We did it!

Posted on December 21, 2003

So, who’s unelectable now? 🙂

FeedDemon 1.0 Released

Posted on December 19, 2003

After much beta testing, Nick Bradbury has finally rolled out FeedDemon 1.0, the first release version of his RSS aggregator software. Interestingly, he’s one of the few who are actually charging for a news aggregator — a free trial is available, but to register it costs $29.95. FeedDemon is arguably the slickest aggregator on the market today, though, so if anyone can get away with charging, it’s Bradbury.

Follow the Money

Posted on December 18, 2003

Ladies and gentlemen, please direct your attention to that paragon of moral authority, your Attorney General…

The Federal Election Commission has determined that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s unsuccessful 2000 Senate reelection campaign violated election laws by accepting $110,000 in illegal contributions from a committee Ashcroft had established to explore running for president.
In documents released yesterday by the FEC, Garrett M. Lott, treasurer for the two Ashcroft committees, the Spirit of America PAC and Ashcroft 2000, agreed to pay a $37,000 fine for at least four violations of federal campaign law. Lott agreed “not to contest” the charges.
“Spirit of America PAC and Ashcroft 2000, respectively, violated the [law] by making and receiving this excessive contribution. Additionally, Spirit of America PAC and Ashcroft 2000, respectively, violated the [law] by failing to disclose the making or receipt of the excessive contribution,” the FEC declared in a news release.
Under the law, the Spirit of America PAC was allowed to give the Ashcroft 2000 committee only $5,000 for the primary and $5,000 for the general election, which it did. The commission found that the Spirit of America PAC far exceeded these limits by illegally transferring to the Ashcroft 2000 committee $110,000 derived from the rental of its donors list.
The FEC vote to fine the Ashcroft committee was 5 to 1, and the one dissenter sought harsher penalties and tougher findings.

Good to know the guy we picked to be the highest law enforcement official in the land knows how to run such a tight ship, ethics-wise! Sheesh.

America: Home of the Weird

Posted on December 18, 2003

Bill Maher: “If you need further proof that America is the greatest country in the world, a blind hunter in Michigan has shot his first deer.”

Warm Up The Blamethrowers, Boys

Posted on December 17, 2003

Wow. I mean, wow.

As far as I know, this is the first time anyone in a position to know has unequivocally said this:

CBS News — 9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable

For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented…
“This is a very, very important part of history and we’ve got to tell it right,” said Thomas Kean.
“As you read the report, you’re going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn’t done and what should have been done,” he said. “This was not something that had to happen.”
Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.
“There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed,” Kean said.

So the obvious question is — who? Who still has their job who was asleep at the wheel when Sep. 11 went down? Inquiring minds want to know…

What Does It Mean To Be Electable?

Posted on December 17, 2003

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about how Howard Dean may win the Democratic nomination and then go down to defeat in November against Bush. It seems that some folks just think that he’s outright unelectable.

Well, I beg to differ. I think that unelectable is in the eye of the beholder. After all, Dean is the only Democratic candidate who has articulated an actual strategy for taking on Bush. All the others — whom nobody is calling unelectable, for some reason — simply fall back on their biographies. How will you beat Bush? “I am a war hero.” “I am a general.” “I am the son of a millworker.” And so on. Those are all great, but they’re not enough to keep someone from truly being unelectable. You need a strategy, a plan. Bush & Co. have $200 million in the bank and the devious mind of Karl Rove to figure out ways to spend it. Dean is the only one who has come up with a plausible strategy for taking that threat on. And he’s the one who’s unelectable? Puh-leeze.

To me, all the talk about him being unelectable just sounds like lazy thinking — like people who don’t want to do the hard work of trying to understand what Dean and Trippi are doing, and then judging for themselves if it’s got a chance or not, so they just fall back on the “unelectable” cliche. It’s too bad; if they took the time, they’d see that Dean is a lot of things, but unelectable is not one of them.

(Inspired by TBogg — if you don’t get it, think about how Google works and you will.)

