The Magic Cauldron Eric Raymond analysis of Open Source business models.

The Times : America paralysed by 2,300 anthrax scares There's that 23 again. I don't know if the Anthrax scare is part of the same terrorist campaign as the 9.11 attack. But viewed purely as a post-modern detournement of the West against itself it's a masterstroke. If you had the capability to manufacture infectious spores, then you only needed to get 10-20 letters delivered to public figures and get one person infected to throw the whole system into a tizzy. The delivery mechanism is so easily copied that there would inevitably be thousands of copy cats. And they've succeeded in getting people scared of a fundamental part of western life, the post. In a way, it's taken terrorism out of the world of solid objects and into the world of ideas.

[Salon.com News] The "traitor" (Susan Sontag) fires back. It's about time we had a few dissenting voices. I'm getting heartily sick of the world view being portrayed by the media and spokespeople.

Everyone else is linking to it, so I will too. I know what's next. George W Bush is gonna hold a press conference and rip his face off and it's going to be "Ming The Merciless" under there.

Dave Kaye is writing a book about weblogs.

AI Bot Rather cool. It's a work in progress but interesting nonetheless. Mel is seriously into wearables as well.

Dave Winer asks : We thought we were doing good in Yugoslavia. OK, let's look at the pictures, but after that, will you tell us what you would like us to do in the future when peace is threatened by a despot like Milosevic.

I'm sitting here thinking that maybe it's because they live in a police state, that Americans want the USA to be the world's policeman. It's common among a certain type of Brit to think that the USA's problem is an innate inferiority complex due to their comparative youth compared with most of the world's cultures. So the USA insists on blustering and blundering round the world in an attempt to show how big they are. I don't subscribe to this view (though I have done). I think it's a more northern European, even Germanic world view that says that if you see something that's "wrong", you have to poke your nose in and tell the participants so. The UK has too much of this as well and it results in a "nanny" approach to your own population and a desire to tell others what to do outside your own culture. Of course, saying these sort of things is not exactly welcomed in the current climate.

Now I've upset pretty much everybody, I'll answer Dave. "Just Back Off, It's none of your damn business". Which is just as politically naive as Dave's question.

RIAA Wants to Hack Your PC They wanted to scan my hard disk to see if I had any MP3s that stole their content. And they wanted protection from any damage they did along the way. So how did they think they were going to tell the difference between an MP3 I had downloaded and one that I had ripped myself for my own use? Would they have a huge hash table of every MP3 found on the net?

You can download BlogMail from here.

n/a

I've just built a module for Drupal that let's you Blog by Mail. Set up a
Mailbox just for Drupal. Cron then checks it for mail and adds it to the
Blog. It works out which blog to add it to based on the From address in
the email. This needs to match the Real Email address when the user
registered. The subject line goes into the title. The body of the
message goes into the Blog body. Any signature is stripped. There's an
option to add extra security where the first line of the body must
contain the user's Drupal password. Cool, huh?

Bush Orders Biohazard Suits For All Americans Don't panic, it's only satire.

Cooking with Bigfoot Totally awesome Flash cartoons. Like Grody to the Max! thanks boingboing!

Inevitably. Terrorist or NOT?

the road less travelled : It's the world's first grass-roots, curiosity driven weblog.

The Times : Bin Laden is linked to US puppet regime You couldn't read about it. This one will run and run. Sesame Workshop are appalled. "We are exploring all legal options to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future.” That's it. Sue the producers of the posters for copyright abuse!

"OSAMAGATE" Iran-Contra all over again? Surely not.

Wonderbum. Is it a new song by Oasis? Is it just a gratuitous chance to say "Bum" in a weblog? Is it a Wonderbra for the bottom half?

No it's support hosiery!