Now's the time to plan ahead for your hangover remedies!

It just doesn't make sense to not put such good advice to use!

Oh drat! They don't really work. (Thanks Cory and Fark.)

Here's a Wired News interview with Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the ACLU and former president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
ACLU Exec Voices Concerns, by Ben Polen.

Is the entertainment industry seriously going to start suing its customers over the same minor acts of piracy it has traditionally condoned for years (making mix tapes for your friends)? Only time will tell.

For the time being, the entertainment industry will continue to use the threat of prosecuting consumers as part of their pitch to sell Congress on the need for hardware with built-in security mechanisms. (Enter the dreaded SSSCA - Security Systems Standards and Certification Act...)

See the NY Times article by Amy Harmon:
Online Piracy Fight: Next Up, Consumers

Here's a useful article about how to make your weblog more accessible:
Weblog Accessibility, by Andy J. Williams Affleck.

Bio-Rad won't license its patent for an instant HIV test because it already controls the market on the lousy tests that take two weeks.

I wonder what other technology that could benefit society isn't being made available to us because some company has decided it can make more money on it later (presumably after more people have been infected with whatever it is a cure for, causing the demand to be higher and the profit margins to be larger).

Open plea to Bio-Rad executives: if you've already cornered the market, why not start phasing in the faster, more accurate tests to all of your existing customers? You can charge more for the tests and the demand for them will go way up because people won't have to deal with the hassle of coming back to get the results. You can still make a fortune, and you'll get to be the good guys for a change. -- Time to make money and help the world...

See:
Patent owners stall fast HIV test: Long wait for results cuts effectiveness in fighting disease,
by Geeta Anand for the Wall St. Journal.

"...simple, fast HIV tests, which are commonly used in dozens of other countries, aren’t available in the U.S. The reason: a patent granted over a decade ago on a rare form of the virus. The company that controls the patent, the big diagnostic-products maker Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., has been approached by several small companies seeking licensing rights to sell their fast HIV tests here. Bio-Rad refused. Bio-Rad did sell some licensing rights to three big companies, but those companies don’t sell easy-to-use tests in the U.S.

Critics at the CDC and the military say Bio-Rad and its three big U.S. licensees — Abbott Laboratories Inc., Chiron Corp. and Johnson & Johnson — have little incentive to sell a rapid test domestically because they already dominate the $200 million U.S. market for the slower, lab-based HIV tests. Abbott, in particular, is the biggest U.S. seller of the slower tests. Quick tests would require the companies to conduct expensive clinical trials, and would likely siphon off sales of slower tests, the critics say.

“They have, in effect, locked everyone out of the U.S. market,” says Nelson Michael, chief of molecular diagnostics at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, the U.S. military’s medical-research center. Bernard Branson, the CDC’s epidemiologist in charge of HIV diagnostics, says, “I’d call it restraint of trade. It’s a travesty to stand by and allow these tests to languish.”

The CDC earlier this month asked the Department of Justice whether there was reason to initiate an antitrust investigation into the use of the patent by Bio-Rad and its three licensees, according to a person familiar with the situation. It couldn’t be determined whether such an investigation is proceeding, and a Justice Dept. spokeswoman declined to comment.

At Bio-Rad, spokesman John Hertia says the company may have held up the marketing of rapid HIV tests in the U.S., but he says “it’s common in diagnostics to use your intellectual property strategically.” He says licensing the virus freely would diminish the value of Bio-Rad’s patent, both for Bio-Rad itself and for its existing licensees. “We want to be a global leader in blood-virus testing,” he says. Abbott, Chiron and Johnson & Johnson all say they don’t unfairly use their patent rights to protect their existing products.

I just bought a new book (well the book's not new, but my copy will be :-) :
The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places,
by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass.

After I bought the book, I nosed around the Cambridge University Press website a bit and realize they have a lot of great titles.

Top Ten Crooked Cop Do's and Don'ts:
#1 -- Be careful not to use copyrighted materials when tampering with your video evidence!

Swedish TV-channels SVT and TV4 are jointly pressing charges against the police for violating copyright restrictions as a result of falsifying evidence by using and manipulating sequences taken from both channels.

