Posts

The death penalty has been in the news a lot lately, and thus has been a lot on my mind. This morning I was lucky to find a pointer to Garry Wills’ New York Review of Books article: The Dramaturgy of Death. Wills deconstructs ancient and modern rationales for the application of the death penalty, demonstrating just how absurd they are. It’s clear upon reading it that people support the death penalty for visceral reasons, and only later come up with “rational” reasons in an attempt to justify their primal urges. ...

Honeypots and the Honeypot Project: Bruce Schneier takes a look at the honeypot project, a network specifically designed to be hacked. The machines are monitored closely in order to gather data on how networks are attacked and what intruders do once they’ve broken in. The rate at which machines on the Internet are probed and attacked is just jaw-dropping. This week, the House is conducting hearings on whether analyst research on stocks is biased. I hear that next week they’re inviting some witnesses up to Capitol Hill to determine whether the Pope is Catholic. The consensus seems to be that yes, in fact, the system of analyst research is horribly biased and corrupt, but then again, you’d have to be a fool to listen to analysts anyway, right? Fortunately, investment banks are working hard to restore their credibility by adopting a code of conduct and list of best practices for analysts to follow. Unfortunately, adherence to the code of conduct is voluntary. I imagine that will turn out about as well as those voluntary pollution regulations for power plants did in Texas. ...

I have often heard, and indeed repeated, the “FDR knew” theory that FDR was aware that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. FDR is alleged to have intentionally kept the military in the dark so that the attack would be devestating and we would be forced to enter World War II. There’s a great article at Salon today by Judith Greer that examines the history behind this conspiracy theory, and evaluates the evidence used to promote it. After reading her article, I feel fairly confident that I’ll never be repeating that theory again. (The main reason I ever did is that Gore Vidal, who I respect, believes that “FDR knew.” Shame on me.) ...

Rob Walker weighs in on the refusal of cable companies to carry advertising for DSL. I’ve also read that phone companies are generally only rolling out DSL to areas where cable companies are offering cable modems, or they face some other form of broadband competition. Cable companies, phone companies, media companies – they all suck. I’m just surprised they haven’t figured out a way to buy legislation that will allow them to merge into one giant quasi-governmental agency. Then we could have the media/communications company (probably named something like (Warner Sprint Bell Worldcom AOL, Inc.), and the software company (Microsoft). Wouldn’t that make things delightfully simple? ...

I forgot to mention it last week, but Automatic Media (the umbrella for smart sites like Suck, Feed, and Plastic) bit the dust. Scott Rosenberg’s remembrance of Suck and Feed brought back a flood of memories for me as well. I can remember reading Suck for the first time and thinking, “This is what this whole Web thing is all about.” This was back when almost nobody knew who the Sucksters were, and before they had an ongoing feud with The Netly News. It seems almost impossibly long ago now. ...

Here’s a useful article for XMLheads: W3C XML Schema Made Simple. I’ve been using XML for a number of applications, but I have not yet dared to create a DTD or a schema for any of it. The record companys’ vision of how online music should work is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I can understand why they hated and feared Napster, but then why did they strike a deal with them? What value does Napster have if the music being shared is protected? Why would I share files through Napster that people can’t listen to without paying for them somewhere? And then there’s the whole other matter of people still not being able to create files that can’t be copied anyway. ...

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? ...

Linus Torvalds on Fresh Air. (By the way, I noticed that Adaptive Path consulted on the newly redesigned npr.org. Congratulations, guys!) Optimistic people like myself believed that the great thing about the Web was lower barriers to entry and the even playing field that it provided for audience eyeballs. According to a recent Jupiter Media Metrix study, Internet traffic is rapidly glomming onto a small number of sites. The study seems pretty flawed, since it counts in things like instant messaging, email, and Napster with Web usage. It also doesn’t take into account the fact that many of the larger sites publish content produced by third parties. AOL leads the pack thanks to their huge user base and the fact that they’ve acquired a huge number of popular sites. ...

Currently, I’m rereading The Lord of the Rings , which I hadn’t read since I was a kid. (I’m currently wondering whether I really finished it back then, because I don’t remember anything from the second half of The Two Towers on very well at all.) Anyway, what surprised me is that these are really great books. I think my opinion of them had been diminished by all the other fantasy dreck I’ve read since then. Anyway, as I’ve read the books, I’ve of course become obsessed with all things Tolkein … I even bought an atlas of Middle Earth. I’ve also been wondering how Tolkein’s world view shaped the overall mood of the novels. Andrew O’Hehir’s essay briefly discusses Tolkein’s upbringing and life, and reading it, my suspicions are confirmed. ...

A server belonging to the Apache Software Foundation which housed all of the Apache source code was compromised. Thanks to good security, though, the intruder was detected almost immediately and things were cleaned up very nicely. It’s almost impossible never to get hacked, it’s what you do once that happens that counts.