Sunday, March 26, 2006

What Is That File?


If you've ever wondered about a specific file or process running on your machine (is it adware, spyware, or something even worse?), then look no further. This handy, AJAX-enabled website helps you separate the good files from the bad.

What is that file?

Saturday, March 25, 2006

From Google: Top 230 highest paying AdSense Keywords


Tools in Google's Adwords service now permit advertisers to search for the current CPC (cost-per-click) for keywords. One blogger used the tool to compile a list of the highest-paying keywords. Lawyers seem to be willing to pay the most (can you say "DUI" or "wrongful death"?)...

read more 

HARMONY begins to reveal the truth about Iraq and Al Qaeda


The HARMONY database -- a huge cache of documents liberated from the Iraqi Intelligence Service -- is beginning to reveal its secrets. Unfortunately for mediacrat superheroes like the Sour Spinster (Maureen Dowd) and Schnozzy McPeacenik (Bill Maher), these documents paint a worst-case scenario for the Bush/lied/WMD/Halliburton/War-for-Oil crowd. It's increasingly clear that Bin Laden and Hussein were indeed cooperating before, during and after the 9/11 attacks. Best of all, this information represents just the tip of the iceberg.

In a document dated September 15, 2001, “An Iraqi intelligence service document” says “that their Afghan informant, who’s only identified by a number, told them that the Afghan consul Ahmed Dahastani claimed the following in front of him:

* That OBL and the Taliban are in contact with Iraq and that a group of Taliban and bin Laden group members visited Iraq
* That the U.S. has proof the Iraqi government and "bin Laden's group" agreed to cooperate to attack targets inside America.
* That in case the Taliban and bin Laden's group turn out to be involved in "these destructive operations," the U.S. may strike Iraq and Afghanistan.
* That the Afghan consul heard about the issue of Iraq's relationship with "bin Laden's group" while he was in Iran.


This just keeps getting better and better for the administration. Before HARMONY, anyone with an iota of intellectual honesty could look at the Boeing 707 at Salman Pak -- used to train thousands of would-be hijackers -- and the presence of Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Baghdad prior to the war... and know that invading Iraq was absolutely the right thing to do. And President Bush -- on September 20, 2001 -- made it crystal clear what was in store.

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.


But the far Left bank of the Democratic Party has never been described as intellectually honest. They claimed all along that Iraq was a "distraction" from the war on terror (an obvious falsehood) and that there was no significant cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Well, my friends, the HARMONY database is starting to reveal the true depths of that relationship. What it will mean over the long haul is anyone's guess. But one outcome is certain: the Democrats are certain to continue losing elections until and unless they decide to treat the war on terror with the gravity it requires.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Fixing DRM... by killing it


The software technology used to restrict the use of video, audio, and e-Book content is called DRM, which stands for "Digital Rights Management". The basic rationale for DRM is to give the publisher or distributor better control of the content.

For example, when you purchase a song from the iTunes store, it comes wrapped in an electronic envelope ostensibly designed to protect the intellectual property from misuse (like *ahem* copying the song). And, for a time, when Sony CDs were played on a PC, they installed a malevolent root-kit that could damage your computer (the public relations blowback was painful -- yet highly entertaining -- to watch).

The motivating factor for DRM has nothing to do with improving the customer experience. Instead, it has to do with treating the customer like a would-be criminal; thereby chaining the content to a particular machine or device. Increasingly sophisticated consumers, of course, want to use the content on a wide range of devices. And a subset of technically savvy consumers simply remove any DRM altogether.

Bill Thompson writes of these flawed schemes:

The music, movie and publishing industries do not deserve to survive if their only way to remain viable is to undermine copyright law and replace it with restrictive contracts backed by harsh penalties for breaking the inevitably flawed DRM they wrap around their products. Others will take their place, and I cannot see that this is a bad thing.


Indeed™.

BBC: How to right the copyright wrongs

Sell used books to B&N (Shipping Included)


The folks at Barnes & Noble are now offering a "Buyback" service that will pay you for your used books. Enter the ISBN and, if interested, complete the transaction. They'll send you a prepaid postal cover for the book. Once they receive it, they'll mail you the check for the agreed-upon price. Though the price is, as you might expect, significantly less than retail, it's an interesting model...

read more

Thursday, March 23, 2006

AjaxWrite: web-based MS Word substitute


The look, feel, and general functionality of Microsoft Word, delivered over the web. In all seriousness, AjaxWrite represents a glimpse at the future of software delivery. Check it out. ASAP.

