I am Larry Koffi. I am director in charge auditing and collecting Union Togolaise De Banque Lome, Togo West Africa. I came across $44.5 million of a dead person in my bank. I will give you 25% to be his NEXT OF KIN. I like red jelly beans.
June 2004 Archives
By Stephen Zunes
Stephen Zunes zunes@usfca.edu is an associate professor of politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project (online at
"... Below is a transcript of President George W. Bush.s address to the nation on Monday,
March 17, announcing his readiness to order a U.S. invasion of Iraq followed by an analysis highlighting
some of the lies and misleading statements in the speech. Such an overview is necessary since the
Democratic Party leadership in Congress, which has pledged to support the president in the event of war,
declined to take their traditional opportunity to offer a formal response. The Green Party, which opposes
the war, was not given the opportunity by the networks to respond."
Even if it's highly unusual, garden furniture is not something that gets us cartwheeling around the office in excitement. It's all a bit DIY-centre meets home-improvement show for sophisticated urbanites such as us. Besides, garden furniture sits gathering cobwebs in the shed for most of the year, doesn't it? Well no, not if it's the utterly ingenious Terra Armchair. That's because, once 'assembled', this eco-friendly chair actually becomes part of the garden. Literally.
http://www.firebox.com/index.html?dir=firebox&action=product&pid=854
It was a true clash of cultures. Stephen Nock, a gay man from London, assumed it would be a matter of routine to book a double room at a remote Scottish guest house for himself and his long-term partner.
But Tom Forrest, owner of the bed-and-breakfast accommodation in the Scottish Highlands, where a sometimes stern Presbyterian spirit remains strong, had other ideas. He would be happy to rent the couple a room with twin beds at the guest house in the village of Kinlochewe, "but we will not condone your perversion" with a double bed, he wrote in an e-mail, the Times newspaper said Wednesday. Angry at the response, Nock replied by suggesting that Forrest was bigoted. "Bigot? No. Respect for other guests," came the reply. "Homophobic? No, I have no hatred or fear of poofs, etc -- I just do not approve of unnatural acts being performed in my home." Nock in return asked the Scottish tourism board to remove the guesthouse from a list of recommended accommodation on its website, saying that the prejudice had "depressed" him, the report said. The tourism board asked the guest house owner to act differently, but he has refused to back down, saying he ran a "respectable" establishment. "I have had bent people coming to stay, but they have had a twin room and respect our wishes," Forrest was quoted as saying.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040629/323/ewyxm.html
You can find the Bed and Breakfast on this page:
http://www.roomfinderscotland.co.uk/mapsearch.php?townid=337
The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.
On the heels of last week's sophisticated malware attack that targeted a known IE flaw, US-CERT updated an earlier advisory to recommend the use of alternative browsers because of "significant vulnerabilities" in technologies embedded in IE.
"There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME-type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different Web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites," US-CERT noted in a vulnerability note.
A divided U.S. Supreme Court refused Tuesday to let the government enforce the latest version of a criminal law requiring commercial Web sites to shield minors from sexually explicit material.
In a 5-4 ruling, the court upheld a lower court's injunction against the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which would make it a crime punishable by six months in jail and a $50,000 fine to post material for commercial purposes that is harmful to minors because of its sexual content and lacks serious cultural or social value. Providers could win acquittal by showing that they took steps to prevent minors' access by requiring a credit card or adult identification.
Citing free-speech concerns, the court majority said the evidence so far suggests that allowing parents to use Internet filters to screen out sexually explicit material would be more effective in achieving the goal of the law without resorting to criminal prosecution. That means opponents of the law, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, have shown that it is probably unconstitutional and are entitled to a continued injunction against enforcement, the court said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/06/29/PORN29.TMP
MSNBC.Com - Unthinkable: How the Internet could become a tool of corporate and government power, based on updates now in the works.
Picture, if you will, an information infrastructure that encourages censorship, surveillance and suppression of the creative impulse. Where anonymity is outlawed and every penny spent is accounted for. Where the powers that be can smother subversive (or economically competitive) ideas in the cradle, and no one can publish even a laundry list without the imprimatur of Big Brother. Some prognosticators are saying that such a construct is nearly inevitable. And this infrastructure is none other than the former paradise of rebels and free-speechers: the Internet.
To those exposed to the Panglossian euphoria of Net enthusiasts during the 1990s, this vision seems unbelievable. After all, wasn't the Internet supposed to be the defining example of empowering technology? Freedom was allegedly built into the very bones of the Internet, designed to withstand nuclear blasts and dictatorial attempts at control. While this cyberslack has its downside.porn, credit-card fraud and insincere bids on eBay.it was considered a small price to pay for free speech and friction-free business models. The freedom genie was out, and no one could put it back into the bottle.
Certainly John Walker believed all that. The hackerish founder of the software firm Autodesk, now retired to Switzerland to work on personal projects of his choosing, enjoyed "unbounded optimism" that the Net would not only offset the powers of industry and government but actually restore some previously threatened personal liberties. But in .the past couple of years, he noticed a disturbing trend. Developments in technology, law and commerce seemed to be directed toward actually changing the open nature of the Net. And Internet Revisited would create opportunities for business and government to control and monitor cyberspace.
