I transferred all of the links in the weblog to a different database server at pair.com. Please send email if you get any of the database errors that have plagued this site in the past. As far as I can tell, the site is significantly faster now.

The BBC has the best article I’ve yet seen on President Bush’s order to freeze the assets of 27 individuals and organizations. The article also has a list of the 27 parties involved.

More attack URLs from RRE.

Packaged with the Anti-terrorism Act being proposed by the Department of Justice is a provision which would classify some computer criminals as terrorists. This means that they would face mandatory sentences of life in prison for things like breaking into computers and releasing viruses. Read the whole article, there are plenty of other chilling provisions in the proposed legislation as well.

Christopher Kremmer’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Alas, our new brothers-in-arms resemble more a freaks’ gallery than a stable family. The British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, heads off today to Iran to ask its government - which is on an American list of countries that support terrorism - to join the war against, that’s right, terrorism. Perhaps Tehran’s contribution could be to explain exactly how it’s done. The same twisted logic applies to Pakistan’s Lazarus-like return from beyond the realm of civilised nations. Islamabad has escaped sanctions - and will no doubt breeze through debt-rescheduling talks - precisely because, having sponsored the Taliban, it knows all about them and is willing to sell that information for 30 pieces of silver. As a former US envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Thomsen, noted: “In the last 15 years Pakistan has been both the fireman and the arsonist in Afghanistan.”

The important thing here is that everyone else in the world knows what we’re up to here. It’s not like people in Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world are ignorant of the fact that Pakistan was a pariah state and that the West disapproved of their military government until they could give us something that we wanted.

Is anyone else troubled by the profusion of ads for online casinos that have been popping up only slightly less frequently than X10 ads lately? I even see them on sites like Yahoo, which means that Internet ad rates have truly fallen through the floor or there are lots of people paying to gamble online. Isn’t it the case that online casinos are basically unregulated and there’s no guarantee that the computer program you’re gambling against obeys the rules at all? Maybe that’s why they can afford to buy so much advertising …

Derrick Story thinks highly of Mac OS 10.1. I’m thinking of buying a laptop later this fall, and if Mac OS 10.1 is really great, maybe I’ll make it an iBook.

Harvard professor Jessica Stern testified before the House Committee on Government Reform last week, providing lots of useful background information on al Qaeda. The testimony contains fascinating revelations gleaned directly from interviews with former members of the organization. There’s a transcript at the Harvard web site.

Ms. Stern’s prescription for solving the terrorism problem in the long term is nation building of the sort that President Bush mocked when he was campaigning for his current office. America can hardly pretend to be isolated when we have business interests throughout the world, and the government spends billions of dollars in various ways globally to support those business interests. The idea that America can somehow solve its problems through withdrawal or unilateralism is a sad fantasy.

Here are some of Ms. Stern’s other writings that might be of interest at this time:

  • Pakistan’s Jihad Culture (from Foreign Affairs)
  • Meeting with the Muj -- a first hand account of visits to madrisas, Islamic schools which teach their students how to become mujahideen in lieu of math or science
  • an interview on how terrorist leaders attract followers and cash