FCC Chief: AT&T Can Limit Net Bandwidth


The exact nightmarish scenario I described several weeks ago may indeed come to pass.

FCC Chief Kevin Martin yesterday gave his support to AT&T and other telcos who want to be able to limit bandwidth to sites like Google, unless those sites pay extortion fees. Martin made it clear in a speech yesterday that he supports such a a "tiered" Internet.

Martin told attendees at the TelecomNext show that telcos should be allowed to charge web sites whatever they want if those sites want adequate bandwidth.


In other words, Martin's thrown in with AT&T, Verizon, and the other carriers who appear to be the same unreformed monopolists they've always been. Their idea of innovation? Erect various tollbooths on the Internet to hamper bandwidth unless someone pays extra.

Martin's fatally flawed vision would, if enacted, help destroy the innovation that has been so key to the development of the Internet. How would a boot-strapped startup, for instance, pay the tarriffs necessary to compete with the big boys' bandwidth? And if these tolls had been in place in the nineties, would Google have gone up against Yahoo and become the economic force it is today?

Highly unlikely, in my view.

Get involved by signing a petition that business and Congressional leaders will see. And copy your friends with this message so they can see what's at stake.

Networking Pipeline: FCC Chief: AT&T Can Limit Net Bandwidth

Another Identity Theft Debacle


The latest in a series of identity theft debacles relates to the loss of a Fidelity Investments laptop that contained personal information on nearly 200,000 HP employees.

The stolen computer belongs to Fidelity Investments, which provides services to HP, a representative for the Palo Alto, Calif., technology giant said Wednesday. The laptop was being used by several Fidelity employees in an off-site location, said Anne Crowley, a spokeswoman for Fidelity, which is based in Boston.

The portable PC contains information on 196,000 current and former HP employees, Crowley said. The data includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other employment-related information, but not the personal identification numbers required to log on to Fidelity services, she said.


The key question: why is someone walking around with a database that contains 200,000 sensitive records?

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Richard Cohen is an Outrage


The dull, stuck-in-the-Sixties WaPo columnist Richard Cohen excreted another vacuous column this week. It was number five thousand and three (my count could be off) in a continuing series lambasting the administration for pursuing the war on terror. From what I can tell, Cohen simply reorders the paragraphs of his previous column to produce the next. His monotopical diatribes ignore any historical, factual or current affairs basis in presenting their assertions.

You'd think Cohen would be capable of reading the news since he -- supposedly -- is in the business. But, apparently that's beyond him, since his partisan blinders prevent him from mentioning the HARMONY database, a cache of Iraqi government documents discovered after the war, which are only now being released.

The HARMONY documents are beginning to paint a worst-case scenario for the Democrats: that the President was absolutely right and utterly justified in ordering the destruction of the nexus of terrorism represented by Hussein's government. The documents -- currently being released and translated -- point to direct Iraqi sponsorship and training of Al Qaeda and its affiliates such as Abu Sayyaf.

And that's why you'll get the bile-like discharges from Cohen that disengenuously discuss the war on terror with scant mention of 9/11. Or without presenting an alternative strategy to that of promoting Democracy, which seems to be the only plausible modality for suppressing the virulent form of fascism we now face.

But Cohen couldn't be bothered with actually reading the news to figure out what's going on. Or, even if he could, certainly isn't intellectually honest enough to mention the highly germane developments represented by the HARMONY documents.

Of course, trying to present such a logical, straightforward argument to a rocket scientist like Cohen is like trying to teach quantum physics to a guppy.

Hitchens' Ideal War


Hitchens -- Christopher Hitchens -- saddles up and rides straight into another tussle with the American Left over Iraq. Which he handily wins through his use of concepts foreign to the Left: facts.

As for the “terror” connection, Hayes in a series of unrebutted articles has laid out a tranche of suggestive and incriminating connections, based on a mere fraction of the declassified documents, showing Iraqi Baathist involvement with jihadist and Bin Ladenist groups from Sudan to Afghanistan to Western Asia. If you choose to doubt this, you might want to look at the threat, neglected by the U.S. military, of the “Fedayeen Saddam...”

...This interestingly named outfit, known to many of us for some time, did most of the serious fighting against the coalition after the ignominious and predictable collapse of the Iraqi army and the Republican Guard. Its ranks were heavily augmented with foreign jihadists, and from this para-state formation and its recruitment pattern, we get an idea of the way in which things would have gone in Iraq if it had been left alone. Never mind “imminent threat,” if that phrase upsets you. How does “permanent threat” sound?