In September Walker posted his fears in a 28,000-word Web document called the Digital Imprimatur. The name refers to his belief that it's possible that nothing would be allowed to even appear on the Internet without having a proper technical authorization.
How could the freedom genie be shoved back into the bottle? Basically, it's part of a huge effort to transform the Net from an arena where anyone can anonymously participate to a sign-in affair where tamperproof "digital certificates" identify who you are. The advantages of such a system are clear: it would eliminate identity theft and enable small, secure electronic "microtransactions," long a dream of Internet commerce pioneers. (Another bonus: arrivederci, unwelcome spam.) A concurrent step would be the adoption of "trusted computing," a system by which not only people but computer programs would be stamped with identifying marks. Those would link with certificates that determine whether programs are uncorrupted and cleared to run on your computer.
The best-known implementation of this scheme is the work in progress at Microsoft known as Next Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly called Palladium). It will be part of Longhorn, the next big Windows version, out in 2006. Intel and AMD are onboard to create special secure chips that would make all computers sold after that point secure. No more viruses! And the addition of "digital rights management" to movies, music and even documents created by individuals (such protections are already built into the recently released version of Microsoft Office) would use the secure system to make sure that no one can access or, potentially, even post anything without permission.
The giants of Internet commerce are eager to see this happen. "The social, economic and legal priorities are going to force the Internet toward security," says Stratton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign, a company built to provide digital certificates (it also owns Network Solutions, the exclusive handler of the "dot-com" part of the Internet domain-name system). "It's not going to be all right not to know who's on the other end of the wire." Governments will be able to tax e-commerce.and dictators can keep track of who's saying what.
Walker isn't the first to warn of this ominous power shift. The Internet's pre-eminent dean of darkness is Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford University guru of cyberlaw. Beginning with his 1999 book "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace," Lessig has been predicting that corporate and regulatory pressures would usurp the open nature of the Net, and now says that he has little reason to retract his pessimism. Lessig understands that restrictive copyright and Homeland Security laws give a legal rationale to "total control," and also knows that it will be sold to the people as a great way to stop thieves, pirates, malicious hackers, spammers and child pornographers. "To say we need total freedom isn't going to win," Lessig says. He is working hard to promote alternatives in which the law can be enforced outside the actual architecture of the system itself but admits that he considers his own efforts somewhat quixotic.
Does this mean that John Walker's nightmare is a foregone conclusion? Not necessarily. Certain influential companies are beginning to understand that their own businesses depend on an open Internet. (Google, for example, is dependent on the ability to image the Web on its own servers, a task that might be impossible in a controlled Internet.) Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are sounding alarms. A few legislators like Sens. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Norm Coleman of Minnesota are beginning to look upon digital rights management schemes with skepticism. Courts might balk if the restrictions clearly violate the First Amendment. And there are pockets of technologists concocting schemes that may be able to bypass even a rigidly controlled Internet. In one paper published by, of all people, some of Microsoft's Palladium developers, there's discussion of a scenario where small private "dark nets" can freely move data in a hostile environment. Picture digital freedom fighters huddling in the electronic equivalent of caves, file-swapping and blogging under the radar of censors and copyright cops.
Nonetheless, staving off the Internet power shift will be a difficult task, made even harder by apathy on the part of users who won't know what they've got till it's gone. "I've spent hundreds of hours talking to people about this," says Walker. "And I can't think of a single person who is actually going to do something about it." Unfortunately, our increasingly Internet-based society will get only the freedom it fights for.
Yesterday Paul Bremer, the chief administrator of Iraq for the past 14 months, signed over political control of the country to the interim Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi, and then quietly slipped away on a plane. Only six people participated in the secret handover, which occurred two days before the much-trumpeted date of 30 June.
The coalition billed the handover as Iraqis 'taking control'. 'You are ready now for sovereignty and we think it's an important part of our obligation as temporary custodians to hand it over', said Bremer in the ceremony (1). Tony Blair's spokesman said: 'what's important now is that the Iraqi people, for the first time, can see Iraqi leaders representing them taking charge in Baghdad.' (2)
Critics have seen the new leaders as a mere 'puppet government', giving a veneer of respectability to America's 'ongoing imperialist project' in Iraq (3). Anti-globalisation activist Naomi Klein described it as an 'underhand' rather than a 'handover', providing cover for the US 'corporate feeding frenzy' (4).
A sure-footed Republican and self-described "ardent Bush-Cheney supporter," Alan Wilenski found none of his other right-leaning friends and family willing to go along with his Sunday afternoon plans.
But the Alan Wilenski who stepped out of the Farmingdale Multiplex Cinemas yesterday afternoon, after the 12:40 showing of "Fahrenheit 9/11," was a different man. Hands in pockets, his expression contemplative, he left with more than a new perspective. He left with three more tickets to a later showing of Michael Moore's politically combustible documentary criticizing the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
"It's really given me pause to think about what's really going on," said Wilenski, 50, of Plainview. "There was just too much - too much to discount."
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lifahr283870381jun28,0,2997491.story
The Supreme Court delivered a mixed verdict Monday on the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies, ruling that the U.S. government has the power to hold American citizens and foreign nationals without charges or trial, but that detainees can challenge their treatment in U.S. courts.
