Privacy International has issued some Stupid Security Awards. I’ve seen only the summary at the BBC.

In what, as far as I know, is the first “success” for the DMCA, a guy selling mod chips for XBOX has been sentenced to five months of jail followed by five more months of house arrest and fined $28,500.

The NY Times shows every sign of having turned off the ability to get to their content without going through their registration process, even when you get there via Google News. Updates as conditions change, assuming I notice.

Most frequently linked from the NYT, Common Dreams also has this article about librarians ensuring that they don’t have any information they don’t need. I also enjoy the “Fair Use” notice at the bottom of the page.

Even worse than simply an idiot puppet, W may believe he is a man on a mission from his god.

There’s been a lot of linkage to summaries and discussions of this New Yorker article about how SecDef Rumsfeld is a stupid, petty dictator who over-ruled his top planners at every turn when they told him he needed more troops on the ground. Most discouraging feature of the article for me: frequent comparisons to Viet Nam. When I was a cog in the Military-Industrial Complex, I heard many times that we needed to stop planning to fight the last war, since the next war was invariably different. We have demonstrated yet again that even when we are fighting the last war, it’s different, and assuming it would be the same has bitten us hard on the ass:

The immediate goal, [a former intelligence official] added, was for the Army and Marine forces “to hold tight and hope that the Republican Guard divisions get chewed up” by bombing. The planner agreed, saying, “The only way out now is back, and to hope for some kind of a miracle—that the Republican Guards commit themselves,” and thus become vulnerable to American air strikes.

“Hope,” a retired four-star general subsequently told me, “is not a course of action.”

The article is interesting, if discouraging, reading.

Lest we forget, SARS is still out there, and it’s apparently more contagious than we thought. Two suspected cases in King County and, according to the CDC, one in Alabama, though their Public Health website’s news releases seem most concerned with Smallpox vaccinations.

An article in the NY Times, popular on Blogdex today, says that a lot of today’s teens are anti-abortion. Interestingly, a quote toward the end of the article reveals a fairly profound misunderstanding on the part of at least one young person:

“There are better contraceptives—RU-486, the morning-after pill—along with an emphasis on sex ed, abstinence and slogans like, ‘Not me, Not now,'” said a sophomore at Hunter College High School in Manhattan whose father did not want her to be identified. “Abortion isn’t such an issue, because getting pregnant isn’t such a prevalent problem among my peers.”

If they think that the morning-after pill—to say nothing of RU-486, f’r Chrissakes—will continue to be available after a ban on abortion, they have a rude awakening in store. The anti-abortionists would outlaw most women’s hormonal contraceptives on the grounds that they can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting, so it’s hard to imagine they would overlook methods that are explicitly post-fertilization.
On the bright side, those arguments don’t apply to men’s hormonal contraception. On the down side, I’m not optimistic that men have any interest in managing their fertility. But I’m probably just cranky from my unmodulated hormones.

A helpful guy from one of my satellite TV mailing lists has compiled a list of possible new shows that might be hitting your screen soon.

In today’s cynical bastard department, we have the sadly unsurprising “news” that many pro-war rallies around the country have been organized by ClearChannel radio stations. Paul Krugman outlines the Bush-ClearChannel history.