Here’s an explanation of the methodology used for the survey of most used stuff on the Internet I posted a link to yesterday. (Sorry not to be more specific, but the study glommed together everything from Web sites to Napster to email, so I’m not exactly sure what to refer to it as.) Anyway, JMM apparently solicits people to participate in their study, and then installs some tracking application that reports everything they do online. I can’t imagine that they get too many savvy Internet users to participate in that. Then again, what percentage of Internet users these days I would consider to be savvy?

The EFF is joining with Princeton professor Ed Felten to sue the RIAA and SDMI for violating his First Amendment rights by preventing him from publishing his research on the schemes SDMI uses to protect music files. The U.S. government is also included as a defendant in the suit because the DMCA is also being challenged. I really, really need to cough up the bucks to join the EFF.

More details keep coming in about the Robert Scheer column in The Nation that accuses the Bush administration of giving $43 million to the Taliban. I knew on Monday that Scheer had made an error of fact in stating that the U.S. gave $43 million to the Taliban in drug aid. Anyway, it turns out that Scheer was completely and totally off base. Brian Carnell of LeftWatch.com sent me an email with a pointer to his essay that dissects Scheer’s column, and also to a CNN story that describes the nature of the aid and how it will be distributed (by the UN). Bad Robert Scheer, bad. Anyway, this still doesn’t clear up the increasingly cloudy issue of whether we are giving drug war dollars to the Taliban, but that doesn’t change the fact that Scheer’s column was fiction.

This article from 1998 seems to indicate that the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention struck a 10 year deal with the Taliban to destroy opium poppy crops in exchange for $25 million a year. If this agreement was reached (and from what I’ve read, Afghanistan is cracking down hard on opium poppy farmers), then it’s actually the UN that is putting the drug war ahead of human rights concerns. (I still don’t know whether the US is also paying off the Taliban.)

jwz weighs in again on AOL and Netscape. He’s right.