The administration had sought a more clear-cut endorsement of its policies than it got. The White House had claimed broad authority to seize and hold potential terrorists or their protectors for as long as the president saw fit - and without interference from judges or lawyers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4254516,00.html
A 23-year-old Singaporean woman appears to have set a world record for sending text messages over a mobile phone.
Kimberly Yeo thumbed 26 words in 43.24 seconds into her phone, beating a world record of 67 seconds for the same words set by a Briton last September, Singapore's dominant telephone carrier, Singapore Telecommunications, said on Monday.
Mobile phones are an ubiquitous accessory in technology-savvy Singapore where more than four out of five people own a handset, giving the wealthy city-state one of the world's highest mobile phone penetration rates.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040628/80/ewte2.html
The United States has handed sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government two days earlier than expected, aiming to forestall guerrilla attacks with a surprise ceremony formally ending 14 months of occupation.
Iraq's outgoing U.S. governor Paul Bremer handed a letter to Iraq leaders sealing the formal transfer of powers before immediately flying out of the country.
The low-key ceremony was over before it was announced and came as a surprise to ordinary Iraqis. Its hurried and furtive nature appeared to reflect fears that guerrillas could stage a spectacular attack on the scheduled date of June 30.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040628/325/ewtml.html
After blistering the box office in its inaugural New York launch, Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" opens nationwide in the United States today with most reviewers giving it high marks as brilliantly provocative but unflinchingly partisan.
While saying Moore's latest work can fairly be classified as propaganda, critics generally praised the film as an artfully rendered critique of U.S. President George W. Bush, his war on terror and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
"Unabashedly partisan, wearing its determination to bring about political change on its sleeve, 'Fahrenheit' can be nit-picked and second-guessed, but it can't be ignored," wrote Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040625/325/ewobh.html
Britain's top legal officer has slammed as "unacceptable" proposed U.S. military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees in a speech reviving a rare rift between the closest allies in the global anti-terror war.
Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith's comments, released on Friday ahead of delivery in a speech in Paris, were one of the bluntest statements yet of London's disquiet over the U.S. handling of terror suspects at the U.S. base in Cuba.
"While we must be flexible and be prepared to countenance some limitation of fundamental rights if properly justified and proportionate, there are certain principles on which there can be no compromise," he was to say.
"Fair trial is one of those -- which is the reason we in the UK have been unable to accept that the US military tribunals ... offer sufficient guarantees of a fair trial in accordance with international standards."
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040625/325/ewokz.html
George Bush understands that most Americans don't have the time, energy, or interest necessary to keep up with current events. How else can we explain the paradox of his expanding claims of close connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and the 9-11 Commission's statement on the same day that there were none?
According to Reuters, Bush sent e-mail today claiming that the "9-11 Commission Staff Report Confirms Administration's Views of al Qaeda/Iraq Ties." This came just hours after the 9-11 commission reported that there was no evidence of a "collaborative relationship." This is the commission Bush never wanted. Under intense political pressure he eventually allowed it to begin its work, but even then hindered its efforts. He even refused to appear before them alone or to have his joint appearance with Cheney recorded or transcribed. But the commission has been thorough in their work, and their conclusions will not easily be challenged.
Reuters offers an explanation of Bush's apparent blindness to the Commission's conclusions: He is "employing a common campaign tactic, shaping public perception through repetition." In other words, he is lying. He is repeating the same lie so many times -- along with Cheney and other members of his staff -- to sow confusion. Eventually, the theory goes, those of us who aren't paying attention will be as likely to believe Bush as the truth.
http://www.thousandreasons.org/opinion/061804.html
Hundreds of companies blame the Iraq war for poor financial results in 2003, many warning that continued U.S. military involvement there could harm this year's performance.
U.S. soldiers in an armored vehicle watch a gasoline tanker blaze after a roadside attack on the edge of Baghdad Friday.
In recent regulatory filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission, airlines, home builders, broadcasters, mortgage providers, mutual funds and others say the war was directly to blame for lower revenue and profits last year.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/2004-06-14-iraq_x.htm
A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.
In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.
He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1242638,00.html
The director of the National Security Agency acknowledges in a new book that audiotapes that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell aired before the United Nations last year to justify the need to confront Iraq offered "ambiguous" evidence that Baghdad was hiding banned weapons.
The comments by Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who was interviewed by writer James Bamford, spotlight doubts among high-level intelligence officials about evidence the Bush administration used to explain why U.N. weapons inspections should cease and the United States should go to war.
At the time, Powell described the three tapes, which he played on Feb. 5, 2003, for the United Nations and international news media, as proof that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction from inspectors. The tapes contained bits of conversations, intercepted by the NSA, among people Powell described as officers of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.tapes22jun22,0,2586045.story
Michael Moore has lost an appeal to lower the R-rating for Fahrenheit 9/11, his controversial film about George W. Bush's actions before and after the September 11 attacks on the US.
The R-rating prohibits children aged 17 and younger from seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 without an adult.
Distributors Lions Gate Films and IFC Films said yesterday the appeals board of the Motion Picture Association of America had rejected their request to reduce the rating to PG-13.
