Eric S. Margolis wrote a nice piece for the L.A. Times that explains some of the history behind Russia’s shrewd Oil strategy (as enabled by the “War On Terrorism” ):
Russia Checkmated Its New Best Friend .

He who controls energy, controls the globe.

Russia, the world’s second-largest oil exporter, wants Central Asian resources to be transported across its territory. Iran, also an oil producer, wants the energy pipelines to debouch at its ports, the shortest route. But America’s powerful Israel lobby has blocked Washington’s efforts to deal with Iran.

Pakistan and the U.S. have long sought to build pipelines running due south from Termez, Uzbekistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan, then down to Pakistan’s Arabian Sea ports, Karachi and Gwadar.

Oilmen call this route “the new Silk Road,” after the fabled path used to export China’s riches.

This route, however, would require a stable, pro-Western Afghanistan.

Since 1989, Iran has strived to keep Afghanistan in disorder, thus preventing Pakistan from building its long-sought Termez-Karachi pipeline.

When Pakistan ditched its ally, the Taliban, in September, and sided with the U.S., Islamabad and Washington fully expected to implant a pro-American regime in Kabul and open the way for the Pakistani-American pipeline.

But, while the Bush administration was busy tearing apart Afghanistan to find Bin Laden, it failed to notice that the Russians were taking over half the country.

Here’s a moving piece by Ted Rall, a cartoonist and writer covering the war in Afghanistan for The Village Voice and KFI Radio in Los Angeles:


Running the Odds When Nobody Cares.

No one gave a damn about our security. The Northern Alliance never assigned guards for our houses or for journalist convoys, which were constantly getting ambushed. And neither the U.S. nor the Alliance would send a chopper for you if you got shot.

The next morning, Nov. 27, I ran into Pedro, a Portugese radio correspondent who lived a few houses away. I asked him if anyone had pounded on his door the night before. “As a matter of fact, yes,” he replied.

A few hours later, the news spread that Ulf Stromberg, a 42-year-old Swedish cameraman who’d been living three doors away from me, had answered the door that night to find three or four young men pointing Kalishnikovs at him. When he shouted to alert his roommates, they shot him. The killers robbed the others and fled into the night.

Forty-five journalists had come to Taloqan in my convoy. Stromberg was the third one killed for his money.

I conducted an informal poll of the writers and TV people gathering at the tiny Foreign Ministry. All had been awakened the night before by knocks at their doors. Only Stromberg had answered. The killers had known where all of us lived. If we had all answered our doors, we all would have been killed for our carefully concealed $100 bills and whatever possessions intrigued them.

“I don’t mind dying in battle to get a story,” a writer for the French daily Le Monde told me. “Getting killed in a stupid street crime is something else altogether.”

Here’s a new weblog that provides “A Skewed View of the War on Terrorism” with content that’s right on target:
Jihaddict.

Interesting commentary by Kevin Werbach for ZDNet news regarding 802.11 networks and lack of scarcity of the airwaves:

Here’s a cure for bandwidth blues

(Note: emphasis below cheerfully added!)

Bandwidth isn’t as scarce as you think. The cure for the broadband blues is right in
front of our faces, but we don’t see it because we’ve trained ourselves to look elsewhere. The
answer is something called open spectrum.

The concept is that wireless frequencies could be shared among many users rather than assigned
in exclusive licenses to individual companies. Smart devices subject to rules ensuring that no one
player could hog the airwaves would replace networks defined by governments and service
providers. Spectrum would be used more efficiently. Bandwidth would be cheaper and more
ubiquitous.

It’s a deeply subversive idea, just as the Internet was for networking and open source is for software
development. But it’s an idea whose time has come.

“We could have the greatest
wave of innovation since the
Internet…if we could unlock the
spectrum to explore the new
possibilities,” said David
Reed, formerly chief scientist
at Lotus and a researcher
involved in the original
development of the Internet.

All it would take to open the
floodgates for innovation are a
few government decisions to
make more wireless
spectrum available for
“unlicensed” services.
Unfortunately, the companies
that have paid for exclusive
spectrum licenses oppose
alternatives that would make
the airwaves shared and virtually free. They argue that unlicensed services would cause ruinous
interference–a “tragedy of the commons.” The real tragedy is that today’s spectrum owners are
preventing a commons that could benefit all.

No government has yet taken the open spectrum idea seriously. There’s new hope today, though,
thanks to the runaway success of 802.11b (WiFi) technology. It uses a small, congested sliver of
spectrum set aside for unlicensed use. WiFi was designed for the mundane purpose of replacing
Ethernet cables for connecting office PCs. Despite these limitations, WiFi is taking off as an
alternative mechanism for Internet access. There will be 10 million WiFi devices installed by the
end of this year, and 4,000 public wireless access points in locations such as airports and cafes.

I must admit, I already wake up every morning wondering what the latest ridiculous plan out of Ashcroft’s mouth is going to be, but this morning’s announcement about a “responsible cooperator program” really takes the cake: let’s give immigration incentives for providing information about terrorists!

This way we can not only encourage foreign hopefuls to make up stories about real or imaginary people in order to increase the chance that their immigration status may be “fast tracked”, we can also assist potentially threatening foreigners to get into the country quicker! (Since, in theory, anyone who might be privy to such information could themselves impose a threat to national security.)

Law-abiding foreigners: do not be fooled by this insidious invitation! If you should actually have the misfortune to happen across any important information that may somehow lead to the capture of terrorists or the prevention of a terrorist act from occurring, tell one of your white upper-middle class non-Jewish-American friends about it, so they can phone in an anonymous tip from a pay phone!
(No one is safe! 🙂

See the CNN article: U.S. to offer immigration incentives for
terrorism information.