Wiki.NET?

Posted on December 16, 2003

This is interesting… Ward Cunningham, well-known programming genius and inventor of the Wiki, has announced that he’s taken a job at Microsoft.

Oh, man… this is gonna break Oscar‘s heart 🙁

Fun With Spam: The Stars Come Out Edition

Posted on December 15, 2003

Another actual spam found while I was cleaning out my spam filter:

Check out the Sender on this one. It’s from none other than famous British action hero Sean Bean! (Best known, perhaps, for his portrayal of the doomed human warrior Boromir in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.)

Wow. Who knew that Sean took time out from his busy shooting schedule to write incoherent e-mails to strangers? And what’s even funnier is that I’m currently about a third of the way through the epic Sharpe series of movies (there are fourteen of them, if you can imagine), in which he stars, so when I saw a message from “Sean Bean” in my inbox there was a moment of “What the f…”

Odds are you’ll be hearing from Sean soon too. Tell him I said hi.

Fighting Back Against PATRIOT Expansion

Posted on December 15, 2003

Not too long ago, Dave Winer at Scripting News pointed to an article in Wired News about some doings in Congress that slipped expansions of the PATRIOT Act into an unrelated bill.

When I read the article, it got me really upset. That’s exactly the sort of thing that undermines people’s confidence in government and their representatives. The more I looked into it, too, the more angry I got. But there didn’t seem to be any direct avenue for me to express my frustration.

I was struck, though, by one part of the Wired article. It described how 15 GOP congressmen broke with their party to vote against the bill, because of their concerns about the PATRIOT expansion. The House Republican caucus is known for its strong emphasis on loyalty (and punishing those who don’t show it), so it seemed to me that these fifteen Members of Congress had really done something remarkable — taken a stand on principle even when doing so might cost them down the line.

Now, I’m a Democrat, and most of these guys aren’t usually on my side. But I believe in supporting people who do the right thing. And I wanted some way to show these guys that there were people out there who supported their stand — that it was worth it for them to have done the right thing, even though they lost the vote.

So I used the PayDemocracy service to set up a campaign called “$15 for the Fifteen“. The idea is for people who want to send a message to these folks — that we’re with them in fighting PATRIOT, and that they should keep fighting the good fight — to go to that URL and put $15 into the kitty. That’s a dollar for each of the congressmen.

For most of us, $15 is nothing, but the power of the Web to aggregate lots of small contributions means that (in theory, anyway) we could pull together a powerful statement to the Powers That Be that there is a constituency out there that’s watching this issue, and is ready to stand behind the people who are on the right side of it.

For me, what it boils down to is a simple question — how much is your freedom worth? How much would you give to send a message to Congress that we’re sick and tired of seeing our civil liberties getting chipped away bit by bit? To me, it’s worth $15 — less than the cost of a CD, for Pete’s sake — to raise that banner high. Is it worth it to you? Here’s your chance to show that it is.

I’ve put in my $15. The rest is up to you.

Keeping Our Eye On the Ball

Posted on December 15, 2003

In all the hoopla about the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Post decided that this story should go in the very back of today’s A section… great news judgment, guys.

Washington Post: Pakistani Leader Narrowly Escapes Attempt On Life

Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, narrowly escaped an attempt on his life Sunday when a powerful bomb ripped up a section of a bridge in the city of Rawalpindi seconds after his motorcade crossed it, officials said.
A senior army official called the explosion the “closest call yet” in at least three attempts to assassinate the president since he began cooperating with the United States in the war against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks…
A military official said that “the intensity of the blast was enough to blow up the entire convoy.” Police officials and witnesses said debris fell half a mile from the blast site. No one was hurt in the incident…
In recent days, as part of his campaign to rid Pakistan of religious extremism, Musharraf has banned key Islamic militant groups and ordered the arrests of their leaders. And, for the first time, police detained a dozen Islamic militants Saturday for soliciting funds for jihad, or holy war…
In two audiotaped messages recently aired on al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network, Ayman Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, dubbed Musharraf a traitor and called on his Pakistani followers to topple his government.

