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August 06, 2003

Aid and comfort to the enemy
: Former Intel engineer Maher "Mike" Hawash has pleaded guilty to aiding the Taliban and has agreed to rat on fellow terrorists; he'll serve a minimum of seven years.
Hmmmm. I seem to remember lots and lots of sites defending him and decrying our bully government for taking him away in handcuffs.
So now he admits he's guilty.

Hawash pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban. Prosecutors agreed to drop charges of conspiring to levy war against the United States and conspiring to provide material support for terrorism.
"You and the others in the group were prepared to take up arms, and die as martyrs if necessary, to defend the Taliban. Is this true?" U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones asked Hawash during the hearing.
"Yes, your honor," Hawash replied.

Anybody have a spare "suspected terrorist" button for Mike?asian cam free live web

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Push, the monster that won't die
: Push, created by that Dr. Frankenstein of the bubble, Pointcast, will not die.
AOL bought the successor to Pointcast and with its new Communicator email/IM client, it adds a push screensaver, complete with annoying, moving graphics that'll give you a seizure.
I first saw Pointcast before it was released and I hated it immediately. First, it seemed ridiculous to me to deliver news and advertising via a screensaver, for your screensaver comes on when you're not using your computer; this was the delivery channel aimed at an audience down the hall in the bathroom. Second, the application was a hog of computer power and bandwidth; it brought down corporate networks the world around. Third, it was simply overdone with annoying graphics and other wasted bits; it was a program with a big ego.
I left the demo and decided that I could deliver the value of Pointcast with nothing more than a browser page that refreshed every minute with the latest news. Thus, with some help, Newsflash was born. It still lives. Pointcast turned down $500 million from Rupert Murdoch and eventually died.
And the saga continues: Gary Wolf, who just wrote a history of Wired magazine, declares on his book-blog [via Scott Rosenberg] that the single dumbest story ever in the magazine was its cover cooing over push.

Push! (5.03) In March, 1997 Wired said goodbye to the Web browser. In an article so important it started on the cover, the Wired editors announced: “the Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance. In its place...” ...
Meanwhile, the Wired cover spawned Push media conferences, push media consultants, push media investment strategies, and uncountable push media nightmares.

The nightmare continues.asian cam free live web

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Out
: Elizabeth Spiers declares that big media snarky jokes about bloggers are "out."asian cam free live web

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Georgie porgie
: George Clooney put up a shrine to Joe Biden on his own web site (amazing that he could fit in in, what with all the pictures of George there):

Being one of the few men qualified to restore democracy to America following the demoralization of it's [sic] people, destruction of the environment, destabilization of the economy, and dishonor in the world community, it is certainly our hope that he will do so.

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Guvunuh Ahnuld
: So he's running. This is going to be entertaining. asian cam free live web

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To the great relief of trailer trash everywhere
: Jerry Springer just announced that because his show would get in the way of a candidacy, he won't be running for the Senate.asian cam free live web

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Pepe le PU
: Can you imagine what France smells like now?asian cam free live web

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Next: eBay, the movie
: Somebody's making a movie about a day in the lives of CraigsList.asian cam free live web

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Poliblogs
: Mark Glaser writes about the Dean blog today (quoting me, btw). And at WSJ, James Taranto writes about all the blogging pols. He argues that it won't work because blogs need to be snarky. No, blogging is just publishing and the better job these pols do at publishing, the better they will connect to voters. asian cam free live web

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RSS and freedom
: Hoder, the pioneering Iranian blogger, has an interesting idea: using RSS with peer-to-peer distribution to get around government censorship. One of his comments points out that this is what Freenet is intended to do. The difference, I imagine, is that using RSS allows any weblog to be published or read as is, around censors.asian cam free live web

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Blue Bird
: Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting Blue Bird -- the Iranian/American teen who blogged so eloquently about her return to Tehran recently -- with her parents and her brother, a prominent online Iranian himself, on their vacation trip to New York. It was a delightful lunch with some very nice people. And I'm glad to see that Blue Bird got herself a digital camera (I merely recommended the best place to buy it).
I tell you all this because I marvel, once again, at the ability of this weblog and Internet thing of ours to bring people together.
By chance, I found Iranian weblogs and then found Blue Bird's. I wrote about them and linked to them. They linked to me. Conversation began (and a few arguments). Education ensued (and I learned a great deal). Connections were made (and friendships formed).
But these are connections that in no way could have been made otherwise.
In a sense, a meeting via weblog is as serendipitous as the seating on an airplane: You can find yourself sitting next to someone you would not otherwise have met and end up having a conversation and learning and connecting. But in that case, you don't get to peer into the thoughts and heart and soul of the person next to you before connecting -- as you can do through weblogs.
So then is a meeting via weblog more like writing to an author after you've read his or her book? No, because that's so one-sided and one-to-many.
No, this weblog and Internet thing of ours is new and special and powerful in ways we still don't fully understand. I just know that it's thanks to weblogs that I had a wonderful lunch with some new friends.asian cam free live web

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King of all jerks
: Jerks never know when to shut up. That's what makes them jerks.
The king of all jerks, John Gilmore, the guy who wore the "suspected terrorist" button on a BA flight, keeps trumpeting his self-centered immaturity in the comments on Lessig's site and Floyd McWilliams sent me his latest dumb bomb:

Rob said “We must take whatever measures are necessary to prevent another 9/11, because I don’t want it to be MY office building they run a plane into next." That’s exactly where we part company. The US has many millions of buildings. Three or four of them were knocked down in the 9/11 attacks. The chance of Rob’s building being “next” is less than one in a million. So, for Rob’s safety in a one-in-a-million chance, we must take “whatever measures are necessary”? Not if it undermines freedom of expression, association, and travel, I say.
The plane-into-building thing was brilliant political theatre, but did very little to physically hurt the US or its people. Out of 280 million people, about 280 million survived. If Rob really wants to increase his chance of survival, he’ll take whatever measures are necessary to stop heart disease — which kills more people in the US every week than 9/11 or the Afghan war or the Iraq war killed.
What demonstrates the brilliance of the political theatre is how many people will violently disagree with me, that we “must” stop terrorism, etc. Let me ask you then, when we will know that we have taken “whatever measures are necessary”? When will we know that no more measures are necesary? It’s almost two years since 9/11/01 and no planes have flown into buildings since; no harbors mined, no trains destroyed, no major attacks on US soil or US properties (except against US forces invading other countries).
When should the Bush Administration set the “alert level” to green and dismantle the whole “alert level” system? When should the FBI stop wiretapping the Internet without warrants and peeking into what library books people are reading? When will mere allegations stop being reason enough to imprison British citizens without trials? When will Americans be able to travel in their own country without government permission? How many years of total safety do you have to experience before you’ll be comfortable with a guy wearing a political button sitting next to you on an airplane?

So Gilmore wants the world to be safe once more for him to be a jerk, that's what it gets down to. He doesn't want to be bothered with the fact of the real and constant threat against us because he wants to be a show-off jerk. He wants to put his own jerkfoolery above the safety and lives not only of his fellow passengers on a jet but also the lives of his fellow Americans. He shrugs off the deaths of 3,000 as insignificant against his rights to be a jerk. asian cam free live web

: But here's something even more shocking. I note that Lessig filed the Gilmore posts under the category heroes.
Put the entire weblog in that context and smoke it.asian cam free live web

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