Slate/Hitchens: My Ideal War

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

That's what I'm talkin' about



M-32 Grenade Launcher

I wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of this bad boy. The Marines just took delivery of the M-32 six-short 40mm grenade launcher. These replaced the traditional M203 single-shot launchers, which mount under M16 rifles. Defense Industry Daily writes:

"The M-32 is a modified Milkor MGL-140... It can put all 6 rounds on target in under 3 seconds, and can fire "normal" M433 40mm grenades or specialty rounds. Specialty rounds include HELLHOUND rounds with twice the lethal radius of the M433, which will breach doors and kill anything behind them; DRACO thermobaric rounds; and even HUNTIR rounds with cameras in them that descend on a parachute and send back video... the USMC has ordered 9,000 of them."

Would it be improper to scream "Come n' git some!" while aiming one of these?

DID: USMC's New M-32s: Hitting the Field

Prosper - eLoans for the rest of us


I wrote up Prosper.com a couple of weeks ago. Now, Springwise provides a great overview of the idea behind Prosper with some hints at the potential.

But the big challenge -- as in any marketplace, but especially one revolving around the transfer of funds -- is reputation. Before I cut a check for $5,000 to someone I've only met over the web, I'd need to be absolutely sure that the loan is secured by confirmation of identity and reputation. That's truly going to be the hard part.

If Prosper does get some traction, though, perhaps they could use Google's new Reputation Service for its GoogleBase classifieds offering.

Hollywood's Bad Guys


The incomparable Mark Steyn was recently taken to task (on his own website, no less) for referring to Muslims as Hollywood's "preferred villains of the 80s and 90s." Bob Armstrong (yes, that Bob Armstrong... I'm kidding, never heard of him) of Winnipeg notes:

A cursory glance at the big-budget action films of those decades suggests that the preferred villain, even before 9/11 brought about the current mania for not scapegoating [Islamic Terrorists], was anybody but:

Bruce Willis films:
Die Hard (German Marxists turned mercenaries);
Die Hard 2 (mercenaries working for a Latin American right wing general/drug lord);
Die Hard 3 (the brother of the lead German from DH1);
Mel Gibson films:
Lethal Weapon (rogue CIA agents working for drug dealers);
Lethal Weapon 2 (South African diplomats);
Lethal Weapon 3 (corrupt LA cops);
Arnold Schwarzenegger films:
Red Heat (Russian mobsters in America);
Commando (right wing Latin American general/drug lord with corrupt CIA/U.S. Special Forces help);
True Lies (Muslim terrorists)
Harrison Ford films:
Patriot Games (IRA);
Clear and Present Danger (Latin American drug lords);
Air Force One (rogue Russians);
The Fugitive (drug company, German-accented doctor, corrupt Chicago cop);
Witness (corrupt Philly cops);
Eddie Murphy films:
Beverley Hills Cop (drug dealing LA art dealer);
Beverley Hills Cop 2 (German-accented robbers)
48 Hours (California bank robber/cop killer)
Sylvester Stallone films:
First Blood (nasty small town cops/hypocritical military officers);
Rambo (Vietnamese communists/hypocritical U.S. military officers);
Rambo 3 (Russians – with Muslim Afghans as the good guys);
Various others:
The Peacemaker (rogue Russian general);
Proof of Life (Latin American guerrillas);
Speed (rogue LA cop);
Red Dawn (Russians, with Cubans as bad guys with a conscious).

So there’s one crew of [Islamic] terrorists in a sea of corrupt cops and CIA agents, Latin American generals and drug lords, smooth-talking Central Europeans and gruff Russians. And yet, how many people, through... constant repetition... have come to believe that Muslims have been targeted by Hollywood? After reading the above list, the only thing more obvious to me than the bogus nature of that complaint is my need to see some better quality movies...


Actually, Bob did miss a Bruce Willis movie -- "The Siege" -- that featured a bad guy named Sheikh Achmed Bin Talal. However, just to even things up, an FBI agent of Arabian extraction is definitely a good guy. And Bob also missed "Wanted: Dead or Alive" -- the Rutger Hauer action flick featuring Gene Simmons as homicidal terrorist Malak Al Rahim.

And how could he forget "Back to the Future" and Marty McFly's frenzied escape from terrorists seeking nukes (in a DeLorean, no less)?

