cheese it, the cops!

who will keep us unsafe?

this renews my faith in humanity. before you go around authorizing people to keep everyone else under surveillance, drone-strike people, and so on, you'd better keep in mind that you are trusting this to idiots, really. the security state likes to portray itself as implacable, efficient, and so on. seems like folks like that wouldn't be able to convince you after twenty colossal blunders a week, but people want to believe i guess. 

you don't want your government creating cyber-weapons, for one thing, any more than you want them creating new plagues (which no doubt they've been working on for decades), because they and you may end up being the victims. 

twitter dawg

yeah you had to figure weiner was going to burn after all those evasions. and it would surprise me if there wasn't more more more. i guess what puzzles me is that people lie in circumstances in which, and in a way in which, it's just impossible for anyone to believe them. i've had people (well, kids, but also adults) tell me passionately that they didn't do what i actually just watched them do, or (in an outside case) that they never did what i saw them do every day for months. sometimes you just wonder what people think they could possibly be accomplishing. ah well. reflect, confess in full, and apologize: that's my advice. and working back: sending lewd pictures to a random 21-year-old girl? asshole, please. while you're at it, get out of congress.

just to pile on: geez, chump, what a lovely wife you have. she'd have been plenty.

frederick: what's your email. or: anyone wanna help lala with the yemen website?

lala is trying to start up a website to post vids and take contributions for medical care. i wonder whether people have insight into a good, simple, open or hard-to-block hosting service?

mastercard etc have portrayed the attacks as trivial, and the msm keeps saying that actual transaction processing was never affected at all. you know, i'm not sure about this. i actually did have some trouble doing web transactions yesterday.

i hope the performance of anonymous is not too disappointing. i want to believe there's a twisted little genius among them, a malignant gates, casually preparing to vaporize global capital so that it will seem never to have existed at all. awwww you shudna fucked with us, beeches!

no doubt the reason that the military freaks on wikileaks is because they are concerned with the safety of their informants and soldiers, obscure or speculative though any such such endangerment might be. (i want you to show me some of the many deaths that y'all predicted with the utmost confidence from the afghan leaks. obviously assange is a murderer. ok who did he kill?) it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they do not want you or the iraqis etc to know what the u.s. military actually has done. indeed, if people knew things like that, they might cease to support the war effort. that is, it would be bad for morale. patriotism, as robert gates has so often asserted, or perhaps merely implied, can only be maintained under conditions of utter delusion. and are we not patriots?

this is a pretty funny story: the guy's wife was killing his rivals on amazon; all are eminent british academics. now on the other hand robert service among others approaches the whole thing with extreme incomprehension.

Service...alerted more than 30 leading historians in Britain and abroad in a furious email.

In it, Service condemned the online reviews as "unpleasant personal attacks in the old Soviet fashion", adding: "Gorbachev banned anonimki from being used in the USSR as a way of tearing up someone's reputation. Now the grubby practice has sprouted up here."

Though, having been alerted to the problem, Amazon had by now removed the offending reviews, Service continued: "How to expunge the practice and expose the practitioners of malign electronic denunication in countries of free expression is, I think, a matter for debate."

dude. it's an amazon reader's review. of course the reviewer might be your rival's wife, or your mother-in-law, or whatever. you have to learn to read in the genre/medium you're in. amazon isn't the government, much less the soviet government. it isn't the times literary supplement. it's a website where more or less anyone can say more or less anything and try to disguise themselves, which has its own charm. ok then you try to ascertain the identity and you post that. it's a different mode of filtering. like the other, it's radically imperfect. but what the hell. i don't even think amazon should have taken the stuff down; i'd like to read it. like i say, just post more.

now on the other hand you'd have to say that this is a bush-league move by stephanie palmer (the wife) and - one would have to suspect - by orlando figes (the russian historian).

philosophy is the art of addressing conceptually unanswerable questions, such as "did you get my last email?"

now this is what i call disturbing. the idea is to "protect privacy": no doubt that's the central mission of the nsa, har har.

adam calls our attention to this wonderful wordie thing.

if you're wondering what the hell is up w/www.crispinsartwell.com, so am i: i'm not able update it, and you're not able to read it. well, my people, the "new freedom data center" (nfdc) tell me that someone in china has been continually trying to "hack into" my site. so they've shut it down to prevent...whatever the chinese might have in mind. maybe you can explain this. i can't.

people's republic of microsoft

actually, it's getting harder to distinguish microsoft from the government of china.

wikiwiki

wikipedia rocks . i just kind of wish my students didn't use it as a substitute for actually reading the classics of philosophy.

microsoft, as you know, sucks

the way microsoft does business, over and over, is it steals other people's ideas and then bludgeons the market with them. i heard some techie on the radio enthusing about the next windows (due out 2007?): more or less: "it's excellent! it has many of the features of mac os10!" amazing. and amazingly, windows was a bad copy of the mac to begin with. what i love is that they'll absolutely kill you if you swipe their code or distribute or imitate their shit, that is, if you adopt their business model. they're the very picture of the very worst of capitalism: lumbering, gigantic, slow, stupid, absolutely lacking any semblance of creativity, parasitic, and vicious. that this is the most successful software company in the world means...what?   

i believe i can actually now update my main (now essentially archival) site crispinsartwell.com. i will be trying to post old columns etc, insofar as they have survived the meltdowns of my various hard drives. all mp3s have been removed from the site. they made both the site and the traffic too extreme; thus the non-stop crashing.

anne applebaum has a good piece in today's washpost, about the ways microsoft, cisco and others have marketed technology to the chinese to help them censor web content. it's worth saying that this is not surprising, since these same companies are basically dedicated to the idea of the web a territory that can be owned, with content that can be controlled by them. wouldn't it rock if someone could hack and destroy the chinese infrastructure?

this , from ace of spades, is so incredibly wrong-headed. why the hell would anyone be pissed off at wikipedia ? i use it all the time, though no doubt some sabotage or mistakes can slip through. when i read an entry on something i know about it is invariably accurate. if ace doesn't know "really what the hell it's supposed to be," i'll tell him: it's the future of reference: a cooperative enterprise of thousands of people, most composing or correcting material on which they are experts. it makes brittanica or whatever look primitive: the way it is made (as a wiki) is a way to approximate the state of human knowledge as a whole. the only way, in fact. and a way only made possible by open access to the encyclopedia. i think too, that if these spades punk wikipedia, they will learn how resilient it is, though why anyone would take a hostile attitude toward it is beyond me: for heaven's sake at least explore and think about it first.

adam sends this  along with the subject line "tyler durden eat your heart out." after the love rug, why not overthrow the government of the united states of america?