Mark Lewis has an interesting article on why people aren’t investing in gold despite the fact that the economy is in the dumpster.

Hanan Cohen did some interesting legwork on FAS, the Internet archive, and government secrecy and wrote it up for our benefit.

Security researches discovered a man in the middle attack that can be used to get people to unknowingly decrypt intercepted PGP messages and send them back to the interceptor. The flaw isn’t in the software, it’s a complex form of social engineering that relies on the person replying to the intercepted messages and not trimming their reply. So here we have it, yet another reason to be courteous and trim your replies.

Oxford researches have discovered that the New Caledonian crow is smarter than some software developers I’ve worked with.

The Economist has a powerful article about America’s prison problem: we’re putting more people in jail than ever and we’re not doing much for them while they’re there. As long as we’re letting people out of prison after we put them in, we may as well do what we can to make sure that they won’t do things that land them back there. The raw statistics by themselves are pretty staggering:

America’s incarceration rate was roughly constant from 1925 to 1973, with an average of 110 people behind bars for every 100,000 residents. By 2000, however, the rate of incarceration in state and federal prisons had more than quadrupled, to 478. America has overtaken Russia as the world’s most aggressive jailer. When local jails are included in the American tally, the United States locks up nearly 700 people per 100,000, compared with 102 for Canada, 132 for England and Wales, 85 for France and a paltry 48 in Japan. Roughly 2m Americans are currently behind bars, with some 4.5m on parole or on probation (the probationers are on suspended sentences). Another 3m Americans are ex-convicts who have served their sentences and are no longer under the control of the justice system.

The New York Times reports that Donald Rumsfeld is considering deploying special forces all over the world to capture or kill terrorists, including places where we don’t even inform the local government that we’re there. The CIA already has the privilege of doing things like this, so it seems like Rumsfeld just wants to have the power to handle these things through the Department of Defense, probably without the tight supervision that the CIA earned through decades of shameful behavior. The logical conclusion of such policies will be a series of horrifying mistakes that involve lots of dead innocents, which are then covered up for as long as possible, and we all get worked up about around 2025.

US Airways filed for bankruptcy, kind of making me wonder what the whole airline bailout thing was all about.

At How Appealing, I just saw a pointer to this article about the controversy at UNC over the assignment of a book on the Quran as summer reading to incoming freshmen. I loved this quip:

What you don’t understand is that in the United States, the defense of liberty has become sophisticated. So sophisticated, in fact, that it has become its opposite. Here, nobody openly persecutes anybody anymore. If I want to persecute you, I don’t say I’m persecuting you. I say you’re persecuting me.

I’m ashamed to say that it was liberals who invented this practice (as a somewhat natural outgrowth of resisting and decrying legitimate forms of persecution), but it’s the right wingers who have taken it to its most absurd extreme. When I hear people whining about the persecution of Christians in this country, or the way white males are treated unfairly these days, it just makes me ill.

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra passed away on August 6. Dijkstra was probably best known for writing the seminal paper “Goto Considered Harmful,” but he accomplished a heck of a lot more than that. He was truly a pioneer of computer science.

Slate has the goods today on the Rand “expert” who gave the Pentagon briefing arguing that Saudi Arabia is our enemy that has just about everybody all astir. It also contains the content of all of the slides in the presentation. My favorite slide in the presentation is the one that suggests that we demand that the Saudis, “Stop all anti-U.S., anti-Israeli, anti-Western predication, writings, etc., within Arabia,” thereby cementing us as the defenders of liberty and freedom throughout the world.