This article from the InterActivist Info Exchange has the full story and direct links to all of the video footage in question:

Swedish Cops Fake Video Evidence in Gothenburg Prosecutions & Face Copyright Infringement Claims .

hydrarchist writes: "According to yelah.net, Swedish Police have been accused of copyright infringement by two national television stations. The allegations arose subsequent to a documentary screened last week on the alteration of evidence in a trial against a demonstrator who was shot and seriously injured during the European Union Summit in Gothenburg this summer. The 19 year old youth, Hannes Westerburg, was prosecuted for rioting offenses and convicted last month. The incident was captured by a number of video cameramen on the scene. Both prosecution and defense received the materials on tape. As the video footage documenting the shooting of Hannes Westerberg did not adequately support the police's version of events, they manipulated the evidence, creating a montage which made it appear that a sole rioter was in fact part of a mob. They also replaced the sound track with audio recorded elsewhere to once again give the impression that Westerberg was part of a large and threatening crowd. State justification for the shooting rests upon the claim that it was necessary in order to protect an injured policeman from further attack, a claim squarely refuted by the evidence.

This manipulation was chronicled in a documentary on Swedish television last week, which included interviews with the Belgian videographer who shot the most comprehensive footage of the incident (in English). He confirms that the audio track has been altered. The TV program is available in its entirety on the web, with the interview appearing towards the end of the second segment. http://www.svt.se/granskning/video/2001/1106/gbg2.ram.

Here's an excerpt from Cory Doctorow's upcoming novel for Tor Books, Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom . ( Courtesy of Infinite Matrix.)

My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and I answered it.

"Yes," I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a backup — one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to machine-generated reminders over conscious choice.

It's Dan." I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him — children's laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of thousands of feet. "Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's pretty important."

"Can it wait for fifteen?" I asked.

"Sure — see you in fifteen."

I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD, dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my head and my life flashed before my eyes.

*****

After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten years since my last death. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to my death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been put in place when I was restored.

Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her pony-tail. She took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened my mouth and said, to my surprise, "I have to pee."

Oops. More of the same security holes for Microsoft products. This time for SQL Server.

(Mac Observer found the news quite tiresome actually...)

See:
Microsoft warns of holes in SQL Server, by Juan Carlos Perez for CNN.

The first and more serious vulnerability results from the failure of the SQL Server text-generating functions to limit the size of the text to the buffer space allotted by the system. This can lead to a flaw known as buffer overflow, which could allow an attacker to execute code within the system. The extent of the damage that the attacker could cause would depend on how the database administrator has configured the product's security parameters. In the worst-case scenario, the attacker could gain "significant control over the database, and perhaps over the server itself" and be able to "add, delete, or change data in the database, ... reconfigure the operating system, install new software on it, or simply reformat the hard drive," according to the security bulletin.

The second vulnerability is related to C runtime functions for formatting text strings. The database calls these strings when it runs on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 or Windows XP operating systems. The flaw can make the database vulnerable to a denial of service attack, Microsoft said. The C runtime is the set of executables and files that provide support for programs written in the C programming language, and all Windows platforms ship with a runtime for C, Microsoft said. A "format string" vulnerability occurs when "a function that accepts formatted text for printing doesn't properly validate it before using it," Microsoft said.

The crop circles remind a friend of mine of this cool poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (Thanks, Aaron)

Excerpted from "I Am Waiting", by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth's dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

Another company is peddling similar technology to the Applied Digital Solutions ID Chip mentioned below.

Here's an editorial by David Coursey for CNET Asia:
An implanted ID chip? Makes my skin crawl...

The concept of a national identity card--something you'd carry to use for matching with your fingerprint or retinal scan--gains a new dimension with implant technology. Or perhaps the chips could be implanted at birth as a sort of digital birth certificate.

Thinking about such prospects reminds me of three essential aspects of any new invention: The first is that technology is amoral, even when there is a temptation to consider it immoral, instead. Second, it's pretty hard to keep technology under wraps: If something is technologically possible, somebody is going to do it. And, finally, if something is created, it will probably be both used and abused.

I hope that VeriChip and its ilk--which have great potential to help people--will find their way into the hands of people who are well-intentioned and smart in equal parts. But I am not naive, either. This is what the ongoing privacy debate is about--and the VeriChip gives us another good reason to pay close attention to it.

Implanted ID chips are used by some farmers to keep tabs on their livestock. Now a company that manufactures them, Applied Digital Solutions, is trying to get people used to the idea of implanted chips in humans.

These chips can hold a few sentences of information and show great potential for being teamed up with a National ID card system.

