What if SCO is right?
As every geek must know by now, SCO — the company which now owns the licence to UNIX — is claiming that Linux contains some proprietary UNIX code. If true, I thought, this could be serious for everyone. But this interesting column by Mitch Wagner points out a serious potential flaw in any lawsuit SCO launches — namely that it has itself been distributing Linux for years under a GPL licence!
Amazing research archive
Just discovered an amazing archive of research papers published about the Net between 1999 and 2003.
Meanwhile, back at the real war…
As the US and the UK struggle to impose order on a shattered Iraq, the New York Times reports that “U.S. Officials See Signs of a Revived Al Qaeda”. And, right on cue, suicide bombers kill 41 people in Casablanca. “Leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda”, says the Times, “have reorganized bases of operations in at least a half-dozen locations, including Kenya, Sudan, Pakistan and Chechnya…
The leaders have begun to recruit new members, train the new followers and plan new attacks on Western targets in earnest, according to senior counterterrorism officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East. As evidence of this, senior government officials pointed to the secret arrests in the United States in the last two months of two Arab men suspected of having been sent by senior leaders of Al Qaeda to scout targets for new terror attacks.
The two recently apprehended men, whom the officials would not identify, were said to be conducting “presurveillance” activities. They were part of a larger group of about six Qaeda followers arrested in recent months whose presence in the United States has led the authorities to conclude that the terrorist group remains determined to carry out attacks on American soil, officials said.”
What if…?
“Who assumes the presidency if a deranged Islamist sneaks a nuclear suitcase bomb into an inaugural, … vaporizing not only the President and the Vice President but also most of the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and Congress?” Fascinating piece in The Atlantic about Norman Ornstein’s attempts to get American constitutionalists to think about the unthinkable.
France’s Minitel is 20 this year
BBC Online story. Funny how things change: once upon a time, France was the only country in the world with a serious e-commerce and online information infrastructure — via the closed but freely available Minitel system. That was in 1983, the year the Internet was switched on. Then came the Web, and with it the idea that boring old steam-age Minitel was finished. Well, maybe it was, but the Web has yet to deliver the same reliability and micro-billing capability.
Firsts
When Sue died, a wise old friend who’d been similarly bereaved said: “Expect a terrible year of ‘firsts’ — the first Christmas, the first New Year’s Eve, the first Easter, the first wedding anniversary — the first birthday — without her. After that it gets easier because next time round it won’t be the ‘first’ anything”. Well, she was right about the first bit. I only hope she is right about the second. Today was Sue’s birthday.
Downloading done right
According to David Pogue in the NYT, the Apple Music Store had 2 million downloads in the first 16 days.
So is the Internet dying or not?
Interesting essay by Andrew Orlowski on Larry Lessig’s increasing pessimism about the Net. Quotes from Thomas Pynchon’s observation (in his Intro to the centenary edition of George Orwell’s 1984) that the Internet is “a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about”.
Living without Windows
Quentin Stafford-Fraser writes. “Realised today that it is well over a year since I used Windows. The Mac has done everything I need, and I use Linux for a few servers, experiments etc that I run. I’ve hardly touched a Windows machine in the last 18 months and I haven’t missed it one bit.”
Rescue of Jessica Lynch entirely “staged” by US soldiers? An extraordinary story from the BBC, which says it will supply evidence that this is so in a news documentary to air Sunday in the UK. A cover story report in today’s Guardian newspaper says that the Fedayeen had abandoned the hospital days before the ‘rescue’ and that the advance party of US soldiers had been informed of this via their own Arab interpreter. More bizarre, US soldiers had actually fired on a vehicle carrying Lynch, driven by an Iraqi doctor who had informed soldiers that he would try to bring her to them from the hospital as basically the whole place was empty anyway and she wasn’t badly hurt. Under heavy fire, he had to turn and drive her back. The Pentagon claimed that she had gun and stab wounds. But doctors at the hospital say she had no gun or other combat wounds, only broken bones and a sprain consistent with a car accident – and the Pentagon is now saying there is now some “conflicting information” about what wounds she actually has, refusing to say anything more.
The doctors also say the soldiers arrived along with their film crew and as the film rolled, started kicking in doors and shouting — though they’d been told there was no resistance and hadn’t been for days. Only a couple of doctors remained in the hospital and one patient, handcuffed to a bed frame. The doctors and the empty hospital are presumably in the military film, but only a five-minute edit of the ‘rescue’ was released (within two hours of the event itself, and rushed to US media) and the Pentagon has refused to release the full film — with the doctors in it — to UK journalists asking for it, to clear up discrepencies. Says one doctor, “I don’t know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury.”
Says another: “It was like a Hollywood film. They cried ‘Go, go, go’, with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions.” The Pentagon would not say what, if any, kind of resistance had been met by the soldiers at the hospital.
And on top of all this, the senior Downing Street official sent to Iraq to represent the Prime Minister’s office has complained that at the very least, the Lynch affair was overblown, a minor human interest element compared to the discovery of the bodies of her comrades. He won’t be any more specific but did complain privately to the UK government that the Lynch presentation was particularly ’embarrassing’. Further, British military Group Captain Al Lockwood, the British Army spokesman at central command in Iraq, says in the documentary that the British could not believe the pandering way in which the US military dealt with the US media, culminating in the Lynch episode, and the gushing, unquestioning acceptance of same by the US media. “In reality we had two different styles of news media management,” said Lockwood. “I feel fortunate to have been part of the UK one.”
Meanwhile, Lynch says she can’t remember anything that happened to her. Will the US media pick up on any of this? Or will it shy away from ruining a potential blockbuster action film through too many difficult questions?