Moore urged teenagers to see the film anyway. "I encourage all teenagers to come see my movie, by any means necessary. If you need me to sneak you in, let me know," the director said.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9936364%255E2703,00.html
In an extraordinary disclosure of classified material, the Bush administration released 258 pages of internal documents Tuesday that portray harsh interrogation techniques -- including stripping terror suspects and threatening them with dogs -- as a necessary response to threats from al-Qaida terrorists.
The release of lists of interrogation techniques and other documents previously kept secret even from U.S. allies was a bid by the administration to quiet harsh criticism over its handling of prisoners in the war on terror and the conflict in Iraq.
Though some of the memos argued that Bush had the right to approve torture, the administration said it had never done so, and pointed to techniques it said fell far short of torture. In a separate press briefing Tuesday, the Justice Department backed away from a memo written in 2002 that appeared to justify the use of torture in the war on terror. That memo argued that the president.s wartime powers superseded anti-torture laws and treaties.
http://www.thedesertsun.com/news/stories2004/national/20040623010000.shtml
The American public has yet to fully discern and perceive the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan as two different national policy objectives since the 911 Commission found no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda terrorists, according to recent polling data posing the question to the American public.
Most Americans believe al-Qaeda may have worked alongside the regime of Saddam Hussein, according to a poll by Harris Interactive. Sixty-nine per cent of respondents believe the deposed Iraqi leader supported the terrorist network, while 22 per cent disagree.
A Pew Research Center poll, however, showed recently that Americans are beginning to decouple the war in Iraq from the war on terrorism -- a belief that could be aided by the commission's dismissal of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda international terror organization.
Last week President George W. Bush said that his administration "never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
The Presidential Commission members charged with the investigation the 9/11 attacks appearing on Sunday morning talk shows have asked Vice President Dick Cheney to provide any evidence he has showing a strong link between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network as he and the President have time-and-again asserted throughout the early stages of the Iraqi War effort.
Commission Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton says the White House and the commission agree on one thing -- there's no evidence al-Qaida and Iraq joined forces in the Nine-Eleven attacks.
The New York Times has called on President Bush to "apologize to the American people, who were led to believe something different." It labeled as "plainly dishonest" the President's effort "to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide."
http://www.mywisecounty.com/news/062104-3.htm
The privately funded rocket plane SpaceShipOne flew to outer space and into history books on Monday as the world's first commercial manned space flight.
The distinctive white rocket plane was released from a larger plane called the White Knight and ignited its rocket engine to enter space 62 miles above the earth.
Against the backdrop of a clear blue sky, it landed safely back at a runway in the Mojave Desert in California, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles.
"The colors were pretty staggering from up there," said pilot Michael Melvill, who also earned his wings, officially, as an astronaut. "It was almost a religious experience."
Melvill said he could see the black expanse of outer space, the curvature of the earth and a broad swathe of the Southern California coast during his three and half minutes just beyond earth's atmosphere.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5473860
Ray Bradbury is demanding an apology from filmmaker Michael Moore for lifting the title from his classic science-fiction novel "Fahrenheit 451" without permission and wants the new documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" to be renamed.
"He didn't ask my permission," Bradbury, 83, told The Associated Press on Friday. "That's not his novel, that's not his title, so he shouldn't have done it."
The 1953 novel, widely considered Bradbury's masterpiece, portrays an ugly futuristic society in which firemen burn homes and libraries in order to destroy the books inside and keep people from thinking independently.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/06/21/bradbury.fahrenheit.ap/index.html
Eccentric software developer Dave Winer has removed access to 3,000 weblogs hosted by the company he founded Userland at weblogs.com, without giving any prior notice. Bloggers have been told that if they ask nicely, they may have their data back next month. Winer blamed a computer for his decision.This strange story grows stranger, however. Winer made the announcement after the fact, in a rare audio mumble: third parties had to provide their own transcriptions. The change didn't affect friends and paid subscribers, and Winer has admitted he's continuing in the hosting business - he's simply moving locations.
"The DNS service provider just can't handle the number of different domains under weblogs.com," said Winer. "We had to put them all in one place, and they had to be on one of my servers. Lawrence and I moved the sites over, and when we put the sites on the machine the performance of the machine became incredibly bad."
Network administrators tell us his excuse holds little water. Netcraft reports that Weblogs.com is running Windows 2000 - not many people's first choice for BIND - but even so, it should be able to cope with what is a trivial load. "Either his hardware can't cope with the traffic, or his Win2K has some kind of resource limitation issue, or he's got something mis-configured," a sysadmin told us.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/winer_weblog_wipeout/
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has rebuked the United States for trying to get another exemption from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court and urged the Security Council to oppose the measure.
He is expected to press his case at a luncheon with council ambassadors on Friday. And next week more than 40 nations are scheduled to debate the measure in a public meeting, at which time U.S. abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan is bound to be mentioned.
"The blanket exemption is wrong. It is of dubious judicial value and I don't think it should be encouraged by the council," Annan told reporters on Thursday.
