Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index! This is what we need. An online resource of cartoons from around the world. That's it. Get irony back in your life. You know it'll make you feel better.

blogdex : top 10 recent links Blogdex is an MIT project to spider blog sites and count links. It then ranks the links according to how often bloggers link to them. This is generating a running guide to what bloggers are finding interesting. I feel sure that there is some overlap between this work and RSS headline feeds. Just not completely sure what it is yet.

There are increasing calls to outlaw encryption, build US Gummint approved security into computer hardware and stamp down on free speech that discusses it. But the genie is out of the bottle and you can't legislate it out of existence, only turn legitimate users into criminals. Well I have this to say to you.

F*** Censorship:- When encryption is outlawed, only the OUHSD KLJASN BVQWO UYDDN BQWAZ.

WTC Non-US Death Toll Outnumbers American No comment, just a fact.

Do you know anyone running WinNT or Win2000 on an internet connected machine? Have they turned off IIS? Have they applied the recent security patches? Have they got a clue?

The recent spate of Internet worms (Code Red, Code Red II, Code Rainbow) are all attacks on MS IIS. The problem is that there are so many of them that the rest of us suffer as well.

SILICON DEFENSE - Flash Worm Analysis : Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet The Warhol Worm. It's merely idle speculation. But as "Rainbow" Worm hits the net maybe not. The Slashdot folks are tracking it here.

The Flame to End All Flames When some email or Usenet post makes you want to scream, try this.

The Times : Where war is a way of life BY NICK DANZIGER
Returning from Afghanistan, the author, who has travelled before with its warlords, says that before taking action there, the West should remember what an unforgiving place it is Worth reading.

Shared Voice.org : Another petition. Well put.

Disconnect the Dots (washingtonpost.com) : Applying network analysis to the problem of fighting terrorists.

Defend liberty - especially now - As the world debates how to combat terrorism, we should not allow our own leaders to erode freedom, in our name. [Spiked Online] Indeed.

World War 3: Example Weapons Well we are on a grim humour kick this morning, aren't we?

GNN CounterIntelligence: Boom, Bust and Echo : A Dark Theory Behind Black Tuesday Which may be a fantasy.

The Petition : (for peaceful resolution)

Have a scan down though the local news from the Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan region. It makes grim reading. Pakistan and Iran have shut their borders (whatever that means). Afghanistan has had three years of drought and is 1-2 million tons of grain short in supplies for this winter. All western aid has been removed. Over 1 million Afghan DPs may starve to death.

And in the middle of all that are 8 Aid workers (including 2 Americans) that are in prison for "attempting to spread Christianity".

Buckminster Fuller said that the best antidote to war was economic interdependence. I think the Internet and what has happened in the last 4 days has shown that communication interdependence is up there with it. China joining the WTO and internet based dissent in Tehran are instructive here.

There's been a suggestion for a new Marshall plan and "bombing" with food aid. They should make sure that the parcels contain wind up radios (and Sat TV receivers?). I can't quite imagine how wide spread internet access in the backward repressive regimes can be achieved, but in the long term it's certainly possible. Every repressive regime attempts to control access to the media (Didn't the Taliban ban TV?), but tech now allows us to by-pass this. And it's that much more powerful when it provides a back channel and gives them a voice as well.

The potential danger here is that "US Cultural Imperialism" is one of the things that these regimes are fighting against. Bombing them with communications access may be seen as an act of war. Especially if the only content available is The Voice of America. But providing them with the same access to all the media that we have helps them to make choices. And the same lesson is available to us. We should be paying attention to media that present the other side of the argument. Not just the filtered view that CNN provides.

Feed a man for a day, teach him to feed himself, education for children and planting trees are stages in a long term process. But it's education that changes the world most. We should be doing everything possible to provide the means for the indiginous populations to educate themselves.

Ii think it's important in this age of universal access that some of us pay attention to alternate news sources. To that end, we've started building sources of headlines and RSS XML syndication feeds of the same for news sources specifically aimed at the Middle East. I've managed to scrape or find 3 Afghan news sites, and we also have Pakistan's main news outlet. The results can be seen here. http://www.newsisfree.com/sources/bycat/78/

Newisfree is also producing a composite feed about Black Tuesday.
http://www.newsisfree.com/sources/feeds/wtc/

Another good source of Afghan News media is the DMOZ entry at
http://dmoz.org/Regional/Asia/Afghanistan/News_and_Media/

And then the Moreover categories at
http://w.moreover.com/categories/category_list.html
and specifically, Middle East news
http://www.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=portal&c=Mideast%20news
and Central Asia News
http://www.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=portal&c=Central%20Asia%20news

Today's CD - Groove Armada - goodbye country (hello nightclub)

The Times : There is a saying in the Middle East: what happens in Afghanistan decides the course of history. And another one. He describes Afghanistan as I remember it, as well.