Earlier this week Salon’s new tech correspondent (and former Wired Newsperson) Farhad Manjoo wrote a great, sceptical article about the use of steganography by terrorists. One question I have about steganography is where the encoding and decoding software comes from. Are there off the shelf steganography software packages? If not, who’s writing it for al-Qaida. We find bomb making workshops, and chemical weapons workshops, and training videos, but we have yet to find al-Qaida’s IT department. Of course, the software-writing terrorists could be anywhere in the world, exchanging encrypted data (perhaps even using steganography), but it seems odd to me that we have not heard of any proprietary, terrorist-specific software installed on computers that we’ve found in the possession of terrorists.

Remember when AOL “acquired” Time Warner? It looks like the shoe is now on the other foot. AOL is now a division run by a Time, Inc executive, and AOL is looking like it’s not doing anything more than dragging down what used to be Time Warner. There’s even talk that Time Warner will wind up spinning off AOL due to its poor performance.

Salon: Deregulation’s big lie (Katharine Mieszkowski interviews Robert McChesney on telecom deregulation).

So, some company called Forgent is starting to seek licensing fees for the patent on JPEG compression they acquired with Compression Labs. The interesting point is buried in the fourth paragraph of the press release:

Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent’s IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue.

Basically, a law firm figured out that Forgent had a patent that could turn into a gold mine, and is financing the company’s attempt to seek licensing fees from everyone who’s using JPEG right now.

The crappy economy has been affecting me on a personal level for the past couple of days, hence the sporadic updates. No worries, I’m still employed, but things have been rather hectic. You can expect the percentage of posts that are vituperative in nature to remain high until things become more relaxed in these parts. I blog, therefore I vent.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that in order to effect “regime change” in Iraq, we need the support of the Kurds in the north of the country. Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned before, we basically let the Kurds die on the vine after they rose up against Saddam right after the first Gulf War, so they’re not likely to trust us that much. The other problem we face is that our ally Turkey, whose cooperation we need to go to war with Iraq, has its own problems with the Kurds and does not want to see the creation of an independent Kurdistan under any circumstances. They fear that if northern Iraq becomes Kurdistan, the Kurds that make up the majority of the population in eastern Turkey would quite sensibly want to secede and join the new Kurdish country, being that the Turks oppress them horribly. So the United States is promising Turkey that there will be no Kurdistan … I don’t know what we’re promising the Kurds. It sure seems to me though that we’re setting up quite a house of cards here. If we do go to war with Iraq, when it’s all said and done it’s almost a guarantee that we’ll have conned somebody.

So earlier this week the Senate unanimously passes a corporate reform bill that would create a new agency for overseeing auditors and punish various corporate criminals more harshly. Unsurprisingly, House Republicans are trying to stymie the bill because it would hurt their big donors. None of this surprises me or is even that interesting to me. What I do find interesting is that even though there’s a landslide of public support for smacking around the corporate criminals that have put the economy in the toilet, the Republicans are risking political capital to protect their friends who have the money. When there was a landslide of political support for fighting terrorism, these same reptiles in Congress lined up dutifully behind the moronic Patriot Act and screwed us all. None of this surprises me, but it’s worth remembering in November.

Yesterday, the House approved the CSEA bill (yet another computer crime bill) nearly unanimously. It provides for life sentences for people who do really bad stuff (my description of the level of offense required is about as accurate as the one in the bill).

Harold Evans asks why the media ignored the various Bush business scandals during the 2000 campaign. It’s a great question. I knew of every scandal listed in Evans’ story long before Bush became President — I doubt that’s true of most people, all of whom certainly knew that Gore was a serial fibber.

A special anti-terrorism court in Pakistan has found four men guilty in the Daniel Pearl murder case, and sentenced one of them to death. Because journalists were not permitted in court, there’s really no way to see how strong the evidence in the case was, or what was revealed during the case. I have no doubt that these guys got the sentences they earned, but I would be willing to bet that there were other people around who masterminded the kidnapping, perhaps people in the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service). This quick, hush hush trial makes it difficult to follow any of those leads, assuming they exist.