Bank to Seiz­ers: Drop Dead. Com­ments stal­wart Dou­glas Fletcher notes that Winston-Salem, NC-based bank BB&T Corp. (as Jacob Sul­lum dis­cussed yes­ter­day) has announced it will… [Hit and Run]

Good for them!

Crane Museo Sil­ver Rag. Pete Myers report appear­ing here at the end of Feb­ru­ary will tell the tale of this paper in greater detail. But if you’re a fine art printer look­ing for a new paper that has the look of tra­di­tional fiber prints, and a tonal­ity in B&W print­ing sim­i­lar to Plat­inum, Crane Museo Sil­ver Rag may be the paper for you. My 17″ test roll is almost used up, and I can’t wait till the paper becomes com­mer­cially avail­able so that I can start print­ing with it in earnest. [Lumi­nous Land­scape]

I’m plan­ning to try this paper as soon as it becomes avail­able. I shoot mostly black and white, and print on Epson Enhanced Matte paper. It does a good job, but this paper sounds even bet­ter, and has the added ben­e­fit of being archival (Enhanced Matte is slightly acidic, so it will turn yel­low eventually).

New York’s Secu­rity. ‘Ring of Steel for New York?’, WSJ, 25 Jan­u­ary 2005. New York’s police are look­ing at London’s approach to secur­ing crit­i­cal finan­cial dis­tricts (via a ‘Ring of Steel’). Closed cir­cuit TV net­works and entry choke points are being con­sid­ered. The… [John Robb’s Weblog]

I believe the phrase they’re look­ing for is “Iron Curtain.”

LA Times Colum­nist Doesn’t Sup­port the Troops. Los Ange­les Times colum­nist Joel Stein admits that he grew up with money and hasn’t so much as served jury duty for his coun­try. I, on the other hand, grew up with no money and have served in the Marines and the National Guard. We do have one thing in com­mon though: we don’t “sup­port the troops.“
Stein has no prob­lem with peo­ple who are for the war sup­port­ing the troops. “But I’m not for the war,” he says. “And being against the war and say­ing you sup­port the troops is one of the wussi­est posi­tions the paci­fists have ever taken — and they’re wussy by def­i­n­i­tion.“
I don’t believe for a New York minute that Bar­bara Streisand, Michael Moore, John Kerry, et al. really sup­port the troops. They only say they do for polit­i­cal expe­di­ency, which just goes to show that the anti-war left is no more trust­wor­thy than the war­mon­ger­ing right. If you think invad­ing Iraq was wrong, why would you “sup­port the troops?“
The Amer­i­can mil­i­tary has been all-volunteer since 1973, and as Stein observes”…when you vol­un­teer for the U.S. mil­i­tary, you pretty much know you’re not going to be fend­ing off inva­sions from Mex­ico and Canada. So you’re will­ingly sign­ing up to be a fight­ing tool of Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism, for bet­ter or worse. Some­times you get lucky and get to fight eth­nic geno­cide in Kosovo, but other times it’s Viet­nam.“
Stein goes on to say,“I’m not advo­cat­ing that we spit on return­ing vet­er­ans like they did after the Viet­nam War, but we shouldn’t be cel­e­brat­ing peo­ple for doing some­thing we do’t think was a good idea.“
Click here to read the rest of Joel Stein’s funny, per­cep­tive arti­cle, and here to read my pre­vi­ous post on the same subject.

[Police State USA]

Inde­pen­dents Push For Sec­ond Fire­fly Sea­son. ovan­klot writes “It seems that Bril­liant Screen Enter­tain­ment is look­ing to see if there is an audi­ence for a sec­ond sea­son of the sci­ence fic­tion show Fire­Fly. From the arti­cle: ‘It’s pos­si­ble that sub­scribers may choose one of three play­back options; monthly DVD deliv­er­ies, TV On-Demand using your cable or satel­lite provider, or com­puter view­ing via Stream­ing Down­load.’” They are ask­ing folks to fill out a short sur­vey to gather demo­graph­ics for sup­port in their efforts to get Fox to release the show to them. The site also stresses that they want nei­ther money nor con­fi­den­tial per­sonal infor­ma­tion. [Slash­dot]

I’ve read that Fox is pretty deter­mined for the series to stay dead, so I’m not get­ting my hopes up, but it would be nice if this worked out.

Here’s an amus­ing inquiry sent to a Nikon mail­ing list I sub­scribe to:

bq. I bought a D1X used recently. Great camera.

[…]

Any lens sug­ges­tions appre­ci­ated. I have no Nikon glass.