See the articles:
A Chip ID That's Only Skin-Deep, by David Streitfeld for the LA Times.

and

Next: An ID Chip Planted in Your Body? , by Robert O'Harrow Jr for the Washington Post.

This is just a brief note regarding the Lord of the Rings film that just came out.

Great flick, but wouldn't recommend it for young children (say under 10).

The film is only rated PG-13, but I think it was more violent and scary than many slasher films I've seen. I understand that parents have to be the judge about what their own kids can handle, but I don't think that the parents that brought their six year olds to see this movie for Christmas understood that blood and gore were on the agenda.

The six year olds sitting near us were asking to go home after the first hour and many had their jackets over their face until they finally fell asleep in their parents arms.

Just food for thought. (I was expecting a bit tamer flick based on the marketing for the film, I guess.)

I'd like to reiterate that this was a beautiful and exciting grown-up movie :-) After three hours, I was ready for more. Guess I'll have to wait a year...

This article by John Borland for CNET News covers some of the upcoming features of the next round of Morpheus software:
New features planned for file swappers.

Ouch. Bad year for the music industry. (Or just record company propoganda :-).

Check out:
Labels Singing the Blues Over Expensive Failures
by Jeff Leeds for the L.A. Times.

"I've never seen this kind of damage," said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "You had these tent-pole releases that didn't carry their weight this year. And it's going to get worse."

The major music companies report financial results differently, but most of the labels are struggling.

EMI posted a loss of $77.6million for the first half of its fiscal year--the worst first-half results in at least five years. Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment reportedly had a loss of more than $70 million this year.

Warner Music, once the industry leader, has been posting lower pretax earnings for three consecutive quarters, and Sony Music reported operating losses of $91 million for the last two quarters. Universal Music is the only one of the Big Five record conglomerates to post gains this year.

Record executives say the fickle marketplace is making established performers seem a liability. Much like Hollywood's movie studios, the major record companies find themselves forced to pay stratospheric sums--even at the risk of losing money on the deals--for the industry's top stars.

Swept up in a free-agency frenzy, record labels during the last decade spent hundreds of millions of dollars to sign such acts as Carey, R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Janet Jackson, Prince and ZZ Top.

Record labels sign blockbuster pacts with hopes that mega-stars will at least pay for themselves and provide momentum for the company to sign new talent. In a business in which some 90% of the 6,000 CDs released domestically each year are unprofitable, according to major-label executives, stars are seen as safe bets--particularly when corporate parents are pressuring music labels to hit quarterly earnings targets."

Here's a cool piece from The Nation detailing how the "big ten" media companies actually own all of it, either directly or indirectly.

See:
The Big Ten , by Mark Crispin Miller. (Thanks, Cory)

Cory Doctorow has written some wonderful words to end the year with for the O'Reilly Network. See: 2002: The Carpetbaggers Go Home .

In case it's escaped your notice, the economy is also circling the drain. Once-proud giants like Yahoo are shutting down weird little community-driven divisions like webrings.com. The traditional business press is full of gloating editorials from columnists who insist that they were never fooled for a second, they knew from Day One that the Internet was just hype and horseshit, a waffle-iron married to a fax machine, and here we are, the bubble burst, fortunes lost, hardy-har-har. (Even a stopped (analog) clock is right twice a day.)

Having spent billions trying to make 95-percent-reliable services function at 97 percent reliability, the Captains of Industry are off for greener pastures (cough biotech cough), leaving behind a horde of underemployed html jocks, perl obsessives, pixel-pushers, and pythoneers. What are these reborn slackers doing with their time in a down economy?

Exactly what they've done all along, only more so. The spare-time economy has yielded a bountiful harvest of weblogs, Photoshop tennis matches, homebrew Web services and dangerously Seattlean levels of garage-band activity.

Webloggers aren't professional journalists; they don't adhere to the code of ethics that CNN et al are nominally bound by, and they often can't spell or string together a coherent sentence, let alone pen an inverted-pyramid story. Nevertheless, bloggers are collectively brilliant at ferreting out every little detail of a story, wearing its edges smooth with discussion, and spitting it out again. Further, bloggers are spread out across the Internet, mirroring, quoting, and linking back to one another, collectively forming a Distributed Provision of Service that is resistant to CNN-killing catastrophes like 9/11. Blogs are about 95 percent of the way to being full-fledged news-sources, and the difference between the bloggers of the world and CNN is a couple of percentiles and several billion dollars.

