August 1, 2002

Salon.com Technology | Sour notes. July 30, 2002 | The fight against online music piracy entered the realm of the bizarre last Thursday, when Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., proposed giving the recording industry sweeping new powers to do what, for the rest of us, would be illegal: hacking computer networks. [Daypop Top News Stories] 6:56:23 PM

JENIN B.S. CONTINUED [Jonah Goldberg] As various people have been noting in the Corner for months, the Jenin "massacre" never happened. The UN, which always bends over backward to make Israel the bad guy, issued a report today which found that Israel's casulaty estimate was entirely accurate. Alas, the news networks which touted the "massacre" as fact for weeks have ignored the report almost entirely. Let's see if the Post or the Times -- which also gave the massace story great traction -- put it on their front pages tomorrow. If they don't, shame on them. 4:18:29 PM

The wife of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader in Gaza, got a phone call from "a recruiter of suicide bombers," who "asked about the possibility of her son staging such an attack." Sorry, not interested, said Mrs. Rantisi; get someone else's kid to blow himself up. The Jerusalem Post reports the Palestinian Authority apparently was bugging the phone, and Israeli troops captured the tape of the call in Yasser Arafat's office. IMRA reports Israel Radio plans to broadcast it this evening. 2:54:55 PM

It happened on Sept. 11, and it happened again yesterday: Palestinian Arabs took to the streets whooping and hollering for joy over the murder of Americans, this time at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "About 10,000 Palestinians handed out sweets, sang songs and chanted anti-Israeli slogans as they marched through Gaza city on Wednesday to celebrate the bombing that killed seven people at Jerusalem's Hebrew University," Reuters reports. Here's a picture of this obscene spectacle. Reuters quotes a statement from Hamas's Qassam Brigades: "The price of the Israeli crime to assassinate the leader Salah Shehada is more than 100 Israeli soldiers and that will come in 10 martyrs' operations." Note that Hamas's objection is to the killing of an Arab terrorist, not to the collateral civilian deaths that prompted so much hand-wringing last week. The Iraq Daily, published by Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information, calls yesterday's atrocity "a courageous, promising reprisal." The Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz have biographies of the murder victims. Five of them were Americans: Marla Bennett, 24, of San Diego; Benjamin Richard Blutstein, 25, of Harrisburg, Pa.; Dina Carter, 38, a librarian on campus; Janis Ruth Coulter, 36, of Brooklyn, N.Y., who worked for the university's New York office and was in Jerusalem for a student-orientation ceremony; and David Gritz, a 24-year-old Frenchman who also held U.S. citizenship. Two Israelis also died: David Diego Ladowski, an immigrant from Argentina, and Levina Shapira, a Jerusalem native. MSNBC.com reports on President Bush's reaction: " 'I'm just as angry as Israel is right now,' he told reporters, although he didn't explain the reason for his anger." Are the guys at MSNBC really so clueless that they need an explanation? "opinionjournal" 2:49:52 PM

AT&T Broadband opts for tiered pricing. The company offers a faster and pricier cable Internet access dubbed UltraLink, set to debut in cities including Dallas, Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area. [CNET News.com] 12:36:28 PM

Skipping Commercials? Not So Fast.. TV executives are positively hysterical about the prospect of viewers skipping ads using digital video recorders, and they're contemplating solutions some of them are scary. By David Pogue. [New York Times: Technology] 9:11:09 AM

Vegas Braces for the Hackers. It's time once again for Defcon, the infamous hacking convention where mysterious incidents -- like smoking swimming pools and FBI arrests of Russian programmers -- are more commonplace than not. Michelle Delio reports from Las Vegas. [Wired News] 9:08:56 AM

Car-tracking system raises hopes, concerns. General Motors will begin installing new sensors and communications systems into vehicles next year that could save lives but might raise privacy concerns. [CNET News.com] Car 54 where are you? 9:07:33 AM

Pressplay, the online music subscription service, has made significant improvements to a product that consumers have been less than enthusiastic about. Unlimited downloading, more burning, more flexibility and more features have been built into Version 2.0, which debuts today. 7:08:39 AM