Jef Raskin. The DigiBarn Com­puter Museum reports that Jef Raskin, the man who orig­i­nated and inspired the Mac­in­tosh rev­o­lu­tion, passed away peace­fully yes­ter­day. [Mac­In­Touch]

Ramadi res­i­dents flee city after lat­est US-led attacks. Res­i­dents of Ramadi, the cap­i­tal of Anbar province some 100 km east of Bagh­dad, have started to flee the city fol­low­ing the lat­est offen­sive launched by US Marines and the Iraqi army.

Fir­dous al-Abadi, a spokes­woman for the Iraqi Red Cres­cent Soci­ety (IRCS), told IRIN that many peo­ple had been trapped in the uni­ver­sity and inside mosques for over 48 hours as fight­ing raged outside. (link)

What’s going on in Ramadi that the news isn’t cov­er­ing. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

I expect that in the com­ing months the Feds will destroy the city, killing hun­dreds or thou­sands of inno­cent peo­ple in the process, and then pro­claim a great vic­tory over the “ter­ror­ists.” Mean­while, the rebels will have moved on to some other city, strength­ened by hun­dreds of pre­vi­ously neu­tral Iraqis who will want revenge for their mur­dered friends and rel­a­tives, and their destroyed homes and businesses.

DOES ANYBODY ELSE FIND THIS DEPRESSING AND DISCOURAGING?. But about halfway down the linked page is a boxed poll ques­tion with this result reported:

bq. It IS nec­es­sary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good val­ues.
Yes: 51%

[…]

The sheer igno­rance dis­played by that 51% isn’t the only prob­lem. If that poll result reflects real­ity, then 51 per­cent of Amer­i­cans are openly, bla­tantly big­oted against non-believers. They’re say­ing we’re inher­ently not good, decent human beings, every last one of us.

If you said that all blacks, Jews, gays, name-minority-of-your-choice were inher­ently not good, decent human beings, you’d be rightly nail­ing your­self as the igno­rant, ugly bigot you are. But say it about peo­ple who live their lives cleanly because of their own inter­nal ethics … and appar­ently that’s just dandy. [Wolfes­blog]

I cer­tainly find it depress­ing and dis­gust­ing, but not at all surprising–I’ve encoun­tered big­ots like that myself. Also, I strongly sus­pect that a not-insignificant part of that 51% actu­ally are also big­oted towards some or all of those minorites.

Gun­man kills ex-wife, bystander in Texas shoot­ing spree; four wounded. A man angry about being sued for unpaid child sup­port opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle out­side a cour­t­house, killing his ex-wife and a bystander who inter­vened to pro­tect the couple’s 23-year-old son.

[…]

Author­i­ties cred­ited the bystander who died, Mark Alan Wil­son, 52, with sav­ing the son’s life.

Wil­son, a gun enthu­si­ast who had a con­cealed weapons per­mit, inter­vened after Arroyo started shoot­ing, wit­nesses said. Swin­dle said Wil­son shot at Arroyo sev­eral times but his rounds didn’t pen­e­trate the body armour. [CBC News]

Nat­u­rally the US media cov­er­age I’ve seen only men­tions that a “bystander who tried to inter­vene” was killed. The fact that the bystander was armed and (as a result of being armed) suc­ceeded in sav­ing the son’s life have been con­spicously absent.

pop-up adver­tis­ers have finally defeated the pop-up block­ing func­tion­al­ity found in many browsers. The Return Of The Pop-Up Ad.
SYFer writes “Shortly after upgrad­ing my Macs to OS X 10.3.8, I noticed
that I was get­ting pop-up ads on Safari. It had been so long since I’d
seen a pop-up, I com­pletely for­got­ten how annoy­ing they can be. I went
over to Apple’s Sup­port site to see if there was a rela­tion­ship, but
learned that the tim­ing is just a coin­ci­dence (even though there’s a
lot of the usual FUD and flail­ing of arms in the dis­cus­sion forums). In
fact, it turns out that the pop-up adver­tis­ers (what’s the proper
den­i­grat­ing term here?) have finally defeated the pop-up block­ing
func­tion­al­ity found in many browsers. Mac­FixIt is run­ning a front page
arti­cle on the topic and says ‘Con­trary to ini­tial reports, this
prob­lem isn’t lim­ited to Safari; sub­se­quent reports have noted
pop-under ads vic­tim­iz­ing a num­ber of browsers that pro­vide
pop-up-blocking fea­tures, includ­ing the lat­est ver­sions of Safari,
Fire­Fox, Mozilla, Omni­Web, and Camino.’” [Slash­dot] [Pri­vacy Digest: Pri­vacy News (Civil Rights, Encryp­tion, Free Speech, Cryp­tog­ra­phy)]