Just a reminder as we celebrate the toppling of a dictator that the people who struck at us on September 11 are still out there, still defiant, and still waging war against all those they deem their enemies.

Finally

Posted on December 14, 2003

CNN.com – Baghdad celebrates Saddam’s capture

No matter what your feelings about the justice of this war, it’s always good news to see a dictator and tyrant run to ground. Hopefully this will mean that the guerrilla opposition will slow down, and the Iraqis can get on with the business of rebuilding their country.

Cringely on E-Voting, Part 2

Posted on December 12, 2003

As promised, this week’s Cringely column is the second part of his look into the whole electronic voting mess. It’s an eye-opener:

I asked the question, “Who decided to leave out this auditing capability?” The ability to audit is actually required by the Help America Vote Act of 2001 [actually, it was 2002 — ed.], which is providing the $3.9 billion needed to buy all those touch screen voting machines. Or at least it appears to be required. Certainly, most of the Congressmen and Senators who voted for the Act thought it was required. But then the language was changed slightly in a conference committee, and for some reason, though the auditing requirement remains, most systems aren’t auditable. Huh? The best explanation for this that I have seen so far says that the new machines are “able” to be audited in the same sense that I am “able” to fly a Boeing 747. I am a sentient being with basic motor skills just like all 747 pilots, so I am “able” to fly a 747. So we are “able” to audit these machines. We just don’t know how.

Glad to hear the functioning of our democracy is being managed so well!

Losing the War on Terror

Posted on December 11, 2003

Middle East expert Juan Cole (Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, actually) has posted an essay on his blog that, if true, is pretty troubling regarding how we’re coming up with tactics for the war in Iraq. Apparently we’re bringing in the Israelis to come up with them for us:

Julian Borger of the Guardian reports that the Israeli army has sent “urban warfare specialists” to Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, to help train US Special Forces personnel for operations in Iraq. He says that according to two sources, Israeli military “consultants” have also visited Iraq.
Borger appears to have picked up on the story in the wake of a ground-breaking report by Seymour M. Hersh in the New Yorker, which goes into much more detail, but wasn’t on the Web yet when I initially posted…
W. doesn’t have his father’s experience with the world, and is, frankly, an ignoramus. If he is letting the US effort in Iraq be tarred with the brush of Israeli occupation, he is actually acting as the world’s most prominent recruiting agent for al-Qaeda in the Muslim world. Because that is al-Qaeda’s message to angry young Muslim men who feel humiliated by US power and by Israeli brutality in the West Bank and Gaza. Al-Qaeda says, the Americans are not in Iraq to bring democracy. They are bringing Israeli hegemony to the Middle East.
It was ridiculous. Until [this] story broke and gave it legitimacy.

Even better, the bring-in-the-Israelis plan is apparently the brainchild of noted Jesus freak General William G. “Jerry” Boykin. You remember General Jerry — he’s the one who spends his spare time when he’s not serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence giving speeches to Christian groups about how Islam is a Satanic religion, and the war against Islamic terrorism is a battle between holy Christian warriors (that’s us) and infidel idol-worshipping pagans (that’s them). So we probably shouldn’t be surprised at his lack of, shall we say, sensitivity to the message you might send to the average Arab by inviting Israeli soldiers to join American occupation forces in Iraq.

A big part of why we lost in Vietnam was because nobody on the American side had a clue about what motivated the average Vietnamese. With “leaders” like General Jerry calling the shots this time around, it’s starting to look like we’re going to get a repeat performance.

What’s Number Portability Costing You?

Posted on December 10, 2003

Boy, it sure is nice that the cellphone providers have to let you carry your old phone number to your new phone, even if you switch providers. Except that some of those SOBs have decided that, since they lost the fight in Congress to keep number portability from happening, they’ll stick it to their customers by hitting them with new fees for the privilege. Gizmodo has a useful survey of which providers have added new fees (and how much), and which haven’t. (The most clue-enabled seems to be T-Mobile, which not only hasn’t added any new fees, but has rewarded customers who have stayed with bonus “loyalty minutes” to boot.)

