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Monday, November 11, 2002
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In The Old West, A Tense Showdown Over Federal Lands. The Guardians use an unusual legal approach. First, they track down ranchers who have permits to feed their livestock on federal land for just pennies a head. The next step is to sue under the U.S. Endangered Species Act or other laws, accusing the government of mismanaging the land where the ranchers' cows graze.
If the Guardians win in court, or if the government settles, the number of cows a rancher is allowed to graze with his permit is cut. That hands the Guardians a double victory: Not only does the land get a breather, but the rancher has to pay much more to feed his displaced cows on private land.
Indeed, the Guardians' most controversial tactic is to single out the financially vulnerable -- ranchers who have used their permits as collateral for bank loans, a common form of financing for small ranching operations. "We want to put the squeeze on ranchers to get off the land," says John Horning, the coordinator of the Guardians' antigrazing campaign. "If some ranchers go out of business along the way, so be it." [Sierra Times]
The "Guardians" are unusually sleazy even for ecofreaks. It's a little suspicious that the government allows them to sue it, instead of just claiming "sovereign immunity." It suggests just who's side the government is on in these cases.
9:01:02 PM 
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Taiwan Government asks Microsoft to open Windows source code. According to this China Times article (in Chinese), the Republic of China government has asked Microsoft to open Windows source code. The official, Lin Jua-Cheng, in charge of the "e-government" initiative, says many other countries have also sent similar requests to Microsoft. Lin explains that without Windows source code, the government cannot add custom firewall functionalities to Windows based systems in wide use, and that is very bad for the information security of Taiwan. Microsoft refused to release source code in the past using reasons of copyright protection, but Lin emphasizes this request is reasonable since it is based on (government users') necessity. [kuro5hin.org]
There's an obvious solution here, and the complete post even mentions it:
Lin points out that GNU/Linux systems, because of their freeness and high security (due to the availability of the source code, which can be modified to add firewalls and other security measures), have become widely used in government computer systems (espeically in militaries and intelligence agencies) of many nations and the Pentagon, the FAA, and the air force of the US.
Need custom firewall functions? Don't use Windows. Problem solved!
7:51:13 PM
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Group Claims South Africa Bombings [AP World News]
A group calling itself the Boer Nation Warriors sent an e-mail to the Afrikaans newspaper Beeld saying the blasts last month signaled the end of the oppression of the Boer, or Afrikaner, nation and the "beginning of the end of the (African National Congress) government."
There's a certain irony to this story.
6:06:41 PM
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Seen in some documentation that I'm reading for work:
Descriptions in the forms used by p4 client, p4 branch, and so on, may be of any length. Similarly, all names given to Perforce objects such as branches, clients, and so on, are also limited to 1024 characters.
Someone's documentation department could use better QA.
3:17:36 PM
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Some additional observations on Mozilla:
It's faster than iCab or Internet Explorer when loading pages. The difference is particularly noticeable when used with Radio. It also doesn't have iCab's annoying bug where checkmarks in the news aggregator turn themselves off.
There is a sidebar, similar to Internet Explorer's. It's apparently more customizable, yet it doesn't seem quite as polished as the IE version. When it appears it automatically moves the page to the right--there's no way to make it appear "over" the page, as there is with IE.
9:56:37 AM
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Macromedia announces Contribute. Desktop software for editing static HTML sites.  [Scripting News]
Apparently this is for Windows only--or at least, the system requirements at the bottom of the page don't mention the Mac OS. What I'd like to know is how this product relates to Dreamweaver. The announcement page has several dozen bullet points, and mentions Dreamweaver several times, but doesn't really explain what the difference is between the two products.
8:47:01 AM
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It turns out Mozilla has a limited image filtering capability--you can choose to filter all images from particular sites. This isn't as good as iCab's filtering, which lets you filter by size as well, but it's better than Internet Explorer.
6:17:44 AM
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IM Users: Your Boss Is Watching. An increasing number of businesses are reading the instant messages of their employees. New software by AOL helps them do just that. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]
I think the Windows versions of PGP include an ICQ plugin. Your boss can't read encrypted messages.
5:54:11 AM
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© Copyright
2005
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
3/9/2005; 2:33:01 PM.
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