Month: May 2003

More Nastiness Abroad. Uzbekistan takes on, um, the enemies of freedom. [Hit & Run]

bq. Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death.

The US condemned this repression for many years. But since September 11 rewrote America’s strategic interests in central Asia, the government of President Islam Karimov has become Washington’s new best friend in the region.

No More Liberal Bias!. Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll, in a staff memo leaked to the L.A. Observed weblog, has declared war on his paper’s liberal bias:bq. I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We may happen to live in a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values (and is unreflective of the nation as a whole), but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times. [Hit & Run]

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Lately I’ve been using “Groove” a fair amount. I finally paid for a copy, even though there’s no Mac version, in the hope that I could convince my department at work to use it instead of doing all our communication through a single overburdened Lotus Notes mailing list.

In the past I had trouble fetching a shared space from my office computer to my home computer, but I finally figured out the problem. I was logging out of my account on my work computer when I went home (a perfectly natural thing to do), but Groove can’t initially fetch a shared space from a logged-out computer. All I had to do was log in on that computer via PC Anywhere, and the space was fetched. Once a space has initially been fetched, syncing works just fine regardless of whether both accounts are logged in or not.

Ambrosia releases ‘Uplink’ computer hacker game. Ambrosia Software Inc. has announced the release of the Mac conversion of Uplink, a game set in the near future, in the world of high-tech computer crime and Internet-based industrial espionage. You’re hired by companies to hack into their rivals’ computer systems, stealing research data, sabotaging their information, laundering money, erasing evidence and framing innocent civilians. You can use the money you earn to upgrade your computer systems and buy new software and tools. In turn, you can engage in more dangerous, albeit more profitable, activities. [MacCentral]

I downloaded this game as soon as I read about it. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but every other Ambrosia title I’ve tried has been excellent so I have high hopes.

Adobe ships Acrobat 6.0 product line [The Macintosh News Network]

Unfortunately there’s no Mac version, only Windows and OS X.

2 U.S. Soldiers Killed, 4 Wounded in Iraq [AP World News]

bq. Gunmen ambushed a U.S. military convoy in northern Iraq (news – web sites) on Monday, killing an American soldier and wounding another. Separately, another U.S. soldier was killed and three were injured when a Humvee ran over a land mine in an apparent attack, the military said.

It was one of the most violent days for U.S. troops since the war ended last month.

Here’s a clue for ignorant reporters: if fighting is still going on, the war isn’t over. Just because you read that it was in a government press release doesn’t make it so.

in case you hadn’t noticed this story. Half a Million Moroccans march against terrorism:

I guess Muslims aren’t such a monolith after all. See also this. In fact, Muslims have been speaking up for a long time. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

No doubt the Crusaders who want to promote hatred of Muslims will ignore this story. It’s pretty impressive, though–500,000 people would be a huge demonstration even in America, let alone Morocco, with it’s population of only 30 million. There’s also a whole bunch of other link to stories about Muslims speaking out against terrorism.

Islam is Freedom. Matthew points to an interesting poll which suggests people in Islamic countries are more in favor of democracy than we in America and the UK. I think that this speaks more about the universal desire of human beings for freedom they don’t have rather than any particular insight into Islam. [Shi’a Pundit]

I think another factor is that people in countries that are not free place more value on freedom, because they have a better understanding of the alternative than people who grew up in a free country. Americans, on the other hand, don’t really value their freedom because and in many cases don’t even want it. It’s a matter of not knowing the value of something until you’ve lost it.

Getting my “PGP Key” to appear without getting messed up was a bit tricky. The problem was that Radio likes to insert a paragraph tag (<p>) after every carriage return. Since there’s a carriage return in a public key block, the key was getting corrupted by the addition of an unwanted tag. I finally figured out that the solution is to add “#autoParagraphs false” to the beginning of the story containing the key–that disables the automatic tag insertion. Of course it’s then necessary to add any needed paragraph tags manually.

Electronic Frontier Foundation –

Total Information Awareness – a compendium of information about
this spy-on-everyone program. [whatreallyhappened] [End the War on Freedom]