Attorney General John Ashcroft announced
Thursday a new plan to possibly offer immigration assistance to encourage
international citizens living in the United States or abroad to come forward
with information about suspected terrorists.

“If you have information which is reliable information and useful to us in preventing
terrorism and apprehending those who are involved in terrorist activities, bring it to
the FBI or if you are overseas, to an embassy, and you could as a result of that
information be provided a visa which will allow you to be in the United States,
allow you if necessary to work in the United States and provide a basis for your
someday becoming a citizen,” Ashcroft said.

Calling the new plan the “responsible cooperators program,” Ashcroft said, “We
want the kind of responsible people who would help us in the war against
terrorism.”

Ashcroft sent a directive Thursday to the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, all United States attorneys and the Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney
General for the Criminal Division, outlining the new incentive initiative.

Bummer: Ban on DVD-cracking code upheld (written by Evan Hansen for CNET News.com)

The decision for now upholds a controversial law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and prevents Web site 2600 and its publisher, Eric Corley, from posting links to computer code known as DeCSS–a program that allows DVD movies to be decoded and played on personal computers.

Joining a growing consensus among courts across the country, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York found that computer code is speech and therefore entitled to some First Amendment protections under the U.S. Constitution. But the court concluded that the material in this case is “content-neutral,” and therefore entitled to considerably less protection than “expressive” content such as poetry or a novel.

“Neither the DMCA nor the posting prohibition is concerned with whatever capacity DeCSS might have for conveying information to a human being, and that capacity…is what arguably creates a speech component of the decryption code,” the unanimous three-judge appellate panel wrote in a 72-page opinion that leaned heavily on the reasoning of a lower court.

The decision is a major win for copyright holders in general, but especially for the movie industry, which has been fighting to ban DeCSS from the Internet for about two years. Civil rights advocates have been closely watching the case, arguing that the DMCA is overbroad and that banning links to content online could wreak havoc with free expression on the Internet.

Corley, the last holdout in a case that originally targeted dozens of defendants, has won high-profile supporters concerned about the case’s speech implications, including the lower court’s limits on linking. In a flurry of legal filings earlier this year, groups ranging from the America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to a coalition of hotshot programmers submitted amicus briefs siding with Corley and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is spearheading his defense.

While acknowledging the difficulties in placing limits on linking, the appeals court essentially agreed with the lower court’s reasoning “that the DMCA, as applied to the defendants’ linking, served substantial governmental interests and was unrelated to the suppression of free speech.”

Photo By Alex Maness

The thought police are at it again. See: The Poster Police — A Durham student activist gets a visit from the Secret Service, by Jon Elliston for the Independent Online. (Thanks John)

Then: Knock, knock … unexpected guests at
Brown’s Duke Manor apartment. Opening
the
door, she found a casually dressed man,
and a
man and woman in what appeared to be business attire. Her
first
thought, she says, was, “Are these people going to sell
me
something?”

But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the
woman as
agents from the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret
Service. The other
man was an investigator from the Durham Police
Department.

“Ma’am, we’ve gotten a report that you have anti-American
material,”
the male agent said, according to Brown. Could they come
in to have
a look around?

“Do you have a warrant?” Brown asked. They did not.

“Then
you’re
not coming in my apartment,” she said. And indeed, they
stayed
outside her doorway. But they stayed a while–40 minutes,
Brown
estimates–and gave her a taste of how dissenters can
come under
scrutiny in wartime.

And all because of a poster on her wall.

Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig
had some interesting things to say
about the negative effects of copyright law at this week’s
Darklight Digital Film Festival.

See the Wired News article by Karlin Lillington: Why Copyright Laws Hurt Culture
.

Copyright laws in the United States are placing the
control of material into an increasingly “fixed and concentrated”
group of corporate hands, he said. Five record companies now control
85 percent of music distribution, for example.

Because copyright law now also precludes “derivative use” of copyright
material, people cannot develop new material based on copyrighted work
without permission. Lessig said this radically changes how human
culture will evolve, since “the property owner has control over how
that subsequent culture is built.”

This restriction also stymies technological innovation, as developers
cannot follow the long-established practice of taking existing code
and enhancing it to produce something new, he said.

“…Digital production and the Internet could change all
this, so that creative action and the distribution of these arts could
be achieved in a much more diversified way than before,” Lessig said.
This would allow for a “production of culture that doesn’t depend on a
narrow set of images of what culture should be.”

A more open business model in which artists have greater control over
their productions would create “diverse, competitive industries”
rather than centralized, monopolistic companies, he said.

New technologies such as peer-to-peer-based communication and
file-exchange programs could force a new look at copyright laws and
profoundly change the methods of distribution, Barlow and Lessig both
said.

The MIT Micro Gas Turbine Engine Project has developed a micro turbine rotor engine. See the Wired News article, The Little Engine That Could Be, by Louise Knapp. (Thanks John)

There’s also a white paper written by the same group at MIT that explains how it works: Micro Electric Machines for Micro Turbomachinery.

Here’s an excerpt from the Wired News article:

The development of a fuel-powered miniature engine, touted
as a more efficient and longer lasting alternative for the battery,
may push the Energizer Bunny to the unemployment lines.

No bigger than a regular shirt button, the micro gas turbine engine
uses the same process for producing electricity as its big brother
electricity stations — burning fuel and running it through a power
plant.

“Fuel and air in, and electricity out,” said Luc Frechette, assistant
professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and one of
the team members building the engine.

Hey girls! Now you can be beautiful and die for your country!

Product Description “Secret Agent Barbie lets kids join Barbie and her friends in an exciting new adventure as she travels the world as a secret agent… Secret agents have access to special powers like running, jumping, tumbling, and blending into the background. There are special gadgets like pink-vision glasses and a remote-control puppy, and a selection of cool secret agent outfits.”