Annan has opposed the measure in past years but used particularly harsh language this time, noting the human rights scandal in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040618/325/ew53c.html
US researchers have sent atoms through space without movement, which could mean faster data transfer in the computers of the future
Teleportation -- "sending" atoms, or at least their properties, through space without any physical movement -- is possible, according to scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technologies.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, NIST scientists say they were able to transfer the quantum state, or list of active properties, of one beryllium atom to another. The quantum state describes such physical characteristics as energy, motion and magnetic field.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040618/152/ew5fu.html
Transvestites and transsexuals at a private Thai college have been given their own restroom after being humiliated by classmates, a school administrator revealed.
Chiang Mai Technology College has designated a "pink lotus" bathroom for use by about 15 of its 1,500 students after the group encountered difficulties using male and female bathrooms. "We are not supporting them to become transvestites or gay, we merely wanted to solve their problems and make them happy when they are at college," Thodsaporn Promprakai, the assistant director for students affairs, told AFP.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040618/323/ew5f7.html
A German sociologist Werner Habermehl says regular sex can help university students pass exams and get better grades.
Habermehl from the University of Hamburg said he and his team had tested students before and after sex.
They found that regular sexual activity significantly increased mental capability, but they found celibate students found it harder to make the grade.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_981281.html
A Danish IT company has given all its employees free subscriptions to internet pornography sites.
LL Media in Nordjylland introduced the idea to stop staff accessing adult material at work.
The company's director, Levi Nielsen, believes access to porn is a natural fringe benefit, like a free phone or a company car.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_969464.html
After more than a week of round-the-clock Reaganolotry, New York was so ready for the rollout of Michael Moore's Bush-bashing movie. I mean really, really ready. There was such demand to get into a small screening at the Beekman Theatre on Monday night that executive producer and host Harvey Weinstein moved the celebrity crowd to the thousand-seat Ziegfeld Theatre. This was a canny PR move. There was only a one-week frenzy window between Gippermania and the pending Clinton memoir, and Weinstein flew right through it.
Disney's refusal to distribute "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a perfect ploy to dramatize one of Moore's favorite themes, the suffocating power of big media. Attempted suppression is a promotional must these days. Bill O'Reilly's lawsuit put Al Franken on the bestseller list. The distributors who ran away from Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" made him a miracle worker at the box office. Now we have the Moore/Disney psychodrama. We have gone from the marketing Calvary of Christ to Michael Moore's Messiah complex.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48059-2004Jun16.html
Cabir, the first virus to infect cell phones , was not designed to propagate massively, but rather to demonstrate that these kinds of devices can be infected by malicious code.
"This is a proof-of-concept worm," Patrick Hinojosa, CTO of Panda Software, told NewsFactor. "We won't see it spread very rapidly, because there are a number of physical limitations to keep it from mass replicating."
The Cabir code spreads to devices that run on the Symbian OS, which is used in many models of phones, including some manufactured by Nokia, Siemens and Sony Ericcson.
http://wireless.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=First-Cell-Phone-Virus-Just-a-Test&story_id=25438
US President George W. Bush has insisted that Saddam Hussein had "connections" with al-Qaeda, despite an official report that found no credible evidence of operational ties between the two.
The link, frequently cited by President Bush and top aides as a reason for going to war to oust the former Iraqi dictator, has been called into question by the commission probing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Mr Bush says Saddam was a threat because he was a sworn enemy of the US, with al-Qaeda connections and links to other terrorist organisations.
However, the national inquiry commission said there was no "credible evidence" that Iraq had helped al-Qaeda to attack the United States and no sign of any "collaborative relationship" between Baghdad and the group.
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/newstories/RANewsStories_1134532.htm
While the White House and the Republican National Committee have taken an official "no comment" approach to Michael Moore and his new anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, some conservatives have mobilized a letter-writing campaign and crafted ads that slam the film and its maker.
Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, attacks President Bush's rationale for the war in Iraq and accuses him and his administration of manipulating the Sept. 11 terror attacks and fostering fear for political gain.
It is set for release on June 25, debuting on at least 500 screens, with plans to expand to hundreds more in the coming weeks.
One of the organizations rallying against Moore is Move America Forward, a pro-Bush group that evolved months ago from the letter-writing campaign that led CBS to drop its controversial TV movie The Reagans.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2004-06-17-antimoore-campaign_x.htm
Alas, wireless Internet may not be the technology sector's salvation after all.
Small companies, some publicly traded, are burning cash trying to turn Wi-Fi into viable business. Some have already shut down.
Faster than you can say "industry bubble," skeptics are asking whether wireless Internet connections will become similar to the wired Internet of the late 1990s -- hot but rarely profitable.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/06/16/wi.fi.roadkill.ap/index.html
Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, is set to launch Thursday a highly-anticipated new chip designed to sharply improve and expand the power of personal computers.
Intel is expected Thursday to officially mark the launch of its Grantsdale chip set, which will work in tandem with Pentium processors to give PCs more powerful sound and graphics, a speedier link for peripherals and memory, and give desktop PCs the ability to run a wireless data network.
Having those features built into the core components of a computer could be essential to Intel's strategy as it tries to turn the PC into the heart of home entertainment.
http://money.cnn.com/2004/06/17/technology/intel.reut/index.htm
The Bush administration's foreign policy in Iraq and elsewhere has been a "disaster," and President Bush should not be re-elected, a group of former diplomats and military leaders say in a newly released statement.