Even as cable modem companies are knocking hundreds of thousands of subscribers offline, untethered forced-leisure gangs are committing random acts of senseless wirelessness, armed with cheap-like-borscht 802.11b cards and antennae made from washers, hot glue, and Pringles cans.

Hey cool, Slashdot picked up the Dmitry Sklyarov story. (Thanks, Timothy)

*ZiggyP0P* writes: "We remember hearing how Dmitry was let off and released (so he can finally go home) but how he had to cooperate with the government in the prosecution of his employer as a plea bargain. Turns out that this was all a lie by the Justice Dept. Skylarov has released his own statements which explain what exactly happened. He has entered into no legal plea bargain and he is still employed by Elcomsoft (even though the justice dept called him his former employer)."

I published an O'Reilly Network Weblog on Friday that clarifies the circumstances behind the Department of Justice's dropping the charges against Dmitry Sklyarov.

Check out: Dmitry Sets the Record Straight.

MusicNet and Pressplay are up and running now, and the consensus is that they both more than a little disappointing.

See: Analysis: Music Label Services' Debut Lackluster , by Bernhard Warner for Reuters in London.

Reviewers have criticized Pressplay and MusicNet for offering fewer songs and fewer features than the illegal services. Furthermore, the services won't be available to consumers outside the U.S. for months.

Music fans have been blunt on Internet message boards too. For MusicNet, the most common complaint on the message boards is that would-be customers cannot view the music library until after they've paid the $9.95 monthly subscription.

And, MusicNet does not permit the download of tracks to a portable MP3 player or to be burned on a CD, a feature that rival Pressplay includes.

"Pay 10 to 20 bucks for music that you CANNOT listen to in your portable MP3 player or burn to CD and have the music vaporize once you terminate your subscription," reads one UseNet message about MusicNet. "Is the music consumer that stupid?!"

MusicNet could not be immediately reached for comment.

FreeDrive has been forced to shutdown its publicly available swapping space. See:
News: File-swapping site breaks under DOJ pressure by By John Borland and Lisa Bowman.

FreeDrive's Public Share utility allowed subscribers to publicly post files of all types--both illegal and legal--for anyone to download. People could find the files by searching keywords on public searching services such as AltaVista. Once they found the file name located on the FreeDrive storage system, they could join FreeDrive and download the software.

However, the public system opened the company to charges that pirates were using it to distribute software.

Three months ago, Falter said he received a phone call from the DOJ and a large maker of office automation software, notifying him that pirates were using his system to store illegal software. After consulting with company executives and attorneys, Falter said he decided to close the public system. He would not identify the software company.

"There is no easy way to stop this other than to shut down the public sharing," Falter said, adding that he hoped the closure would "stem the tide of software piracy."

Falter said the move would affect just 1 percent of the 11.5 million members who use its service. Most FreeDrive subscribers use a private sharing system, where people can get files only if they've been invited to do so. That system will stay up and running, Falter said. FreeDrive, like its rivals, collects revenue largely from advertisements shown to those visitors.

Until the closure, FreeDrive was one of the few online storage companies that had allowed its members to open their files to the general public. Other companies decided against it because of the liability. Competitor MySpace.com spokesman Ari Freeman said his company considered starting a public sharing system but didn't because of the "potential problems behind it." Instead, the company has a password-protected service.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to supply potassium iodide pills to any state that wants them.

See: CNN.com - Residents near nuclear plants may get cancer prevention pills by By Rea Blakey and Elizabeth Cohen.

More than two decades after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, the United States is again confronting the fear of an unexpected release of radiation. This time the concern isn't about an accident, but about a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant.

The specter of such a strike has prompted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to take a step many advocates have been demanding for years: supplying potassium iodide pills to people at risk of radiation exposure.

Potassium iodide, known as KI, is a cheap, nonprescription drug that is proven to prevent thyroid cancer -- one of the main causes of death after radiation exposure -- if administered within three to four hours of a nuclear release. But unlike many other countries, the United States has not stockpiled the drug as a precautionary measure.

Here's a cool site that catalogues Clear Channel's suggestions for songs that shouldn't see the light of day:
A Brief History of Banned Music in the United States - Clear Channels List of Songs with Questionable Lyrics.

Dmitry Sklyarov is off the hook, "until the conclusion of the case against Elcomsoft or for one year, whichever is longer."