Going ‘Round the Maginot Line

Posted on December 9, 2003

A couple of days ago I wrote a piece comparing our never-ending missile-defense initiative to the Maginot Line. Some further thought on this has led me to wonder whether getting around such a line might not be even easier for a budding Arab Guderian than I originally thought.

My idea would require our adversary to have copious amounts of chutzpah, but little else. It’s a strategy that’s only really suited for an Evil Genius with nerves of steel and balls of brass. The upside for such a person, though, could be substantial.

The strategy, in a word, is: bluff.

In my previous piece I described the looming danger posed by miniaturized nuclear weapons, and how easy it would be to smuggle one into the country. I said a smart adversary would pre-position one or two in the United States long before they needed them — kind of like an insurance policy.

But what if you don’t have one or two bombs, or the means to smuggle them into the U.S.? Well, then, you just pretend that you did. Announce to the world that you have planted a thermonuclear device somewhere in a major U.S. city of your choosing. Heck, may as well throw a real scare into ’em — announce that you’ve planted two. Then outline your demands and set a deadline for compliance (make it short).

If the deadline is short enough, and the city is large enough, you’ll have put the U.S. in an unenviable position. Finding a device the size of a crate that could be hidden anywhere in a major city, with no leads to go on and a ticking clock, makes finding a needle in a haystack seem like a simple problem. Finding such a device when it doesn’t even exist is even harder! (Especially if you, the Evil Genius, were smart enough to plant some false leads and promising-seeming paper trails in the city in question before you made your threat.) And if you claimed you’ve got two, they’ll be sweating even more, because even if they find one they’ll still be out of luck — it’s all or nothing.

When time runs out on the deadline, the U.S. will have a number of choices, all of them bad:

• Launch a first strike on your country, killing large numbers of innocent civilians and (as far as they know) possibly not even pre-empting the threatened strike (even if they killed everybody in your country, your agents in the U.S. could act alone — if they weren’t fictional, but the Americans don’t know that)
• Grit their teeth, tell you to go pound sand, and run out the clock — in which case they’ll discover it’s a bluff, but to get there they’ll have to display about ten thousand times more backbone than any recent politician has
• Cave in and give you what you want, to avoid the “inevitable” (heh heh heh) apocalypse.

Of course, this policy would make you an international pariah, but I’m assuming that if you’re an Evil Genius and your relations with the U.S. have deteriorated this far, you probably are there already anyway, so a little more disapproval isn’t the end of the world. And even if the plan fails, the worst-case scenario for you (you look like an idiot in front of a world that thinks you’re an idiot anyway) is much less dire than what the Americans think it is for them (substantial devastation of a major city), so the odds favor their giving in.

I don’t bring things like this up because I enjoy them. I bring them up only to illustrate the folly of assuming that a missile defense system would mean the end of nuclear confrontation between powers. It would only channel that confrontation into different avenues that missile defense couldn’t stop.

That’s what fortifications do — they are like stones in a stream: no matter how large the stone, the water always finds a way to flow around it. Sometimes it takes moments, sometimes it takes millennia, but the water always finds a way. When you retreat into a fortification — when you surrender the initiative to your opponent — you become the stone.

Expedia to US Airways: Bugger Off, You

Posted on December 9, 2003

Well, this is peachy… Jen Klyse has discovered that apparently US Airways will no longer be offering tickets through Expedia, mostly due to some strange additional fees that Expedia was slapping on US Airways fares but not those of other carriers.

As somebody who has a vested interest in flying US Airways instead of other carriers (I’m going to earn enough frequent flyer miles to go somewhere one of these days, dammit), all I can say is: urgh.