The group, called Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, held a news conference Wednesday to explain why its members feel "the need for a major change in the direction of our foreign policy," and underscore that they believe their concerns are bipartisan.
A statement from the group notes its more than two dozen members include Democrats and Republicans who have "served every president since Harry S. Truman."
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/16/bush.criticism/index.html
The U.S. military has been improperly holding a suspected Iraqi terrorist in a prison near Baghdad for more than seven months without informing the Red Cross, the Pentagon said on Thursday.
Defense officials confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered military officials to hold the suspected member of the Ansar al-Islam guerrilla group last November at the request of then-CIA Director George Tenet without telling the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Reuters the United States was now moving to end the shadowy status of the man, who was not identified, and allow access to him by the ICRC.
Both assigning a prisoner number and notifying the Red Cross are required under the Geneva Conventions and other international humanitarian laws.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5446790
A newly detected worm spreads among mobile phones using the Bluetooth wireless technology, according to security firm F-Secure.
Called Cabir, the worm targets phones that use the Symbian Ltd. Series 60 operating system, according to F-Secure officials. When a user unwittingly installs the worm on a phone, the malicious code activates and starts looking for other Bluetooth devices to infect. It sends itself as a file called caribe.sis, which the user must accept and install to activate the worm.
Cabir is the first mobile phone virus to be detected, according to F-Secure officials. Although it does not appear to cause any damage, it shows that virus writers have the ability to attack phones, said Matias Impivaara, business manager of mobile security services at F-Secure.
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0614/web-worm-06-16-04.asp
Dogs in the German state of Bavaria can now blend in with the local Alpine scenery wearing the same traditional attire worn by their owners -- lederhosen.
Dogwear designer Hildegard Bergbauer, who also makes Tyrolean mountain hats and rainwear for canines, said the leather outfits were best suited for dachshunds and other small dogs but also looked good on poodles, spaniels and boxers.
"There are lederhosen for the dogs and Dirndls for the bitches," she said on Wednesday.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040616/80/ew0yi.html
What would you give for a simple injection that would stop your lover from cheating?
Well, at least it works for meadow voles.
A single gene inserted into the brain can change promiscuous male rodents into faithful, monogamous partners, scientists said on Wednesday.
It may not be quite that simple to rein in human philanderers -- many genes as well as other factors are probably involved in relationships among people.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040616/80/ew1iv.html
(... at least Voice of America found this newsworthy)
Independent investigators said Wednesday they have found no evidence that Saddam Hussein cooperated with al-Qaida terrorists to target the United States. The conclusion came in a report released by the independent commission probing the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
The bipartisan, independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks said Osama bin Laden met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Sudan in 1994.
But the commission report released Wednesday cast fresh doubt on the alleged links between al-Qaida and Iraq prior to the 2001 terrorist attacks.
http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=3FBA77FF-6200-451B-8FFBC93FFF41F216
(... although CNN has listed this only as a sub topic of the original article. I suppose it wasn't very important to hear that Cheney is fibbing)
The panel said it found "no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."
The report contradicts statements from the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda.
In response, a senior administration official traveling with President Bush in Tampa, Florida, said, "We stand by what Powell and Tenet have said," referring to previous statements by Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet that described such links.
Bush and Vice President Cheney have made comments in recent days alleging such ties.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/16/911.commission/index.html
Running a simple C program crashes the Linux kernel. It does not require root access, but shell access is required. It affects both 2.4.2x and 2.6.x kernels on the x86 architecture
The flaw was by accident discovered by Stian Skjelstad while he was doing some code tests. He was quite surprised when I discovered that the code he was trying froze his machine. He reported it to the Linux-kernel mailing list and the gcc bugzilla 2004-06-09.
http://linuxreviews.org/news/2004-06-11_kernel_crash/index.html
Filmmaker Michael Moore and distributors of his anti-Iraq War documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" are contesting the restrictive rating it received from the Motion Picture Association of America because of its strong language and violence.
The MPAA, which represents major studios and administers its classification system, gave the film an R rating due to "violent and disturbing images and for language", a spokesman for the Washington-based organisation said on Monday.
An "R" rating prohibits anyone under 17 years of age from seeing the film unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian.
Moore's film, a scathing critique of U.S. President George W. Bush's foreign policy and the U.S. war in Iraq, is slated for U.S. commercial release on June 25 in 500 to 1,000 cinemas, making it one of the biggest openings ever for a documentary.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040615/325/evwnu.html
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Saddam Hussein had "long-established ties" with al Qaeda, an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers.
The vice president offered no details backing up his claim of a link between Saddam and al Qaida.
...
The State Department said last week it was wrong in stating that terrorism declined worldwide last year in a report that the Bush administration initially cited as evidence it was succeeding against terrorism, Graham noted. Both the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department acknowledged.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/06/14/cheney.terrorism.ap/index.html
Remote exploitation of a buffer overflow vulnerability in Squid Web Proxy Cache could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code. Squid Web Proxy Cache supports Basic, Digest and NTLM authentication.
