Thursday, May 30, 2002

Sam Ruby: "Plans for next week: the Fourth SOAPBuilders Interop meeting will be held in San Jose on Monday and Tuesday. Later I'll be on a general session panel. For the rest of the week, I'll be demonstrating Web Services in Action." 17:28'05    comment []

NYT: F.B.I. Given Broad Authority to Monitor the Public. The new guidelines give FBI agents more freedom to investigate terrorism even when they are not pursuing a particular case. Mueller said the changes "will be exceptionally helpful to us." "Our reforms of the FBI will and must strengthen our ability to prevent future terrorist attacks," the FBI director said. The American Civil Liberties Union said the lifting of restrictions could renew abuses of the past. King's "persecution by law enforcement is a necessary reminder of the potential abuse when a government with too long a leash seeks to silence voices of dissent," said ACLU legislative counsel Marvin Johnson. While this may not seem like a big deal, it's just this type of erosion of civil liberties that I was referring to here. exactly what are the ramifications of these changes? What type of information is the FBI now allowed to track and file? Who has access, and what justification must be provided? How do these changes apply to the rules of evidence in criminal trials? In other words, what did we just lose? What freedoms are we trading in exchange for feeling more secure? Or even more importantly, what powers have just been given to our government, in order for the Bush administration to gain a small measure of poiltical security? After all, that's what's really happening here, isn't it? 14:42'48    comment []

BlogConnector

Scott Johnson has a work in progress: "BlogConnector is a service that helps people find related blogs. It is based on a cool idea by Matt Mower... What it does is extract from your blog a set of keywords that represent your interests as well as the links from your blog that you find represent your interest. You can then indicate which links / keywords represent you and search our database for blogs like this." 11:52'58    comment []

San Francisco Wireless Broadband

Jim Meehan: San Francisco Wireless Broadband Or, how I came to have a 3.5 Mbps wireless link to my house. "While having a 3.5 Mbps link at your house is pretty cool, it soon became apparent that we would never come close to utilizing it to its fullest... I began to think again about the possibility of a community-based group of people getting together to provide wireless broadband Internet access in San Francisco, and realized that I was now in a position to offer my resources to get that effort off the ground. My employer is receptive to the idea, as long as the additional bandwidth consumed does not expose the company to additional charges from our ISP. At current levels of utilization, I'm in the clear even if my wireless link runs at full 3.5 Mbps capacity 24/7." [via Slashdot] 01:16'42    comment []

MacScripter.Net has an XML-RPC interface for their AppleScript scripting additions database. [via Mac Net Journal] 01:08'58    comment []

P. J. O'Rourke. "With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life." [Quotes of the Day] 01:05'03    comment []