Fun With Spam: Seanbaby Edition

Posted on December 9, 2003

Seanbaby has put in his two cents on the spam situation: how you can use spam to do all your Christmas shopping.

A helpful man named Ernie Huntington sent me a very interesting email with the subject, and I quote, “hssxfk mgoovm.” I couldn’t know for sure whether Ernie was speaking in code, or just so damn determined to help me do my Christmas shopping that he did his best to type this amazing offer even though he was being strangled to death.

Highly recommended.

Gore to Endorse Dean Tomorrow?

Posted on December 8, 2003

The AP says so:

Former Vice President Al Gore intends to endorse Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination, a dramatic move that could boost Dean’s front-runner position.
Gore, who lost to President Bush in the disputed 2000 election, has agreed to endorse Dean in Harlem in New York City on Tuesday and then travel with the former Vermont governor to Iowa, sight [sic] of the Jan. 19 caucuses which kick off the nominating process, said a Democratic source close to Gore.

We’ll see if this comes to pass, but if it does, it’s definitely a Big Deal!

UPDATE: Well, it’s not speculation any more: Gore came out for Dean this morning in Harlem.

American Maginot-ism

Posted on December 7, 2003

There’s a good article in this week’s Economist looking at one of those public policy ideas that just won’t seem to die: strategic missile defense, aka “Star Wars”. Next year will see the deployment of the first ten interceptor missiles by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the defense unit charged with implementing the program, so we’ll soon be hearing about it in the news all over again.

The Economist piece is a good overview of how we got from Ronald Reagan’s grand early-80s vision of a huge space-based global missile shield to the comparatively small and unambitious program in place today (a few ground-based missiles housed in California and Alaska to guard against the launch of one or two ICBMs from North Korea). It does, though, miss the mark on one point I think is important: it describes the opposition of most Democrats to this program as coming mostly on the basis of cost.

For me, at least, that’s not it at all. I mean, the cost is certainly bad enough; the billions of dollars we’ve poured into this program over the years are staggering. But my main reason for opposing it has nothing to do with cost, and everything to do with rationale. Put simply, I think MDA is getting ready to fight the wrong war.

The whole design of the strategic defense initiative has always been premised on the idea that the main vector by which enemies would get thermonuclear devices into the US would be by mounting them on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). After all, that’s how we do it, and that’s how the Russians would have done it, right? The problem is, as technology has marched on, it has become possible to deliver a nuclear device via other channels — channels MDA could never defend against. How many cargo containers come into the Ports of Baltimore or Los Angeles every day uninspected, for example? You could hide a nuclear device inside one of those. How many trucks come over the border from Mexico every day? You could smuggle a device ashore south of the border and then move it north with a load of cheap sneakers.

Then, once you’ve got it in a city somewhere, just put the thing in a U-Stor-It and keep a sleeper agent on the payroll in case the day ever comes when you need to go up against the US. Much cheaper than ICBMs, and just as effective. Heck, more effective — after all, launching an ICBM is like hanging up a big sign that says “I NUKED YOU”, while cooking off a suitcase bomb leaves no such evidence trail. So you don’t have to lose sleep over the inevitable massive retaliation that would follow a missile strike.

The point of all this hypothesizing is that the basic thinking behind the missile shield is flawed: it’s an attempt to address a threat that miniaturized nuclear technology has rendered almost quaint. It reminds me, in that way, of the Maginot Line, which was an excellent solution to the problem of how to defend a trench line against the kinds of assault weapons — field howitzers and machine guns — which had caused so much devastation in World War I. Even while the Line was being built, though, the seeds of its obsolescence had already been planted in the mind of German military genius Heinz Guderian. While the French obsessed over how to build the ultimate trench line, Guderian saw in the armored fighting vehicle the key to making such lines completely irrelevant. When the Germans and French eventually clashed in 1940, Guderian’s tanks and the strategy of blitzkrieg that he had crafted around them provided a stark demonstration of the folly of digging in to fight the last war.

