CNN.com - Northwest pulls sweeteners from flights - October 19, 2001 Jeez! Why don't they just make white powder illegal. Maybe, if we coloured all legal white powder we'd be able to spot the dangerous stuff? There's been rumours of tainted heroin but that's ok because it only hits the underclass. But what if cocaine supplies started getting tainted? Has cocaine use fallen off among the moneyed classes? Would you put some white powder, from an untrusted source, up your nose?

Salon.com Technology | Candy from strangers Webcam teenage girls post a shopping list on the site and have their "admirers" anonymously buy them stuff. Question. Would you let your 15 year old daughter do this? Would you buy me a WiFi card for my laptop, if I showed you some skin? Hmmm? Maybe not.

One of the mailing lists I moderate on Yahoogroups is getting hit by spam to a ridiculous extent. What appears to be happening is that there's a program out there which subscribes to the group and then if successful starts sending spam to the group. I've made subscription moderated and chucked off the members that were spamming, but now I'm getting 10-15 subscription requests a day. This is ridiculous! The group is effectively now a closed group of the current members as I can't distinguish between real new members and yet more spammers. I really don't know how to get out of this cycle. I think it's going to take a change to the Yahoogroups interface to make it similar to Mailman where a potential subscriber has to respond from the same email address. But it's then only a matter of time before some spam program works round that one as well.

What I don't understand is why this one group has been singled out. Other groups I moderate and belong to aren't yet affected. If this spreads, Yahoogroups is going to become unuseable.

Today's funny. You can run but you can't hide.

Constructor Got a few minutes to play with animated stick models?

What is Attack Of The Giant Pasty Man?

Photoshop Tennis Too Cool!

Sample of Larry Ellison's new National ID Card : Ancestry: DNA is 61% Semitic

Steady Upward Market : Yes A wonderful mix of Situationist theatre and Radical activism. The Yes Men specialize in undercover ops in corporate environments. Their latest piece was a powerpoint lecture to a group of PhDs on outsourcing labour to the 3rd world in the guise of a delegation from the WTO.

Technology Review - Teens Peer Ahead : Cybiko Inter-Tainment Computers that let teens meet, engage one another in multi-player games and blip instant messages back and forth over the 900-megahertz radio band $100 for About the size and shape of a walkie-talkie, each Cybiko comes in one of four hot colors. a black-and-white LCD screen, full keyboard, navigation buttons and a megabyte of memory for starters. Cybikos also happen to be full-featured personal digital assistants with the usual trimmings: personal information management software, a scientific calculator, spell checker, photo viewer and MP3 player. Awesome!

More About WebLogs I'm tired and I simply can't spend 2-3 hours a day surfing, critiquing and writing up a weblog.[paraphrased]

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?

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