With­out any lenses, I won­der how the author arrived at the con­clu­sion that it’s a “great cam­era?” Per­haps he meant that it’s great as a really expen­sive paperweight.

Depart­ment of Home­land Stu­pid­ity to Con­fis­cate Safe Deposit Box Con­tents. Notepad at Bel­la­ciao reports on a secret Home­land Stu­pid­ity pro­gram to con­fis­cate safe deposit box contents:

“A fam­ily mem­ber from Irvine, CA (who’s a branch man­ager at Bank of Amer­ica) told us two weeks ago that her bank held a “work­shop” where the last two days were ded­i­cated to dis­cussing their bank’s new secu­rity mea­sures. Dur­ing these last two days, the work­shop included mem­bers from the Home­land Secu­rity Office who instructed them on how to field calls from cus­tomers and what they are to tell them in the event of a national dis­as­ter. She said they were told how only agents from Home­land Secu­rity (dur­ing such an event) would be in charge of open­ing safe deposit boxes and deter­min­ing what items would be given to bank customers.

“At this point they were told that no weapons, cash, gold, or sil­ver will be allowed to leave the bank — only var­i­ous paper­work will be given to its own­ers. After dis­cussing the mat­ter with them at length, she and the other employ­ees were then told not to dis­cuss the sub­ject with anyone.”

Bank employ­ees have been told not to talk to about this to cus­tomers. Click here to read the rest of notepad’s report.
[Police State USA]

This is hardly sur­pris­ing, as the Feds went through bank safe deposit boxes back in the 1930s to steal gold from them. Any­one who trusts their valu­ables to an Amer­i­can bank is ignor­ing the lessons of history.

Google v. Feds. The New York Times reports, “The Jus­tice Depart­ment has asked a fed­eral judge to com­pel Google, the Inter­net search giant, to turn over records on mil­lions of its users’ search queries as part of the government’s effort to uphold an… By Casey Khan. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

Good for Google! Of course, we can expect the Jus­tice Depart­ment to sud­denly dis­cover numer­ous anti-trust vio­la­tions by Google in the near future.

Anonym.OS. This seems like a really impor­tant devel­op­ment: an anony­mous oper­at­ing sys­tem:

bq. Titled Anonym.OS, the sys­tem is a type of disc called a “live CD” — mean­ing it’s a com­plete solu­tion for using a com­puter with­out touch­ing the hard drive. Devel­op­ers say Anonym.OS is likely the first live CD based on the security-heavy OpenBSD oper­at­ing system.

OpenBSD run­ning in secure mode is rel­a­tively rare among desk­top users. So to keep from stand­ing out, Anonym.OS leaves a decep­tive net­work fin­ger­print. In every­thing from the way it actively reports itself to other com­put­ers, to mat­ters of tech­ni­cal minu­tia such as TCP packet length, the sys­tem is designed to look like Win­dows XP SP1. “We con­sid­ered part of what makes a sys­tem anony­mous is look­ing like what is most pop­u­lar, so you blend in with the crowd,” explains project devel­oper Adam Bre­gen­zer of Super Light Industry.

Boot­ing the CD, you are pre­sented with a text based wizard-style list of ques­tions to answer, one at a time, with defaults that will work for most users. Within a few moments, a fairly naïve user can be up and run­ning and con­nected to an open Wi-Fi point, if one is available.

Once you’re run­ning, you have a broad range of anonymity-protecting appli­ca­tions at your disposal.

Get yours here.

See also this Slash­Dot thread. [Schneier on Secu­rity]

I’ve tried these “secure Unix” things run­ning from a live CD sev­eral times, but none of them worked with my PC. I’ll give this a try too, when I get around to it, but I’m not opti­mistic about it being any different.

DHS Declares Bali Aiport Unsafe. Jan­u­ary 19, 2006 [Cryp­tome]

The KGB’s endorse­ment is a bit vague, though. It could mean, “This air­port is almost as oppres­sive and Soviet-like as we want it to be, but not quite. The secu­rity check­point grop­ers sex­u­ally assaulted 1% fewer women than required by our quota.”

But it could also mean, “This air­port was com­pletely unwill­ing to oppress peo­ple, and when we com­plained they started talk­ing about some­thing called the ‘Bill of Rights’ that they seemed to think we should know about.”

Maybe they should have a rat­ing sys­tem, where an air­port that com­pletely meets their stan­dards gets five hammer-and-sickles, while an air­port that com­pletely dis­re­gards all of them gets none.