Percolating through various channels last week was Larry Lessig’s offer to resign if an anti-spam bill he proposes is enacted and doesn’t reduce the overall level of spam. He’s asked Declan McCullagh to judge whether or not the law (if passed) is effective. Anyway, Declan doesn’t think he’ll get the chance to judge the law’s effectiveness because he doesn’t believe it will pass, the problem being that it’s difficult to define spam. I think that any definition has to include bulk mailing to make sense. That’s the problem with referring to spam as simply “unsolicited commercial email.” If I want to find a job in the computer industry and I go to the trouble of looking up the email addresses for HR contacts at a bunch of companies, and then write each of them a personal cover letter and forward them my résumé, is it spam? Not by my definition. By the same token, if somebody wants me to change hosting providers to their company and sends me a personal email, I don’t have a problem with that. That’s how business is transacted. By the same token, if a hosting company sends email to every address in the whois database or I buy a list of 100,000 HR email addresses and I blast all of them, then that’s spam.

Ed Felten has some comments on the Grokster ruling that made news on Friday.

The OSAF has published to the Web a transcript of the Chandler demo from the Emerging Tech conference. I’ve totally drunk the Chandler Kool-aid and am looking forward to watching this application evolve. I’m excited about it for a number of reasons, including:

• Returning innovation to the email arena. Even though email (and especially email combined with scheduling and other PIM features) is probably the key business application these days, Outlook and Express have brutally murdered innovation in this area. Right now there aren’t any realistic alternatives to Outlook for an organization of any size, and Outlook sucked when it was released and hasn’t gotten much better since. I’m glad we might have something that can push the state of the art forward here.
• It’s written mostly in Python. Having an example desktop application that’s large, complex, and hopefully attractive that’s written in a scripting language could force a pretty radical change on the software industry. At some point, we’re going to see languages like C and C++ marginalized so that they’re only used for the most low level work and performance intensive applications. Microsoft is going to be pushing VB.NET and C# as replacements. Chandler could be the compelling argument in favor of building cross platform apps that look great everywhere using a more open language.
• It should be easy to extend. Seeing the sorts of things people are doing to extend Eclipse gives me hope that we’ll see some really amazing user-contributed improvements to Chandler once it’s released.

It’s still way to early to know how Chandler will deliver, but I love the ambitiousness of the project. Certainly Mozilla, even though its gestation period was long, exceeded my expectations. I’d be thrilled if Chandler did as well.

One thing is for sure, when it comes to war, winning means never having to say you’re sorry. Despite the fact that over one million dollars has been allocated for assisting innocent Afghans harmed by US bombing, none of the money has been handed out or spent to help them. Certainly throughout the history (all the way up to the first Gulf War), the losing side has been made to pay restitution as part of the terms of surrender, but I guess when you’re the most powerful country in the world, that’s not necessary. The old “war is hell” excuse seems pretty thin when you’re talking about bombing innocent people who had no choice in the matter and no soldiers (or even unlawful combatants) amongst them.

I just got around today to reading the full transcript of Senator Rick Santorum’s interview in which he says that we should regulate what consenting adults do behind closed doors in their own homes for the good of society, and basically comes out as being a massive homophobe. (His position is that it’s fine for people to be gay as long as they don’t touch each other.) Don’t bother to read all the running commentary about this, just read the actual interview and judge for yourself what you think about this man.

Given my fascination with Paul Berman and my general fandom of Josh Marshall, how could I resist linking to a Josh Marshall review of Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism?

It’s big news today that Henry Norr was fired by the San Francisco Chronicle for filing a false time card. Scott Rosenberg puts this in perspective today, basically saying that it’s standard practice for reporters to fill out a time card that says they work a regular day job and then work the hours that are most conducive to producing the kinds of stories that they’re assigned. Norr, of course, claimed to be out sick when he was really out protesting and getting thrown in jail, but that’s a pretty flimsy excuse for firing a guy.

John Ashcroft overruled a panel of immigration judges yesterday and ruled that illegal immigrants can be detained indefinitely without any legal recourse for “national security” reasons. You can shelve him with Donald Rumsfeld as a government official probably better suited for service in a totalitarian regime, but we already knew that. The real kicker in this case is that the ruling was issued in reference to Haitian immigrants. Ashcroft says that they threaten national security by consuming homeland security resources. By detaining them for as long as we want, we will deter other potential Haitian refugees from coming to America, Ashcroft theorizes. So now you no longer have to threaten this country yourself, you just have to soak up resources that might potentially be used against people who are actual threats to earn imprisonment without trial for as long as these sleazebags want to hold onto you. I have to admit that this story made my jaw drop, some days I don’t even feel like I know what country I live in any more.

I wound up watching the Dixie Chicks interview on PrimeTime Thursday, mainly because my wife was interested. Let me just say that my position is that the Dixie Chicks are free to criticize the President in any way they choose, and that people are free to criticize the Dixie Chicks in any way they choose. Just the same, I’m allowed to think that anybody who would drag their kids out to a Dixie Chicks CD smashin’ party is likely to be a total and complete moron. And, anyone who would issue a death threat against someone for speaking ill of the President is a psychopath who should probably be in jail.

Anyway, I thought that the Chicks acquitted themselves pretty well in their image rehab appearance. They of course said lots of things about everybody making mistakes, just as their handlers told them to, but they said lots of intelligent things as well. Natalie Maines apologized for what she said, but made it perfectly clear that the sentiment was her own and that it hadn’t changed. Also, when Diane Sawyer asked her if they wanted forgiveness, she refused to bite as well, merely saying that she wanted to be accepted, but not forgiven. I was quite pleased that they weren’t willing to sell themselves out.

Just in case you live under a rock, government funding for a University of Pennsylvania research project that was paying for OpenBSD development was cut not long after Theo de Raadt had some anti-war quotes published in the Canadian press. News stories are being tracked on the OpenBSD Media Coverage page.

Another reader mentioned to me that the security advances in OpenBSD that I linked to the ZDNet story about the other day are not as innovative as claimed in the article. Apparently, it builds upon some innovations from elsewhere, like ProPolice. There’s also StackGuard.