Saturday, February 16, 2002

My own OsX tale I had a serious kernel explosion today which sort of screwed up mailboxes (Eudora loses the resource for on toc files and it gets upset) but really bent radio out of whack (taking out several .root files, including those for my weblog). Since I'm a slug, and hadn't been backing radio up often, I was back on Jan 30. Yikes! I used the rendered output, which I store on another box and eventually created a grep script to select one full story plus the date info at a time, and slogged through things in the outliner. 60 stories (and about an hour) later, I was done. Mostly. I had to kill off a log file to get the control console back and I had to reset the next message index in the prefs (weblogData.prefs.nextPostNum) to get it all working properly. 10:18:47 PM

Testing... 9:50:51 PM

Enron activism EnronOwnsTheGOP.com has been asked to remove the modified Elephant with the state of Texas that now has an Enron 'E' plopped on top because the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) has a trademark on the image. Several questions spring to mind. How did these folks get a trademark on the elephant? Isn't the elephant a public domain symbol of the republican party (and doesn't that make derivative works public domain)? Also, why isn't the RPT running some sort of article on their page to describe the good fight they are waging with EnronOwnsTheGOP.com? Shame? [via Politech] 1:45:32 PM

Thinking different about privacy I don't know what rock I was hiding under when David Brin's book The Transparent Society was released, but I missed it. In this interview with the Privacy Foundation, David Brin gives his opinion of the state of privacy five months after the September attacks. He argues for accountability of those doing the snooping. I worry that we won't ever get real accountability (note how quickly the latest administration has muddled up the situation with the Freedom of Information Act). He has some very interesting ideas on how to go about destabilizing foreign regimes... PF: Any thoughts on that philosophy in Afghanistan? BRIN: I would have dropped several million cheap cell phones that use relay sites. Equip them with cameras. We could have gotten real-time images. The ideal weapon against dictators. No bleeding-heart objections if we bomb Iraq with cell phones! That sort of thing should certainly be part of any campaign. I'm uncomfortable with some of these ideas (but The Garden of Openness article just feels right in many ways). Either way, I'm going to read the book and see where I wind up. Jon Udell's article has links to a draft of the first chapter which was carried in Wired as well a column he wrote which spun off some of the themes generated by his reading the book. [Jon's Radio [Privacy Digest Weblog]] 1:29:08 PM

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