See the Press Release from the U.S. Attorney's Office:
US Attorney (N. Dist. CA) Press Release -- On Dropping of Charges Against Dmitry Sklyarov (Dec. 13, 2001).

The United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California announced that Dmitry Sklyarov entered into an agreement this morning with the United States and admitted his conduct in a hearing before U.S. District Judge Whyte in San Jose Federal Court.

Under the agreement, Mr. Sklyarov agreed to cooperate with the United States in its ongoing prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov's former employer, Elcomsoft Co., Ltd. Mr. Skylarov will be required to appear at trial and testify truthfully, and he will be deposed in the matter. For its part, the United States agreed to defer prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov until the conclusion of the case against Elcomsoft or for one year, whichever is longer. Mr. Sklyarov will be permitted to return to Russia in the meantime, but will be subject to the Court's supervision, including regularly reporting by telephone to the Pretrial Services Department. Mr. Sklyarov will be prohibited from violating any laws during the year, including copyright laws. The United States agreed that, if Mr. Sklyarov successfully completes the obligations in the agreement, it will dismiss the charges pending against him at the end of the year or when the case against Elcomsoft is complete.

Part of the deal is that he has to testify in the civil case against his employer, but according to the EFF Press Release, he will most likely also testify on his employer's behalf.

See the EFF Media Release:
Sklyarov Freed (Dec. 13, 2001):

U.S. Federal Court Judge Ronald Whyte today signed a court agreement permitting Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov to return to his native land after a five-month enforced stay in the U.S. The agreement should eventually clear him of all charges brought against him for distributing software that permits electronic book owners to convert the Adobe e-book format so they can make use of e-books without access restrictions.

As part of the agreement, Sklyarov will testify for the government in the case that remains against Elcomsoft, Sklyarov's employer. He will likely testify on behalf of Elcomsoft as well.

"Dmitry programmed a format converter which has many legitimate uses, including enabling the blind to hear e-books," explained EFF Intellectual Property Attorney Robin Gross. "The idea that he faced prison for this is outrageous."

"There was a tremendous outpouring of grassroots support for Dmitry and against the current U.S. copyright law, and EFF is proud to have been part of such a successful effort," stated EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "I'm disappointed, however, that the government has decided to string this along instead of admitting its mistake in bringing these charges against Dmitry in the first place."

Looks like college radio stations may be the next in line to be Digital Millennium Copyright Act victims.

See the Salon article, Why college radio fears the DMCA, by By Mark L. Shahinian.

Under the terms of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), radio stations around the country are supposed to pay thousands of dollars in annual fees to broadcast streaming audio over the Web. Managers of college and community stations say while their commercial counterparts may be able to pay the fees, their stations don't have the cash and will shut down their webcasts.

The 1998 law came up on Capitol Hill Thursday, as members of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property held an oversight hearing on how temporary copies stored on computers should be counted when calculating copyright fees.

The hearing, said congressional staffers, was an early skirmish in a battle to defang the DMCA and transfer power from record companies back to broadcasters.

Webcasting was once touted as an example of the Internet's leveling power -- it allows small local stations to reach Internet users all over the world. And college stations, which run tight budgets and eclectic playlists, fit the webcast bill perfectly. But record companies don't like webcasting, with its potential for copying and distributing unlimited digital copies of songs.

Under long-standing U.S. copyright law, broadcasters pay a coalition of songwriters' groups to air music over the Internet and the airwaves. But until the DMCA, performers and record companies did not have the rights to royalties when stations played their music. As part of the 1998 law, Congress allowed performers and record companies to start collecting fees on songs sent over the web, said Joel Willer, a mass communications professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. There are still no performer fees for regular airwave broadcasts.

But until now, the law has yet to be fully enforced. If it is, college radio on the Web will be in trouble.

Partisan politics are alive and well.

See the Wired article, Madcap Maneuvers Halt MS Hearing, by Declan McCullagh and Ben Polen.

Upset at what the Senate Finance committee was doing with a trade bill, the crafty Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) tried a procedural gambit that pulled the plug on all committee hearings. It was the political equivalent of Windows' blue screen of death.

Byrd is one of the Senate's crusty old men, elected to the Senate in 1958, and a wily parliamentarian. He's a former majority leader and even co-authored a two-volume history of the Senate, called The Senate 1789-1989.

He also, for the record, is the guy who objected to laptop computers on the Senate floor in 1997.

