Danny O’Brien wrote up a nifty new technique for marking email as non-SPAM that can be legally enforced using existing intellectual property law. It’s both fiendishly clever and seemingly feasible, which is quite a combination.

My view of the world is so skewed that when people say as a matter of course that vim is difficult to use and has a steep learning curve, I react with confusion. Some people tell me that the computer books I write are OK in spite of this fact.

The XHTML 2.0 spec has been released, and it drops compatability with XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.0, and everything else. What does this mean for practical Web developers right now? Nothing. No browsers support XHTML 2.0. What does it mean for browser makers? Mainly more work — it’s not as though they can drop support for everything that currently exists, deprecated or no. Google has an index of 2.5 billion Web pages, and not a single one of them are written using XHTML 2.0. Most likely, nearly none of them will ever be converted to XHTML 2.0 or even XHTML 1.0. Certainly XHTML 2.0 carries many advantages for developers, but until we can start coding our pages to that standard, we have to wait for browser makers to release browsers that support it and for the critical mass of people to start using those browsers. In the meantime, keep using XHTML 1.0.

Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT, gets in the last word regarding his appearance on Donahue defending the video game industry in Salon today. His behind the scenes take on what it’s like to make an appearance on one of the talking heads shows confirms any suspicions you might have about the fairness and intellectual integrity involved. The actual points he wanted to make about violence in the media and actual violence are well taken, but weren’t news to me and shouldn’t be to you either.

Do you think that 20 or 30 years from now, Republicans will still be trying to blame Bill Clinton for our problems every time things go wrong?

This month’s Crypto-Gram is really good. Oh, wait, every month’s Crypto-Gram is really good. This month’s edition features articles on Microsoft’s Palladium technology, arming airline pilots, and the legislation that would have allowed media companies to attack computers suspected of trading in copyrighted files with impunity. Schneier’s explanation of why arming airline pilots creates more problems than it solves is typical of his exceptionally well reasoned approach to just about everything:

The real dangers, though, involve the complex systems that must be put in place before the first gun can ride along in the cockpit. There are major areas of risk.

One, we need a system for getting the gun on the airplane. How does the pilot get the gun? Does he carry it through the airport and onto the plane? Is it issued to him after he’s in the cockpit but before the plane takes off? Is it secured in the cockpit at all times, even when there is no one there? Any one of these solutions has its own set of security vulnerabilities. The last thing we want is for an attacker to exploit one of these systems in order to get himself a gun. Or maybe the last thing we want is a shootout in a crowded airport.

Second, we need a procedure for storing the gun on the airplane. Does the pilot carry it on his hip? Is it locked in a cabinet? If so, who has the key? Is there one gun, or do the pilot and co-pilot each have one? However the system works, it’s ripe for abuse. If the gun is always at the pilot’s hip, an attacker can take it away from him when he leaves the cockpit. (Don’t laugh; policemen get their guns taken away from them all the time, and they’re trained to prevent that.) If the guns remain in the cockpit when it is unoccupied, we have a whole new set of problems to worry about.

Third, we need a system of training pilots in gun handling and marksmanship. Guns require training to use well; how much training can we expect our pilots to have? This is different from training sky marshals. Security is the primary job of a sky marshal; they’re expected to learn how to use a gun. Flying planes is the primary job of a pilot.

Abu Nidal, at one time the most feared terrorist in the world, was found dead of gunshot wounds in his Baghdad apartment. While it’s hard to feel any sympathy for a cold blooded terrorist, you have to wonder what stories will go forever untold now that he’s dead.

William Saletan points out in Slate that Bush can’t even get his seeming allies to agree with him that now’s the time to bum rush Iraq.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Washington Post op-ed, If We Must Fight . . ., is worth reading. Basically he lays out the steps that must occur for us to justifiably go to war with Iraq. I’m not a big Brzezinski fan, but I think that he lays things out pretty well here. I’m extremely uncomfortable with our preparations for war with Iraq, for any number of reasons. The most basic is that I don’t think that our reasoning for war is sound, that our preparations are adequate, or that our expectations are realistic. The Iraq hawks are cozying up to a bunch of Iraqi exiles who aren’t what we’d likely refer to as the sons of liberty. I personally don’t believe at all that they’re going to work tirelessly to make democratic reforms in Iraq, nor do I necessarily believe that Iraq is ready for democracy. Furthermore, I don’t believe that Iraq has the worst government in the world (although it might). Finally, it seems obvious to me that Saddam Hussein is quite interested in self preservation. I may be a fool, but I don’t believe that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or Israel without provocation. If he were suicidal, he’d already be dead.

I could be wrong about every one of these things, but it’s up to someone to make the case. The case has not yet been made.

Network Associates sold off its PGP products to a new company founded specifically to market PGP technology. This has to be good news, because Network Associates did absolutely nothing useful with PGP while they had it. Hopefully this new company has hired some real software engineers that can take the basic PGP code (which is very simple) and turn it into something usable by the majority of people. Encryption aside, routine use of digital signature to verify one’s identity is something that’s long overdue, and it’s because the software to make it easy just hasn’t caught on. I think the fundamental reason is that most email is trivial in nature and people don’t really care enough to verify the sender of email they recieve, but for certain applications, digital signatures are really useful. Another advantage of PGP becoming more mainstream is that it would provide a limited alternative to some of the trusted computing crap that’s going to be shoved down our throats in the near future, ostensibly for our own good.