should be familiar with. He’s most famous for writing the quasi-travel guide The World’s Most Dangerous Places (which I read cover to cover a few years ago) and for roaming around the world from war zone to war zone hanging out with unsavory characters of all kinds. Anyway, his take on what’s going on in Afghanistan and in the war on terror is definitely worth reading. It’s not the end all and be all, but it’s a perspective worth absorbing.

John Brewer: Some Useful Free Software for Java Developers. I use most of the tools on his list, except for the testing stuff, which I really ought to be using.

I pass this along without comment.

Bruce Sterling’s closing speech from CFP 2002. (I haven’t read it yet.)

So Gates testified today. Alas, it seems to have been uninteresting. I haven’t tracked down a transcript yet. His written testimony is here, and 155 pages long.

Janelle Brown has a long article at Salon today on drug testing in schools. She looked at schools that have implemented drug testing programs, and the anecdotal evidence she collected seems to indicate that it isn’t working.

For the files: more proof that the entertainment industry hates its customers.