Byrd knew that a Senate rule prohibits committees from meeting for more than two hours while the main chamber is in session, but this is usually bypassed daily with unanimous consent. On Wednesday, Byrd refused to consent, which required committees to halt what they were doing after 11:30 a.m.

Leahy, who was just getting started in the Judiciary committee a block or two away, was visibly peeved. "This committee will be recessed because of a motion made on the Senate floor to stop hearings," he said.

A judiciary aide said afterward that the hearing won't be rescheduled until sometime next year.

Looks like oxygen isn't part of the deal when you surrender to the Northern Alliance.

See the New York Times article Witnesses Recount Taliban Dying While Held Captive by Carlotta Gall.

Dozens of Taliban prisoners died after surrendering to Northern Alliance forces, asphyxiated in the shipping containers used to transport them to prison, witnesses say.

The deaths occurred as the prisoners, many of them foreign fighters for the Taliban, were brought from the town of Kunduz to the prison here, a journey that took two or three days for some.

Colonel General Jurabek, the Northern Alliance commander in charge of some 3,000 prisoners being held here, said Saturday that 43 prisoners had died in half a dozen containers on the way, either from injuries or asphyxiation. Three others died from their wounds after arrival, and had been given a Muslim burial at the town of Dasht-i-Laili, he said.

But the number of deaths may be much higher. Several Pakistani prisoners interviewed in the prison have said that dozens of people died in their containers during the journey here. Omar, a pale and slight youth, who clutched a blanket round his head and shoulders, said through the bars of his prison wing that all but seven people in his container had died from lack of air. He estimated that more than 100 had died. Another Pakistani said 13 had died in his container and that the survivors had taken turns to breathe through a hole in the metal wall.

One prisoner, Ibrahim, a 30-year- old Pakistani mechanic interviewed in the presence of General Jurabek, said he thought some 35 people had died in his container en route from Kunduz. "No oxygen, no oxygen," he said urgently in English. The general corrected him and said only five or six had died.

Now Larry Ellison denies having ever advocated National ID cards. See the NetworkWorldFusion story:
Oracle’s Ellison 'debunks' Web services.

Ellison also claimed that he was misunderstood when he called for the creation of a national ID card system in the U.S., which he made soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. ...

"Everyone thinks I called for a national ID card," he said. "I believe we should not have national ID cards. We should have a set of standards around IDs."

I suspect this misunderstanding may have been seeded by Ellison's own October 18th editorial for the Wall Street Journal, misleadingly entitled,
Smart Cards: Digital IDs can help prevent terrorism:

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, our country has been thrust into a debate over how to root out terrorists while also maintaining our civil liberties. One of the suggestions proposed, though not yet fully debated, is that of national identification cards.

Many Americans instinctively fear that a national ID card would sacrifice basic freedoms and compromise personal privacy. On the face of it, issuing ID cards does seem a significant step. Trusting government to maintain a database with our names, addresses, places of work, amounts and sources of income, assets, purchases, travel destinations, and more, seems a huge leap of faith.

But we should remember that these databases already exist, and that we willingly helped in their creation. For years, companies like American Express and Visa have been issuing cards and building up information on millions of Americans. The databases they maintain are searched and sold on a daily basis.

We should remember, too, that the government already tracks things--lots of things. Federal, state and local agencies issue Social Security cards, driver's licenses, pilot's licenses, passports and visas. They maintain thousands of databases to keep track of everyone from taxpayers and voters to suspected terrorists.

And so the question is not whether the government should issue ID cards and maintain databases; they already do. The question is whether the ones we have can be made more effective, especially when it comes to finding criminals...

The government could phase in digital ID cards to replace existing Social Security cards and driver's licenses. These new IDs should be based on a uniform standard such as credit card technology, which is harder to counterfeit than existing government IDs, or on smart-card technology, which is better but more expensive.

There is no need to compel any American to have a digital ID. Some Americans may choose to apply for a digital ID card to speed the airport security check-in process. Some states might use digital IDs for their next generation of driver's licenses. Companies might want to replace their current hodgepodge of IDs with the new system. In fact, a voluntary system of standardized IDs issued by government agencies and private companies could prove more effective than a mandatory system.

Here's a San Jose Mercury News article containing direct quotes from Ellison himself regarding his National ID card proposal that may have also led to the confusion:
ID card idea attracts high level support.