But we get Bob's point.

Steyn's reply? "...Hollywood gave us far more [Islamic] terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11."

Anything but Bad Guys

Monday, March 20, 2006

Analyzing the Knight Record


Photo
Bob Knight's Wins by Year

In honor of this year's NCAA basketball tournament: the accompanying chart graphs the college basketball wins achieved by legendary Coach Bob Knight. Having watched many of Knight's 1980's-era teams, I was fascinated by the discipline achieved by his system.

Prior to the shot-clock era, if a Knight team had a four point lead with a few minutes to go, a victory was all but secure. His teams ran motion offense to perfection. It was screen, cut, screen, cut, until a cutter found himself at close range of the basket with the ball and generally had an easy layup.

This patient brand of basketball, of course, now belongs to the annals of history. The onset of the shot-clock era -- with the appearance of the 45-second clock in 1986 -- began to change the game. And once the 35-second clock appeared in 1994, the game's pace became much more frenetic. A backcourt press could leave a team with only 26 seconds to run their offense.

Patience, cutting and screening are no longer as valued as sheer athletic ability. Getting up and down the court with alacrity, recovering quickly, and long-range shooting are all the most valued skills.

The point in the graph is this: could we graphically see the impact of the 35-second shot on Knight's patient game? My contention is that we can. Since '94, Knight's teams haven't won 25 games. Nor have they gotten past the sweet sixteen.

Knight -- who has done more to change the game of college basketball more than perhaps any other innovator -- does not seem to have adjusted as well to the 35-second era.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Your invitation to the 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference


It's true, we're all invited to participate in this fascinating conference, which promises new and exciting techniques for effective email marketing.

Like most Nigerians, you're probably finding that it's increasingly difficult to earn a decent living from email. That's why you need to attend the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.

"This conference is an investment in your future. Learn to take advantage of modern technology, and make a great deal of money with very little effort. If you have any question, please contact me and I will send you a proposal that may be of interest to you. I await your response by return while assuring you that the transaction is absolutely risk free." - Dr. Collins Mbadiwe


The 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference

Open-source Windows Packages


Looking for a simple list of free, high-quality, and open-source software packages for Windows? Your hunt is at an end. Visit OpenSourceWindows.org. It's niiiiiiice.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Software Patents: "A Greedy Scam"


Truly great quote from Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, during an interview with News.com:

Q: Various people have accused the free software movement of being anti-capitalist, including Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. What's your response?

A: The idea that we are anti-capitalist is a stupid idea. Free software is not anti-capitalist. Capitalism now makes a great deal of money out of free software, and it voluntarily pays us money to make, improve and lawyer for it.

Some people decided to make knowledge into property. That wasn't capitalism speaking; that was a greedy scam. There wasn't anything normatively acceptable about it. It contravened the freedom of speech and ideas. We didn't engage in it because it was excluding people from ideas.


News.com: Free software's white knight

Report: US Warns Iran


Iran Focus, courtesy Regime Change Iran, reports this ominous news:

The United States warned Iran through a secret channel that it would launch military attacks on a number of nuclear sites in Iran if there was no diplomatic progress a month after the Islamic Republic’s referral to the United Nations Security Council, according to a Persian-language website run by associates of the former Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami.

Khatami was quoted by the website Rooz Online as telling allies that he had received a message through a third party from a senior United States official during a visit to Germany last autumn. The U.S. official had warned Iran that the U.S. would bomb the country’s nuclear sites “if there is no breakthrough in resolving Iran’s nuclear dossier a month after the case is referred to the Security Council”.

New Partisan Times


Taranto humbles the lame collection of partisan hacks known as the New York Times. Again.

"President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a 'free and peaceful Iraq' that would serve as a 'dramatic and inspiring example' to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict."--Editorial, New York Times, Feb. 27, 2003

"One prominent neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama, asserts in a new book that the administration embraced democracy as a cornerstone of its policy only after the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq. The issue was seized upon to justify the war in retrospect, and then expanded for other countries, he says."--New York Times, March 17, 2006


They truly are giving laughing-stocks a bad name.

GoogleTips: Making your site search-friendly


If you're interested in making your site friendlier to Google (and thereby raise your site's profile in its search results), then these quick tips from SSW are handier than a Swiss Army knife in a MacGyver episode.

Even better, the SEOMoz Beginner's Guide to SEO is an outstanding overview of search engine optimization - the best I've ever seen.