Well, by some measures anyway. BBC Online is reporting the discovery of a worm that targets Mac OS X 10.4. It spreads via files transferred in an iChat session but doesn’t seem particularly fiendish. Still, it confirms the wisdom of Bill Thompson’s advice to Mac users not to be too smug about malware.
Cultural impact of blogging
From an exchange between Kurt Andersen and Andrew Sullivan on the subject “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” This is Sullivan talking:
I think over the past couple of decades, liberalism in its classic sense has been under threat. Not just from crazy theocrats abroad but from P.C. paternalism and religious-right activism at home. The formation of solid camps of thought, and the punishment of heretics, and the maintenance of orthodoxy on all sides have inhibited a free discourse in ideas. And part of the reason for that was the limit on the numbers of vehicles for expression. After all, there aren’t that many genuinely intellectual mags in this country, and the battle to influence them can be intense. But the fragmentation of media, accelerated by blogs, can break this up some and allow more complicated or unusual voices to emerge, without their having to ask permission or fight for space or suck up to people already in charge. If, say, the writers at Indegayforum had had no option but to try and get into the established gay press—which has been, until recently, extremely P.C.—it would have taken up a huge amount of time and led to enormous angst and wasted energy. Blogging circumvented that. It widens the sphere of possible voices exponentially. That’s wonderful news for the culture as a whole. And for liberalism in its deepest sense.
Quote of the Day
Let’s call it a “beta,” which is the software industry term for, “We’re just putting this out. Please let us know if it works.”
Michael Kinsley, writing in Slate.
Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM
From Boing Boing
Sony BMG music has demoted its CEO, Andrew Lack. One of the reasons he got the sack was that he oversaw the release of eight million music CDs that were deliberately infected with malicious software that covertly installed itself on music lovers’ PCs, spied on them, and destabilized their systems, and left them vulnerable to opportunistic infections from other malicious programs.
Those new Chinese search logos
Images by Cafe Press, a charity which supports human rights campaigns in China.
Shoots, Hides and Leaves…
.. is the delicious headline on Dan Froomkin’s column in the Washington Post:
The vice president of the United States shoots someone in a hunting accident and rather than immediately come clean to the public, his office keeps it a secret for almost a whole day. Even then, it’s only to confirm a report in a local paper.
Why Salon published the new Abu Ghraib photos
Salon has published the new set of Abu Ghraib prison photographs (in contrast with most of the US media). Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ explanation of their decision:
Abu Ghraib cannot be allowed to fade away like some half-forgotten domestic political controversy, which may have prompted newsmagazine covers at the time, but now seems as irrelevant as the 2002 elections. Abu Ghraib is not an issue of partisan sound bites or refighting the decision to invade Iraq. Grotesque violations of every value that America proclaims occurred within the walls of that prison. These abuses were carried out by soldiers who wore our flag on their uniforms and apparently believed that Americans here at home would approve of their conduct. Rather than hiding what they did out of shame, they commemorated their sadism with a visual record.
That is why Salon is willing to publish these troubling photographs, even as we are ashamed to live in a country that somehow came to accept that torture and prisoner abuse were simply business as usual — something that occurs while a sergeant catches up on his paperwork.
Campfire
Simple group chat for work-groups. it’s called Campfire. I can think of uses for this on projects I’m involved in.
Quote of the Day
I think science has always been under assault to some extent. I think there are fashions in cycles in which science is attacked for a period of time and is embraced for a period of time and it’s attacked again. Generally attack against science is part of a greater attack against intellectualism in general. I think right now we’re in an anti-intellectual period in the United States, but I think the pendulum will swing back in the other direction again. I agree with you that we’re not seeing anything now that hasn’t happened in earlier centuries.
Alan Lightman, in an interview with LiveScience.com on “The Future of Science”.
The riches of the Web
I’m writing an article about the blogging phenomenon at the moment and, naturally, use the web as a research resource. It’s wonderful what there is out there if you go searching. For example, this excellent piece in New York Magazine, which looks at the operation of power law distributions in blogging. And then there’s Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere survey and his more recent analysis of the growth of the blogosphere as media, in which he discusses some of the emerging trends in handling information overload. These are all thoughtful and helpful essays, and I can get them without leaving my study. Fifteen years ago, this would have been unthinkable. And I still can’t quite take it for granted.