I’ve just started to see pop­ups mak­ing it through from cer­tain sites in Fire­fox, although the AdBlock exten­sion has thus far removed the ads, leav­ing just empty pop­ups. The Slash­dot dis­cus­sion includes var­i­ous tips on how to deal with these ever more insid­i­ous ads.

Cabir mobile virus found in U.S... Cabir mobile virus found in U.S.. Virus appeared in two phones in a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia shop win­dow, pos­si­bly infected via Blue­tooth wire­less. [CNET News.com] [Pri­vacy Digest: Pri­vacy News (Civil Rights, Encryp­tion, Free Speech, Cryp­tog­ra­phy)]

Part of my job at Syman­tec is pro­vid­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion man­age­ment sup­port for our wire­less prod­ucts group, which devel­ops soft­ware for (among other things) virus pro­tec­tion on Symbian-based phones from Nokia.

First Grader Pun­ished for Bag of Dirt. Her mom, Michele, says after Michaela put the mix­ture into the bag, she tied the top with a pur­ple pony­tail holder and gave it to her friend saying,“here’s a bag of dirt.”

After recess was over the stu­dent gave the bag of dirt to their teacher.

Michele says after meet­ing with the teacher and prin­ci­pal, she was told that the bag of dirt, “looked like a bag of weed.”

[…]

Michele says she doesn’t deny what her daugh­ter did. But she does dis­agree with the two-day in-school deten­tion. “They said it would be on her school record as far as dis­ci­pli­nary that she made a look alike drug but I don’t feel like that’s right. Because she didn’t do any­thing wrong.”

Michele says her daugh­ter served her two day, in-school deten­tion last Thurs­day and Fri­day. And while she’s still upset with the schools actions, Michele is not con­sid­er­ing mov­ing her daugh­ter to another school. [KFVS 12]

Another exam­ple of why it’s a ter­ri­ble mis­take to sub­ject chil­dren to gov­ern­ment schools. Unfor­tu­nately, it seems this poor girl’s mother is to stu­pid to learn that les­son even after hav­ing it shoved down her throat. Well, we can only hope that the girl grows up to have a healthy con­tempt for author­ity because of this.

Reuters.  Of course, if Bush lied about this as part of a basic secu­rity clear­ance process, he would lose his clear­ance. [John Robb’s Weblog]

Sure he would. And if you believe that, I have a bridge for sale.

PGP Algo­rithm Migra­tion. Accord­ing to Callas, “We’ve been plan­ning for just this sort of event for some time.” All PGP prod­ucts are archi­tected to allow for rapid and non-disruptive migra­tion of all encryp­tion, hash, com­pres­sion, and sig­na­ture algo­rithms. PGP Cor­po­ra­tion began plan­ning the migra­tion to more secure hash algo­rithms after MD5 was com­pro­mised last year. Callas addressed the company’s design phi­los­o­phy in a Sep­tem­ber 2004 CTO Cor­ner arti­cle enti­tled “Much ado about hash func­tions.” At the same time, PGP engi­neers began imple­ment­ing a shift from SHA-1 to the stronger algo­rithms (SHA-256 and SHA-512) while pre­serv­ing inter­op­er­abil­ity with exist­ing soft­ware. [PGP Cor­po­ra­tion]

I may be wrong here, but it seems to me that sim­ply increas­ing the num­ber of bits in an algo­rithm that’s already been proven vul­ner­a­ble isn’t the best idea. Are there no strong algo­rithms avail­able that aren’t derived from MD4?

Arabs: ‘it’s the for­eign pol­icy, stu­pid’. This has been said many times before, but it bears repeat­ing. Arabs and Mus­lims don’t “hate our free­doms”. They hate our for­eign pol­icy:

[Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

I’m not sur­prised. All the talk about a “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” comes from Cru­saders, who are comit­ting the com­mon mis­take of believ­ing that every­one else thinks the way they do.