Salon Premium has an article today about a last minute blockade of the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which includes outrageous mandates things like a ban on forced marriage and full legal and property rights for women. The treaty has already been signed by 169 countries, and awaits ratification by countries like Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and the United States. Apparently right wingers oppose the treaty for some reason that I don’t comprehend, so John Ashcroft (perhaps at the behest of the White House), is blocking the treaty by requesting postponements so that the Justice Department can “review” it (despite the fact that the treaty was originally submitted to the Senate in 1980).

The closest the article comes to explaining why anybody opposes the treaty is these paragraphs:

Of course, the Christian right doesn’t see it that way. “We are the most powerful nation in the world, we are the most democratic nation in the world,” says Janice Crouse, another Bush delegate to the U.N. Children’s Summit and a senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, a Washington group that works on Christian women’s issues. “We are good neighbors. We are a country that is not self-centered in the way we help others, and I don’t think we owe an apology to other countries when we say [the treaty] is not in our best interest and we don’t believe it’s in your best interest.”

The answers to the problems faced by women in the developing world are in the Bible, Crouse says. And while the Bible doesn’t apply to life in Muslim societies, she says, “it could.” She calls the treaty an agent of a “frivolous and morally corrupt agenda,” saying it would “legalize prostitution and open the door for the homosexual agenda.” She says it even attacks Mother’s Day.

Whatever, idiots.

Zimran makes the obvious but necessary point that a government committee can’t possibly set a fair price for broadcasting songs over the Internet, or anything else, really. Didn’t we learn this from nearly every failed economy in the twentieth century? Let the Web radio folks negotiate deals with the people they want the broadcast, and whether the price comes out higher or lower, at least we’ll know it is, in some sense, fair.

Newsweek has an article on Microsoft’s new security architecture for their operating system, Palladium. It sounds like an amalgam of public key encryption, digital rights management, and security implemented in hardware. A lot of this stuff is well known and well understood, but it remains to be seen how it will all work together in Microsoft’s world. When I read about things (like DRM) being implemented in hardware, I tend to freak out. I really don’t want anybody controlling what happens on my home PC but me. (Via Hack the Planet.)

The bill the administration drafted that would create the Department of Homeland Security also eliminates the protection normally accorded whistleblowers and exempts the new department from the Freedom of Information Act, according to this Washington Times article. I don’t think I need to rant about just how stupid that is. (Via Talking Points Memo.)

The New York Times has an article today on L’Effroyable Imposture, the book by French author Thierry Messyan, that claims that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by American right wingers who wanted to manufacture wars in the Middle East for the purpose of getting at oil reserves. The book has sold very well in France, despite the fact that the French press has shredded it repeatedly.

One thing I love about America is that I think we’re much less susceptible to such theories than our counterparts around the world. When Italy lost to South Korea in the World Cup, it was widely believed that the game was fixed by FIFA. The Arabs I know believe that the reason Israel gets more positive press in America than they do is that the Jews control the US media. The French are in love with the idea that 9/11 was the product of a secret conspiracy, not by well known Islamist terrorists but by some shadow group here in the US. The list goes on and on and on.

Sure, there are Americans who see conspiracies everywhere they go, but they’re really fringe elements in our society. I think that the reason that Americans don’t go in for that sort of thing is that our culture ingraines in us a belief that we are in control of our own destiny. On the other hand, in many other (older) cultures, belief in conspiracy takes the place of belief in some sort of higher power that meddles in everyday affairs. People can’t accept that things happen for mechanistic reasons, so they instead cede any responsibility society might have for what goes on to some sort of shadow power that really controls things.

I have to say that it frustrates me to an incredible degree. This pathology explains why groups like the Palestinians are in many ways utterly defeated. Rather than looking at the situation and thinking about what they can do right now to make things better, they blame Jewish conspiracies for everything happening right now and hold out hope that Allah is going to bail them out in the end. It’s a problem I don’t know how to solve, or even if there is a solution.

When Sun came up with JSPs, it was pretty obvious that they were a Java-centric takeoff on Microsoft’s ASP. Reading this migration guide for users moving from ASP to ASP.NET, it looks like Microsoft is stealing many of the good ideas from JSP and putting them into ASP.NET. Isn’t competition a wonderful thing?

This is news only because I find it so odd. Both Adobe and Macromedia are taking a pass on MacWorld in New York this summer. Granted, neither of those companies really need to evangelize those products to the Mac community, but it’s still strange to see major players like that blow off that show.

Everything looked good for webcasters when CARP threw out their proposed rate structure that would basically put an end to webcasting. Unfortunately, the new rates they’ve come up with will still put many webcasters out of business. I guess people will just have to download exactly the songs they want to hear from file swapping services rather than settling for listening to whatever happens to be on Web radio. (You can read more about the decision at the RAIN site.)

If you’re running Apache, you probably need to install the latest version, because there’s a big exploitable hole in all but the most recent versions of Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0 on all platforms.

I finally got my first Amazon Gold Box. Unfortunately, I was offered a garlic press, a vacuum cleaner, a rapid wine chiller, a fancy corkscrew, and a bread maker. Why not a nice La Creuset pan or a cool set of headphones? Oh well, even though I wasn’t offered anything I wanted, I was relieved to finally see the damn thing.