MDA and its dreams of missile defense have eerie echoes of Maginot. The cost of a truly effective missile-defense program would be so high that other programs, other strategies, would be crowded out while America huddles under its “impregnable” defenses. Meanwhile, out there in the rest of the world, where the march of technology will not be ignored, there will be an Arab or Asian Guderian with the wheels turning in his or her head. And God protect us if they are in a position to turn those thoughts into a thermonuclear blitzkrieg of their own.

Thunderbird 0.4 Is Out

Posted on December 5, 2003

Looks like Mozilla.org picked the wee hours of the evening to roll out Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4, the latest version of their terrific standalone e-mail software. As usual, builds are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X; builds for other platforms will be released as they become available. I’d tell you what’s new in this release, but they’ve already done that for me, so I won’t waste my breath.

CLC Taking On Smith Bribery Case

Posted on December 5, 2003

I got a nice e-mail yesterday from Mark Glaze, the Associate Counsel and Director of Public Affairs at the Campaign Legal Center, who reads this blog (who knew?), to tell me that they had seen my previous item on the attempt by unnamed House Republicans to bribe Rep. Nick Smith into supporting the recently passed Medicare bill, and they are now pushing the Justice Department and the House Ethics Committee to look into the matter.

And people say blogs don’t have any impact!

Kudos to Mark and the CLC for fighting the good fight — it’s a tough job, but I’m glad somebody’s there to do it.

Cringely on E-Voting

Posted on December 5, 2003

Today Cringely is piling on the e-voting issue. He puts his finger right on what I think is the Really Big Question in this whole debacle:

One of the key issues in touch screen voting is the presence or absence of a so-called paper trail. There doesn’t seem to be any way in these systems to verify that the numbers coming out are the numbers that went in. There is no print-out from the machine, no receipt given to the voter, no way of auditing the election at all. This is what bugs the conspiracy theorists, that we just have to trust the voting machine developers — folks whose actions strongly suggest that they haven’t been worthy of our trust.
So who decided that these voting machines wouldn’t create a paper trail and so couldn’t be audited? Did the U.S. Elections Commission or some other government agency specifically require that the machines NOT be auditable? Or did the vendors come up with that wrinkle all by themselves? The answer to this question is crucial, so crucial that I am eager for one of my readers to enlighten me. If you know the answer for a fact, please get in touch.
Having the voting machines not be auditable seems to have been a bad move on somebody’s part, whoever that somebody is.
Now here’s the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold’s voting machines, let’s look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines — EVERY ONE — creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can’t be audited they can’t be trusted. If they can’t be trusted they won’t be used.
Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn’t it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn’t it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?
This confuses me. I’d love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?

And then he leaves us with this little tease:

Next week: the answer.

Oh, this oughta be interesting!

Bogus Tanker Deal Is On The Rocks

Posted on December 3, 2003

Well, whaddaya know. Remember when I told you about the shady deal Boeing had cooked up with the Air Force to lease it a bunch of refueling tanker planes? At the time I wrote that, it looked like the lease was a done deal, no matter how little sense it made. But now there’s been a wave of developments that indicate that common sense may be breaking out in the aerospace industry and the halls of the Pentagon after all.

The first bombshell came last week, when Boeing announced that they had fired two of their senior officials: Michael Sears, their Chief Financial Officer, and Darleen Druyun, a senior vice-president. The cause of dismissal was improprieties in hiring ethics; before she had joined Boeing, Druyun had worked as a weapons buyer for the Air Force, and had overseen hundreds of weapons systems acquisitions contracts. Among these was the now-notorious tanker deal. When it was being drafted, Ms. Druyun sat on the Air Force side of the table, negotiating terms for the government; then, once the deal was wrapped up, Druyun retired, and Sears offered her a job at Boeing, which she accepted. Boeing concluded that Sears’ hiring of Ms. Druyun had “conflict of interest” written all over it, and it’s hard not to agree.

