Thursday, September 25, 2003

Bad Moon on the rise Overcoming his church's bizarre reputation and his own criminal record, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon has cemented ties with the Bush administration, while his disciples have even gained government funding. [Salon] 11:32:53 PM

Silenced: a censorship study "Silenced: Censorship and Control of the Internet" is a new paper covering findings from a 12-month study of Internet censorship around the world. The study, published jointly by Privacy International and GreenNet Educational Trust, found that in the wake of September 11, 2001, over 50 countries stepped up efforts to control the Internet within their boundaries, among other conclusions. The full report is available here as a 2Mb PDF, and it licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. [Creative Commons weblog] 11:24:27 PM

Bush's heavy-weather FUD is whistle-blown by EPA leak Stefan sez, "The fossil fuel industry and their ideological brown-nosers have done a great job of spreading FUD about Global Warming. This leaked internal EPA memo details the Bush Administration's own contribution to the effort." This is a disheartening and enraging document. [via Boing Boing Blog] 11:21:29 PM

Microsoft Critic Forced Out A technology executive whose company does business with Microsoft Corp. has been forced out of his job after he helped write a cyber-security report critical of the software giant, according to sources with knowledge of the situation. [Yahoo! News - Technology] It's even better than just getting one guy fired. When a group wanted to rent a technology magazine's list to e-mail the report -- a very standard advertising buy -- they were turned down: A national technology magazine rejected the group's request to distribute copies of the report to its subscribers. The magazine, CIO (short for chief information officers), routinely "rents" its subscriber lists -- for a fee -- to firms wanting to distribute targeted advertising and marketing messages to its audience of executives responsible for running corporate and government computer systems. After receiving the report so that it could be e-mailed to the subscriber list, the magazine informed CCIA representatives that the paper was "too sensitive" and turned away the business. Microsoft advertises extensively in CIO, although [Karen Fogarty, a CIO spokeswoman] said she could not specify how much the company spends with the magazine. She said the decision not to distribute the report had nothing to do with advertising concerns. Now, I'm sure Microsoft didn't tell them to turn down the business. More like CIO just did it themselves, so that they wouldn't lose Microsoft's ad business. Such is the power of the convicted monopolist, they don't have to lift a finger to make you afraid of crossing them... 11:14:35 PM

Firm With Microsoft Ties Fires Executive (AP) The chief technology officer for a technology firm that works closely with Microsoft Corp. lost his job after he helped write a study critical of the insecurity of Microsoft software. [Yahoo! News - Technology] 10:58:42 PM

Microsoft critic dismissed by @Stake A computer security expert who contributed to a paper deeply critical of Microsoft has been dismissed by his employer, a consulting company that works closely with the software giant. [CNET News.com] A Microsoft spokesbot asserts they had nothing to do with this. Which probably just means that they only implied that he should be fired, instead of demanded it... 7:51:27 PM

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