Monthly Archives: October 2004

Fear The Takedown, Part II: Homeland Security

October 31, 2004 – 10:25 pm

Copyfight and Teleread both picked up on an AP story about Homeland Security Agents Enforcing Trademark Law.
Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox “was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.”
Calls from law enforcement agents get [...]

By Casey | Posted in Copyrights & Intellectual Property | Comments (83)



Halloween 2004: The Movie

October 31, 2004 – 8:41 pm

Food, booze, fire: Halloween 2004.

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog | Comments (1)

Links: Picoserver and iVideo

October 30, 2004 – 5:53 am

Picoserver:
Japanese firm Package Technology is coming out with a 42 x 23.5 x 61 mm box called the PicoServer that’s essentially a web/mail server with an Ethernet port and three sockets for sensors (one out, two in).
This could be a packaged implementation of the iButton TINI ICs from Dallas Semiconductor. Then again, it might not [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

The October Surprise

October 29, 2004 – 6:05 am

NPR’s senior news analyst, Daniel Schorr, reported Wednesday that the Bush administration has been busy keeping the bad news it has known about for months out of the press and away from the public scrutiny.
Iraqi Explosives
The Bush administration knew about the 400 tons of missing explosives a year ago, but still claims no knowledge [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (2)

What Have You Done For Me Lately, Dubbya?

October 29, 2004 – 5:51 am

UnionVoice.org asks Are you better off now than you were four years go?
In his four years, George W. Bush has taken away overtime pay, presided over the first net loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, proposed a 30 percent cut in funds for children’s hospitals, sought tax breaks for companies that [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (4)



Grandma Had More Sex

October 29, 2004 – 3:36 am

FleshBot pointed to a story in The Guardian that reports on a study by Prima Magazine that suggests married women of today have less sex than married women of the 1950s.
women in the 1950s had sex an average of twice a week. But a survey found two-thirds of today’s women said they were too tired [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (19)

Warmonger ≠ Support Our Troops

October 28, 2004 – 6:43 pm

On the heels of “There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in” comes a story from Alternet: “Bush has failed the military on almost every level — marking the difference between being militaristic and pro-military.”
Discounting that he sent American troops into Iraq on false pretenses, a real commander would fight for [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (1)

Fictional Story Asks: Is There A Right To Life After Death?

October 28, 2004 – 6:43 am

The story focuses on the brain as an organ, in this case, an organ donated for medical research after the death of the host.
What has prompted the lawsuits, protests and threats just over one year after the
procedure is not the facts of the initial donation, but the university’s decision to terminate the experiments, and therefore [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (2)

C&D = Takedown = Chill = Limited Creativity = Limited Speech

October 27, 2004 – 6:38 pm

Ericka Jacobs at Copyfutures found my Fear the Takedown story about Bits of Freedom’s takedown study. She over-stated my effort; all I really did was quote text from Copyfight, which they quoted from Doom9, but that’s how blogs and the web work. More importantly, Erika explained a lot more than I did, including detailing takedown [...]

By Casey | Posted in Copyrights & Intellectual Property | Comments (0)

Prepare To Get Screwed by DRM

October 27, 2004 – 5:30 am

Copyfight is picking up on something I started talking about a while ago: content owners want to re-sell you the things you already own. Digital isn’t about copying, it’s about not having to re-purchase music just because the record company releases it in a new format (album, cassette, CD, beyond CD). The Real Threat: Me2Me [...]

By Casey | Posted in Copyrights & Intellectual Property | Comments (4)

The Sweet Taste of Lead

October 27, 2004 – 1:40 am

bookofjoe reports on a October 5 Washington Post story titled: Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented Across US. What the headline really means, however, is that lead levels are under-reported accross the US.
“The problems we know about are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Erik D. Olson of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (11)

Serene, Calming Video

October 26, 2004 – 7:32 am

Turn up your speakers to enjoy the serene music and pastoral scenes in this relaxing video of a car ad.
[update:] the original link is broken; look for current links to the video in the text and comments of this newer story.

tags: car ad, kfee, relaxing, relaxing video, pastoral scenes, serene music, video

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (79)

Malware, OSX On Old Macs, Brass Knuckles

October 26, 2004 – 5:19 am

ArsTechnica reports Linux and Mac OS X get some love (?) from malware writers:
Some of you may have seen e-mails purporting to be from the Red Hat Security Team. The e-mail contains a link to fedora-redhat.com and prompts users to download and install a patch for fileutils-1.0.6, stating that a vulnerability could “allow a remote [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

“There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in”

October 25, 2004 – 4:22 pm

It made some news when former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, who resigned from the Cabinet over the Iraq war, said: “There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which al Qaeda could thrive.”
Now, news organizations around the world are quoting the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (2)

Ribbons

October 25, 2004 – 5:22 am

A story on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning declares: yellow-ribbon magnets carry complex meaning.
The Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center tells the history of the yellow ribbon. Though its conceptual beginnings are mixed, Penne Laingen was the first known American to tie a ribbon ’round an ole oak tree in hopes of the safe return [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (1)