A remote attacker can compromise a target system if Squid Proxy is configured to use the NTLM authentication helper. The attacker can send an overly long password to overflow the buffer and execute arbitrary code.
http://seclists.org/lists/fulldisclosure/2004/Jun/0210.html
Benjamin Bratt is not happy with British actors after being rejected for the film Troy because he wasn't white enough.
"About a year and a half ago, I read a wonderful script called Troy and, though the leads were set, even the tertiary roles, smaller in size, were of interest to me. I succeeded in getting a meeting, but was told that I was 'too brown'.
What do people in Asia Minor look like? If they all look like Brad Pitt... fine. After the major roles were established, they said they were only going to hire British actors."
Warner Bros said Bratt was too high profile for a bit part and Brit actors were hired "to qualify for a lucrative British financial incentive". Bratt, an ex-love of Julia Roberts, is starring in this summer's Catwoman with Halle Berry.
http://www.ananova.com/entertainment/story/sm_988201.html
The mathematical equation for the perfect joke has been revealed by scientists.
The formula - c=(m+nO)/p - was worked out by Helen Pilcher and Timandra Harkness.
As well as being scientists, the pair are also stand-up comedians who make up the Comedy Research Project. They run this in collaboration with the Science Museum's Dana Centre in London.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_987661.html
This probably isn't real, but it's sure funny. This is "apparently" a US-made laptop bag. Check out the French translation for the washing instructions:
![[US_washing_label.jpg]](http://www.zuckervati.com/missinglinks/archives/images/US_washing_label.jpg)
South Koreans are demanding regulators put more bite into food safety laws after reports some food makers may have for years used spoiled vegetables in their hugely popular dumplings.
The discovery has prompted a public outcry and calls for harsh penalties.
Four dumpling stuffing suppliers had been charged for food safety violations after raids on processing plants, a police officer involved in the case told Reuters by phone on Friday.
Police would only give the name of one of the four stuffing suppliers and that company did not answer phone calls.
So far, there have been no reports the dumplings have made anyone sick.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040611/80/evpvl.html
French actress turned animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has been convicted of inciting racial hatred and ordered to pay 5,000 euros (3,300 pounds) -- the fourth such fine for the former sex symbol since 1997.
The Paris court sentenced Bardot, 69, on Thursday for remarks made in her book "A Scream in the Silence", an outspoken attack on gays, immigrants and the jobless which shocked France last year.
In the book, she laments the "Islamisation of France" and the "underground and dangerous infiltration of Islam".
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040610/325/evnbo.html
Women are significantly more likely to have sex during the fertile part of their monthly cycle, suggests new research.
"If you're a couple trying to get pregnant, that's great news. There's a hidden biological process working in your favour," says Allen Wilcox, a reproductive epidemiologist at the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Durham, North Carolina, and lead researcher of the study.
"If you are not trying to pregnant the news is not so good," he told New Scientist . The work indicates that having unprotected sex once is more likely to result in pregnancy than previously thought.
The underlying reason for the coincidence of intercourse and heightened fertility is not clear. Previous research suggests women feel sexier in the days before ovulation, which may increase their own libido or make them more attractive to their partners. And men have been found to be more attentive to their female partners around ovulation.
However, those studies did not determine whether these loving feelings actually resulted in more sex. And Wilcox's group have some evidence that sex may actually act as a trigger for ovulation, and not the other way around. "But that would need to be confirmed in a larger study," he says.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040610/12/evmrr.html
A law that the government said would clamp down on those who send millions of unsolicited junk emails is instead causing more hassle for anti-spam campaigners
Pioneering anti-spam organisation The Spamhaus Project has begun receiving threats from spammers, many of whom appear to have moved into Britain following the establishment of controversial UK laws that ostensibly outlaw the spamming of personal email addresses.
Spamhaus founder Steve Linford revealed told the Openwave messaging anti-abuse conference in London this week that this legislation has had a counterproductive effect. "For the first time we have very tenacious spamming gangs setting up in the UK," said Linford. "And, for the first time, we have spammers threatening us with legal action."
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040610/152/evn9j.html
Red Hat's latest hobbyist version of Linux stops some users' systems from booting Windows
Red Hat's newest hobbyist and developer version of Linux, Fedora Core 2, caused trouble for some who found they couldn't start Windows after installing the Linux upgrade side by side with it.
The bug had cropped up in testing, but after Red Hat released Fedora Core 2 in May, many more users reported their systems no longer would boot Windows.
No data on the Windows side was destroyed, and some manual hard drive reconfiguration fixed the problem.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040609/152/evjm7.html
Microsoft's plan to reduce spam by forcing an email sender's machine to solve a puzzle may be defeated by the Internet's army of zombie PCs, say security experts
One of Microsoft's plans to fight the spam epidemic is unlikely to adversely affect spammers or reduce the quantity of spam, according to security experts.
Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates has been calling for the IT industry to work together and eradicate the spam problem. About six months ago he unveiled an initiative called Penny Black, which was a method for reducing a spammer's ability to send large volumes of unsolicited emails using Hotmail and MSN accounts. He suggested making the senders' computer process a complicated mathematical puzzle, which takes approximately 20 seconds, before each message is released. The puzzle's result is attached to the email's header, so that a receiving gateway can recognise emails that have been through the process and allow them to pass.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040604/152/ev8qi.html
A lawyer was sentenced Wednesday to more than three years in federal prison for smuggling thousands of fine Cuban cigars into this country and selling them for a fat profit.