Under Ellison's plan, the government would create a national identification card. The card would contain basic information about the holder, including Social Security number, and would be linked to a federal database containing detailed personal data, including digital records of the person's thumbprint, palm print, face or eyes.

Passengers would show the card at airports, Ellison said, and would have their thumbs scanned by a digital reader to verify identity before boarding a plane.

The cards also would be instantly checked against a new national database. That database would base would link existing criminal and immigration data to screen out potential terrorists.

Ellison unveiled the idea three weeks ago in an interview with a Bay Area TV station. In it, he offered to donate the software. His company, Oracle, based in Redwood City, is the world's leading maker of database software. He is among the world's richest men, with a fortune estimated at $15 billion.

Since then, Ellison has offered more details.

The cards would be voluntary for all U.S. citizens, he said Tuesday. Any American without a card still could board a plane, but only after undergoing a more rigorous search.

``I think 99.99 percent of Americans will want these ID cards,'' Ellison said. ``Wouldn't you feel better if everyone who walked into an airport showed their ID card and put their thumb in the scanner and you knew they were who they said they were?''

The cards would be mandatory, however, for foreign visitors, including students on visas and non-citizens living and working in the United States who now carry ``green cards,'' he said. Ellison has not offered specifics on how the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants in the United States might be affected.

Here's another new weblog with informative links about the current situation overseas:
America Strikes Back - The Dumb War.
(Thanks John)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a new edition of its "Effector" newsletter. This issue is a great way to catch up on many of the recent developments in the Dmitry Sklyarov, Ed Felten and DeCSS cases:
EFFector, Vol. 14, No. 37; Nov. 28, 2001.

Eric S. Margolis wrote a nice piece for the L.A. Times that explains some of the history behind Russia's shrewd Oil strategy (as enabled by the "War On Terrorism" ):
Russia Checkmated Its New Best Friend .

He who controls energy, controls the globe.

Russia, the world's second-largest oil exporter, wants Central Asian resources to be transported across its territory. Iran, also an oil producer, wants the energy pipelines to debouch at its ports, the shortest route. But America's powerful Israel lobby has blocked Washington's efforts to deal with Iran.

Pakistan and the U.S. have long sought to build pipelines running due south from Termez, Uzbekistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan, then down to Pakistan's Arabian Sea ports, Karachi and Gwadar.

Oilmen call this route "the new Silk Road," after the fabled path used to export China's riches.

This route, however, would require a stable, pro-Western Afghanistan.

Since 1989, Iran has strived to keep Afghanistan in disorder, thus preventing Pakistan from building its long-sought Termez-Karachi pipeline.

When Pakistan ditched its ally, the Taliban, in September, and sided with the U.S., Islamabad and Washington fully expected to implant a pro-American regime in Kabul and open the way for the Pakistani-American pipeline.

But, while the Bush administration was busy tearing apart Afghanistan to find Bin Laden, it failed to notice that the Russians were taking over half the country.

Here's a moving piece by Ted Rall, a cartoonist and writer covering the war in Afghanistan for The Village Voice and KFI Radio in Los Angeles:
Running the Odds When Nobody Cares.

No one gave a damn about our security. The Northern Alliance never assigned guards for our houses or for journalist convoys, which were constantly getting ambushed. And neither the U.S. nor the Alliance would send a chopper for you if you got shot.

The next morning, Nov. 27, I ran into Pedro, a Portugese radio correspondent who lived a few houses away. I asked him if anyone had pounded on his door the night before. "As a matter of fact, yes," he replied.

A few hours later, the news spread that Ulf Stromberg, a 42-year-old Swedish cameraman who'd been living three doors away from me, had answered the door that night to find three or four young men pointing Kalishnikovs at him. When he shouted to alert his roommates, they shot him. The killers robbed the others and fled into the night.

Forty-five journalists had come to Taloqan in my convoy. Stromberg was the third one killed for his money.

I conducted an informal poll of the writers and TV people gathering at the tiny Foreign Ministry. All had been awakened the night before by knocks at their doors. Only Stromberg had answered. The killers had known where all of us lived. If we had all answered our doors, we all would have been killed for our carefully concealed $100 bills and whatever possessions intrigued them.

"I don't mind dying in battle to get a story," a writer for the French daily Le Monde told me. "Getting killed in a stupid street crime is something else altogether."

Here's a new weblog that provides "A Skewed View of the War on Terrorism" with content that's right on target:
Jihaddict.