This story provides a nice background on the subject of online music subscription services, If you’ve been wanting to catch up on the big music industry players so you can follow along in the Department of Justice’s big anti-trust investigation, try MP3: Just Press Play — The future of digital music is almost here.
Please have your credit card ready.

My own Turn About Is Fair Player provides a bit more detail on the history and politics of the subject.

Does Osama have nukes? Here’s one perspective from the other side of the world.

See: US mulls neutralising Pak nuclear facilities from The Times of India. (Thanks Doug!)

Okay guys, when we said “a war against every country that supports terrorism” we didn’t really mean to include the United States, did we? (albeit history will attest that it qualifies).

If you don’t believe that airport security is getting a little out of hand, and quickly (although I personally have had nothing but easy going experiences myself even as recently as yesterday), read Homeland Insecurity : A Sacramento journalist is taken into custody by police and forced to destroy photos by an over-zealous National Guardsman. Apparently, the terrorists are indeed causing instability, by R.V. Scheide.

It was 5:15 pm on Wednesday, October 12, and we had call to be apprehensive. The previous day, the FBI had placed the entire nation on high alert, based on “credible” information that Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden, was planning reprisal attacks on U.S. soil for the coming weekend. The bureau urged Americans to report any suspicious activity. Friday morning, armed troops from the California National Guard were deployed at Sacramento International Airport.

America, as we’ve been told over and over since September 11, is forever changed. Nowhere is this change more evident than in our approach to national security. Practically overnight, major metropolitan airports across the country have been turned into militarized zones crawling with armed soldiers and police. Their presence is designed to deter terrorists and provide us with a sense of security, but as I was about to discover, that security has come at a high price.

I’d purchased a roundtrip ticket from Sacramento International to LAX to observe firsthand the unprecedented measures being taken to combat terrorism. There’d been more than a little fear and paranoia in Sacramento and I expected to find more of the same in Los Angeles.

I didn’t expect to be ordered to destroy photographs by an irate National Guardsman. I didn’t expect the Los Angeles Police Department to confiscate and read the notes I’d taken on my trip. I didn’t expect to be questioned by the FBI and detained for nearly three hours for no probable cause.

I didn’t expect any of these things, but that’s what happened. As I followed my fellow passengers up the jetway and into the LAX terminal, I had no idea I was stepping onto the War on Terrorism’s first domestic battlefield, where, as in all wars, truth was about to become the first casualty.

The FBI is toying with the idea of torturing suspects. See the article by Damian Whitworth for the Times of London: FBI considers torture as suspects stay silent.

Will the United States be the next country on Amnesty International‘s list of campaigns?

The world has changed immeasurably since AI first began denouncing torture at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, but torture continues and is not confined to military dictatorships or authoritarian regimes; torture is inflicted in democratic states too.

Like the United States of America, if we’re not careful.

Here’s an excerpt from the Times of London article:

Under US law, evidence extracted using physical pressure or torture is inadmissible in court and interrogators could also face criminal charges for employing such methods. However, investigators suggested that the time might soon come when a truth serum, such as sodium pentothal, would be deemed an acceptable tool for interrogators.

The investigators have been disappointed that the usual incentives to break suspects, such as promises of shorter sentences, money, jobs and new lives in the witness protection programme, have failed to break the silence.

“We are known for humanitarian treatment, so basically we are stuck. Usually there is some incentive, some angle to play, what you can do for them. But it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure . . . where we don’t have a choice, and we are probably getting there,” an FBI agent involved in the investigation told the paper.

If we allow our FBI to torture suspects in the cause of safeguarding our
freedom, we’ll be descending into tyranny even as we seek to defeat it.

These men are easy to hate because of the crimes they are accused, but remember, these men are not convicted felons. They are only suspects and in our country that means they are innocent until proven guilty.

Who will be the next suspect that the authorities will decide is witholding information? You? Me? The guy that the National Guard and United Airlines wouldn’t allow to fly because he was readingi Harry Potter books?

Our due process should not be taken lightly. Its checks and balances were
put in place to protect us — not terrorists. We cannot yeild its
protections for any reason.

We’re talking about people who are only *suspected* of committing crimes and
withholding information. Mistakes happen all the time. Are we ready to risk torturing innocent people? Of course not. That’s why we are a civilized country that has laws against these kinds of practices. Right?

Right?

Here’s a telling Economist article that provides a nice background analysis and a some accurate predictions about where Microsoft is headed with Windows XP and .NET: Microsoft Extending its tentacles.

The U. S. Department of Energy has issued a bulletin that warns its employees about Windows XP and explains how to protect themselves from allowing it to inadvertently send their private information to Microsoft.

Why should anyone else be less worried about their privacy being compromised by Windows XP?

Office XP Error Reporting May Send Sensitive Documents to Microsoft

Microsoft Office XP and Internet Explorer version 5 and later are configured to request to send debugging information to Microsoft in the event of a program crash. The debugging information includes a memory dump which may contain all or part of the document being viewed or edited. This debug message potentially could contain sensitive, private information.

Sensitive or private information could inadvertently be sent to Microsoft. Some simple testing of the feature found document information in one message out of three.

SOLUTION: Apply the registry changes listed in this bulletin to disable the automatic sending of debugging information. If you are working with sensitive information and a program asks to send debugging information to Microsoft, you should click Don’t Send.

Microsoft seems to consider such compromises a feature of XP called “Corporate Error Reporting” and provides a full explanation of this feature and others like it on its web site. Here’s how it works in IE5.

Steve Bonisteel also wrote a piece about it for NewsBytes.

Larry Ellison has gotten the Wall Street Journal’s attention with his crackpot ID card idea. See:
Smart Cards —
Digital IDs can help prevent terrorism.

Ellison thinks the “good news” is that we can all choose to throw both our privacy and our hard-earned tax dollars out the window and invest in a new series of completely untested database cross-referencing schemes that collectively impose a new identification system upon our own country’s domestic air travellers:

The good news is that a national database combined with biometrics, thumb prints, hand prints, iris scans, or other new technology could detect false identities. Gaining entry to an airport or other secure location would require people to present a photo ID, put their thumb on a fingerprint scanner and tell the guard their Social Security number. This information would be cross-checked with the database.

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.

So I get it, we can replace the current hodge podge of IDs with a new hodge podge of IDs…And Oracle can be at the center of it all. Great idea Larry!

Oh no, it’s happening already. Law-abiding Americans are being harassed and unnecessarily detained by the National Guard when flying. This time a Flight Attendant didn’t like a passenger’s chosen reading material (Heyduke Lives! by Edward Abbey).

Read about how Neil Godfrey got the third degree twice. The second time for carrying a Harry Potter book! (No kidding!) (Thanks Cory)

Another 10 minutes or so passed while he sat in the waiting area. A female United employee

My buddy Bill Lazar had the guts to use a word to describe the RIAA I consciously decided against when I wrote my latest weblog for O’Reilly and Associates:

RIAA Threatened By Anti-Terrorist Law.

But hey, if the shoe fits 🙂