Richard "Mick" Connors, 54, was also fined $60,000 and placed on three years' probation.
U.S. District Judge Ronald A. Guzman ordered Connors taken into custody immediately, despite a request that he be allowed to attend his daughter's wedding later this month. The judge said the former public defender is too familiar with ways to flee the country.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/06/09/cigar.smuggle.ap/index.html
Weather for about the next 15,000 years should be warm and stable -- barring human interference -- according to scientists.
They have drilled three km (1.8 miles) into the Antarctic ice to produce the oldest-ever continuous climate record, from an ice core dating back 740,000 years.
It shows eight ice ages, or glacials, followed by shorter interglacial periods and changing concentrations of gases and particles in the atmosphere.
The period that corresponds most to the present interglacial period, which started 12,000 years ago, was about 400,000 years ago and lasted roughly 28,000 years.
"Our data say we won't go into another ice age. We have 15,000 years before that is coming," Dr Eric Wolff, of the British Antarctic Survey, told a news conference on Wednesday.
But concentrations of greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide (CO2) today are the highest seen in the last 440,000 years.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040609/80/evlg3.html
Reclusive actor Marlon Brando is in final negotiations to star as himself in "Brando and Brando", a low-budget movie about disenfranchisement and broken spirits.
The 3 million pound project details the story of a young innocent with a fascination for the American dream -- embodied by the iconic Brando -- on a journey of hope to the United States. Brando has played an active role in the development of the project, which is scheduled to shoot this summer on location in Tunisia and Los Angeles.
Writer/director Ridha Behi describes his screenplay as "a path to explore the desperately unfair conflict between Western technological and materialistic power and those many human beings whose only weapons are their identity and their timeless values."
Brando was last in cinemas with "The Score", a 2001 heist movie starring Robert De Niro and Edward Norton.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040519/325/etxky.html
Director Michael Moore's controversial anti-Iraq war film "Fahrenheit 9/11" has won a standing ovation from an audience of film industry professionals attending its West Coast debut at Academy Award headquarters.
After an audience of more than 600 people in the theatre of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cheered, whistled and laughed their way through the two-hour film on Tuesday night, they jumped to their feet to give Moore a standing ovation as he took the stage.
Clearly buoyed by the reception, Moore, whose film is scathingly critical and mocking of President George W. Bush, declared: "There has been a shift in this country. ... The average American is finally beginning to figure it out. We were duped (into invading Iraq)."
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040609/325/evjjh.html
Iraq will need foreign troops to fight insurgents even after a U.S.-led occupation formally ends in the three weeks required by a U.N. resolution adopted unanimously overnight, Iraq's interim prime minister says.
"The sovereignty is going to be total, is going to be complete," Iyad Allawi told Fox News in an interview to be aired on Wednesday. "We ask in fact and we want the...multinational forces to help us to face the security threats until such a time that we are able to build our own security and move ahead."
The United States and Britain, whose invasion toppled Saddam Hussein 14 months ago, hailed the passage of the resolution that endorses a "sovereign interim government" in Iraq and mandates a U.S.-led multinational force to keep the peace.
Compromises offered by Washington and London, at French and German insistence, over how much control Iraqis will have over U.S.-led forces helped overcome council divisions, but few expect the resolution to calm daily violence in Iraq soon.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040609/325/evjn5.html
A few games of Roller Coaster Tycoon don't usually translate into productive work, but for one developer the diversion planted the seed for making website analysis more intuitive.
Several years after playing those inspirational games, Robert Savage came up with VisitorVille, a website-traffic analysis package that essentially crosses the DNA of SimCity with that of the traditional chart- and graph-centric tools businesses have long been using.
VisitorVille employs a graphical, urban metaphor to present information about customers' real-time Web-traffic flow. A company's entire Web presence is seen as an urban or suburban neighborhood, with each individual Web page presented as a building. The more visitors on a site, the taller the buildings, and the brighter the lights on each floor.
![[visitorville.jpg]](http://www.zuckervati.com/missinglinks/archives/images/visitorville.jpg)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63767,00.html
On some days, they are hailed for their edible health virtues; on others, their culinary curse. Some studies boast of their abundance of life-extending antioxidants, while others warn of the poisons, fats, or other dangers they also contain.
They are those "back-and-forth" foods and drinks that keep making news for different reasons -- adding to a recipe for confusion when it comes to their real role in your health.
http://content.health.msn.com/content/article/87/99550.htm
Low-carb lifestyle junkies are more likely to suffer from a seldom discussed side effect of such diets -- halitosis, aka bad breath. And since more than 25 million people say they have tried the Atkins diet (not to mention other low-carb eating plans), according to the National Marketing Institute, bad breath may be an epidemic!
Bad breath in the low/no-carb sect is often caused by certain chemicals that are released in the breath as the body burns fat. They are called ketones, and entering into a fat-burning state of ketosis is the hallmark of the Atkins diet. So the good news is that if your breath stinks, you're probably doing a good job of sticking to that low-carb diet.
http://content.health.msn.com/content/article/87/99349.htm
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