Then came the even bigger bombshell: the resignation of Boeing CEO Philip Condit a few days later. The tanker fiasco was, however, just the straw that broke the camel’s back for Condit; Boeing has been taking a beating in the marketplace for a while now, and his board was already starting to mutter that new blood was needed, so I guess he figured he knew how to take a hint.

And, to top everything off, now that Boeing has raised the issue of unethical behavior in the letting of the tanker contract, the Pentagon has gotten cold feet; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress today that there would be a “pause in the execution of the contracts” to allow time for the inspector general to look into the matter. Of course, the same sock-puppet Congressmen who pushed the flawed deal in the first place jumped up to insist that DoD get its little “ethics” fetish out of its system, so I suppose that this thing could still turn around and be back on track again the day after tomorrow. And who knows what the IG would have to turn up to scrap this piece of junk contract entirely. But it’s gratifying at minimum to see the way the deal was arrived at getting closer scrutiny, and one case of egregious Washington revolving-doorism getting smacked down as hard as it deserves to be.

Fun With Spam: College Days Edition

Posted on December 3, 2003

Another actual spam found while I was cleaning out my spam filter:

For 99% of you, this will mean absolutely nothing. Those of you who went to college with me, though, will know why this is funny as hell. And if you’re the one person in that group whose name appears in this post… hi Erin!!! 🙂

Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until It’s Gone

Posted on December 2, 2003

MP3.com went offline for good today.

You may or may not be familiar with the little soap opera that has surrounded that site recently. If not, here’s a recap: MP3.com was basically an online distribution channel for independent and unsigned bands. Recently, though, CNet bought the site from its current owner, Vivendi Universal, and then announced that they were only interested in the name, not the music — so as of today, December 2, over a million songs that 250,000 bands took the time to write, perform, record, and upload for the world to hear are gone forever.

Yep. Gone. Poof!

For me, this is really pretty sad, because MP3.com was one of the first services to really open my eyes to the potential of online technologies. I wrote an article a few years ago about how much more I liked MP3.com’s business model (you could buy CDs of bands you liked for $10, and the band got half of that, which is five times more than they would get in a big-label contract) compared to the crooked dealings of the RIAA’s membership. But in the end, the Establishment won; they dragged MP3.com into court, strung out their finances for legal fees, and eventually MP3.com’s management sold the site to Vivendi, which effectively ended any real threat it posed to the old way of doing business in the music world.

The failure of MP3.com wasn’t all the result of evil machinations, though; there were enough minor things about the service that they never quite got down right for it to sink under its own weight. Take the problem of how to find new music. There was plenty of music there, and plenty of listeners, but it was hard to locate stuff you would like within the mass of stuff that was there — all you could do was search by name (which was useless, since you’d never heard of any of these bands anyway) or check out the most popular bands on the site (which kind of defeats the purpose). Little problems like that did as much as The Man did to bring MP3.com down.

And yet, I found several good bands through the site, and when you did, there was a real sense of discovering a diamond in the rough — of making a connection that would have been impossible to make without the Internet. A year or so after I wrote that article, I got an e-mail out of the blue from one of the singers I’d written about in it, Sarah Lentz. She said she’d found the article on the Web and wanted to say thanks for the kind words I’d written. How cool is that? It was that sense that there were real people behind the music, and not plastic, pre-fab mannequins, that made MP3.com so much fun.

And now, all that music is gone. The founder of the site, Michael Robertson (who currently manages Lindows.com Inc.), is lamenting the loss, and so am I.

So, as a final shout-out, here are links to the new homes of some of the “best of the best” bands that I enjoyed discovering through MP3.com. Check them out, see what you think. Who knows, maybe there’s a diamond in the rough here waiting for you, too…

• Sarah Lentz — fantastic torch songs
• Red Delicious — like Garbage, with more attitude (if you can imagine)
• Under the Rose — mellow, relaxing acoustical jams
• Purple Wage — guitar-driven electronic rock straight outta Tel Aviv
• The Muckrakers — great alt-pop band