Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Music recommendation system for iTunes [The Macintosh News Network] I installed this on my PC, and got: Your estimated wait for results is 10 hours, 43 minutes, 9 seconds. You may quit and log back in at anytime to check on the status of your recommendations. Either it's very popular, or it's running on a really slow computer. Tomorrow I'll check back and see what recommendations it comes up with. 6:16:06 PM    comment () More Charges Against al-Sadr. Sadr's been accused of stealing from mosques. [Back to Iraq 3.0] I read another report recently accusing Sadr of stealing from mosques, but now I can't remember where it was! 5:53:51 PM    comment () Globe and Mail - Arrests key win for NSA hackers. Citing anonymous sources in the British intelligence community, The Sunday Times reported that an e-mail message intercepted by NSA spies precipitated a massive investigation by intelligence officials in several countries that culminated in the arrest of nine men in Britain and one in suburban Orleans, Ont. -- 24-year-old software developer Mohammed Momin Khawaja, who has since been charged with facilitating a terrorist act and being part of a terrorist group. The Orleans arrest is considered an operational milestone for this vast electronic eavesdropping network and its operators. But Dave Farber, an Internet pioneer and computer-science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the circumstances are also notable because it will be the first time that routine U.S. monitoring of e-mail traffic has led to an arrest. "That's the first admission I've actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it," Mr. Farber said. Officials at the NSA could not be reached for comment. But U.S. authorities are uniquely positioned to monitor international Internet and telecommunications traffic because many of the world's international gateways are located in their country. And once that electronic traffic touches an American computer -- an e-mail message, a request for a website or an Internet-based phone call, for instance -- it is routinely monitored by NSA spies. "Foreign traffic that comes through the U.S. is subject to U.S. laws, and the NSA has a perfect right to monitor all Internet traffic," said Mr. Farber, who has also been a technical adviser to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. That's what happened in February, when NSA officers at Fort Meade intercepted a message between correspondents in Britain and Pakistan, The Sunday Times reported. The contents of that message have not been revealed, but are significant enough that dozens of intelligence officials were mobilized in Britain, Canada and the United States. [Privacy Digest] Further evidence that it's advisable to encrypt all your email. 5:44:48 PM    comment () The Alamo is over-rated as a tourist attraction, dammit [A View from A Broad] An account by a soldier who survived a very bad situation in one of the southern cities of Iraq (Kut, perhaps). No synopsis would do, read the whole thing. 12:54:39 PM    comment () Tinderbox in Meetings. Ken Hagler used Tinderbox to take notes during RealWorld 2004, and shares his Tinderbox document (Stuffit archive), One interesting thing is that Hagler uses outline view, creating a top-level item for each topic (or session?), and storing topical notes inside them. I usually use a map view for conference notes, setting aside a distinct region of the map for each session. It might be interesting to think about where each style would work best. [Mark Bernstein] As it happens, there wasn't a lot of thinking in this particular case. At the beginning of the first session I created a new document, which defaults to outline view, and I was too busy typing after that to worry about organization. The sessions were so packed with information that I didn't have time to reorganize until the end of the first day, at which time I decided that an outline was good enough. It's actually just as well the default was outline, because organizing things in map view takes longer, and I didn't have the time (except for the top-level session items). I'd have ended up with a huge disorganized collection of notes otherwise. In any case, I'm pretty familiar with working in outline views--before buying "Tinderbox" I'd have used "MORE" or my Newton outliner. I do use map view with regions for organizing in certain cases, but only when a strictly hierarchical view of the information doesn't make sense. For example, the screenshot below shows my notes for a document on setting up OS X and Windows builds to work with BuildForge, a configuration management tool. Some notes apply to only one platform or the other, but some apply to both. I show this by having regions for the two platforms, with the cross-platform notes stretching across the edges of both regions. 12:12:20 PM    comment ()

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