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Tuesday, February 12, 2002 |
Dave Van Ronk, blues and folk-singer, was born in New York on June 30, 1936. He died there of cancer on February 10, 2002, aged 65. [The Times]
His sound was sweet. When I hear it, I think of lazy Sunday afternoons sitting in the sun...
11:47:18 AM 
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A feminist Arab hero Woman's suicide blast stirs Islamic debate [International Herald Tribune]
"From Mary's womb issued a child who eliminated oppression, while the body of Wafa became shrapnel that eliminated despair and aroused hope," Adel Sadeq, head of the department of psychiatry at Ein Shams University in Cairo, was quoted as writing by the London-based newspaper Al Quds al Arabi.
Sadeq said that "it is not surprising that the enemy in both cases was the same," apparently a reference to Jews.
[...]
Idris has repeatedly been described as a feminist hero, in columns that praised her beauty and stressed her femininity.
"She bore in her belly the fetus of a rare heroism, and gave birth by blowing herself up!" the columnist Mufid Fawzie wrote in the Egyptian daily Al Aalam al Youm. "What are the women of velvet chatting in the parlors next to the act of Wafa Idris?" In the Jordanian paper Al Dustour, the columnist Hussein Amoush wrote that Idris had exposed the poverty of Western ideas of women's rights. Idris "never dreamed of owning a BMW car or having a cellular phone," he wrote. "Wafa did not carry in her suitcase makeup but, rather, enough explosives to fill the enemies with horror."
[...]
Some Islamic leaders expressed reservations about women killing themselves for the Palestinian cause. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of the Islamic group Hamas, which has arranged dozens of suicide operations, cautioned that under Islamic law women should not carry out suicide operations as long as men were available for the work.
If a woman does go out on a mission for longer than a day and a night, he warned, she must be accompanied by a male chaperone. He was quoted in the London-based Al Sharq al Awsat on Feb. 2.
A feminist step forward...and two steps back.
11:33:27 AM
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Another voice on 'Axis of Evil'
Less admiration of America and more fear Respect is a two-sided coin. On the one side is admiration, on the other fear. The weighting of respect shown to the United States by the rest of the world has been rebalanced in the past two years. The preponderance of admiration has given way to fear of its military, trade and financial power.
[International Herald Tribune]
And that's the way the Bush administration likes it.
11:09:44 AM
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Enron spoils Rubin's post-Treasury party
Plenty of government officials retire to the private sector to make their fortunes. Plenty of business executives venture into politics seeking power and influence.
Robert Rubin is doing both. [International Hearld Tribune]
Citigroup gives him a salary, bonus and stock options valued around $40 million a year to advise on strategy, which he does in an imposing Park Avenue office next to that of Sanford Weill, the company's chairman and chief executive.
But, as a former U.S. Treasury secretary, Rubin has not abandoned his role as a globe-traveling statesman.
He advises the Senate majority leader, Thomas Daschle, on economic policy. He was a sounding board for Governor Gray Davis of California during last summer's electricity crisis even as Citigroup worked for energy companies that were selling power to the state. He debates bank reform with Prime Minister Zhu Rongji of China while trying to drum up business there for Citigroup.
He also called the Treasury Department last autumn to see if there was anything the Bush administration could do to save Enron, a major Citigroup borrower and client. He spoke as a banker, and as a former Treasury secretary concerned about the risks to the nation's markets.
And he's a Democrat!
10:26:57 AM
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Iridium satellites launch after false starts
A rocket carrying five communications satellites streaked into space, following three days of delays due to mechanical glitches and high winds.[CNN.com]
Motorola and other investors spent $5 billion dollars building the Iridium network only to cut off commercial service two years ago as it drowned in debt.
The company originally sought to destroy its satellites by having them burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
Instead, the're sending up spares? I'd like to know a little more about this.
10:11:22 AM
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Dale Carnegie Inc. says no to Macs, OS X [MacCentral]
They say that Microsoft and IBM don't support the Mac. Not true, really. What they mean is they don't want to have to program their custom Access applications to run in both a Windows and Macintosh environment. All the rest of their press release is just pure BS.
9:57:54 AM
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Rings lead Oscars race. The Lord of The Rings leads the race for the 74th Academy Awards,
picking up 13 Oscar nominations, including best motion picture. [BBC News: world]
Brings a tear to my eye.
9:53:13 AM
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Bad karma in Saudi Arabia
For Outsiders, Worship Is Risk in Saudi Arabia. At a secret location every Sunday evening, a young Catholic priest does a dangerous thing. He says Mass. [The New York Times: International News]
In describing Saudi Arabia in its 2001 report on religious freedom, the State Department was unusually blunt: "Freedom of religion," it stated, "does not exist."
The situation is particularly painful for American troops. They are offered a range of religious services, with the help of military chaplains.
But they must worship in private, even though many of them are protecting the kingdom from outside threats. And soldiers who wear a cross or a Star of David must keep the symbols hidden.
If only they didn't have that oil.
8:52:34 AM
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Charney an ominous MS pick. Not good -- not at all good [The Register]
To get a legal perspective on this, I asked Jennifer Granick, clinical director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, what she thought about the implications of all this. She replied that it "didn't look good for the free flow of information." There is no question about that.
Charney is not a technologist, he is a lawyer. How convenient. He is also one of Howard Schmidt's best friends, and Schmidt is now in Washington as the vice chairman of the federal Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.
Microsoft's pick might signal that the company intends to launch a hacker crackdown of its own.
This could mean that disclosing a Microsoft security hole would end up a federal crime. That will fix that problem! Right!
8:50:05 AM
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What's in a Name?
I've been trying to find a name for this odd list of random thoughts and newsitems. Something a little more upbeat that crap I'm a thinking on. The wonderful world of the internet makes checking on name ideas remarkably easy. Which, in a way, is part of the problem. I might have settled on a name by now, if I hadn't found several other people using the same name already.
Case in point: CodeZero. Cool sounding name, that I thought could mean "from the beginning..." As in, "take it from codezero," or "Start at codezero." Well, three different people have registered CodeZero as a domain name. One each for .com, .org, and .net. I have to figure that one of them would get around to sending me an angry email.
Using Network Utility, a very handy utility that comes with MacOS X, I've been able to do Whois lookups as well as domain name lookups. That's how I found out that there where three different people behind CodeZero. Network Utility also allows you to ping, traceroute, finger, netstat, and run a port scan.
For an article I'm working on, I looked into the name Trinity Code [the use of the word code in both examples is coincidental]. This time via Google search I find that Trinity is the name given to a program that makes it easy for scriptkiddies to create DoS [denial of service] attacks. Ignorance can be bliss, I suppose.
8:17:01 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Duncan Murphy.
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