Kook of the Year!

There’s a wonderful story on Slashdot about a crackpot who wrote a Wikipedia page about himself, only to have it, er, rendered more objective by other contributors. This then drove him wild, with predictable results. The current version of the page seems admirable to me, but it’s had to be locked to prevent further vandalism. Opponents of Wikipedia will doubtless try to use this story as evidence that an open project like this cannot work. To me, it proves the opposite.

Caligula’s horse — contd.

“The story of Mr. Kerik’s nomination is one of how a normally careful White House faltered because of Mr. Bush’s personal enthusiasm for Mr. Kerik, a desire by the administration to quickly fill a critical national security job and an apparent lack of candor from Mr. Kerik himself.” [ New York Times .]

I like that bit about “a normally careful White House”. That would have been in, let me see…, Harry Truman’s time?

Google to digitize millions of books

Many years ago, Howard Rheingold asked an interesting question. He was trying to get people to think about the possibilities of a world in which everything that was published was accessible on the Web. “Where is the Library of Congress”, he mused, “when it’s on your laptop?” In the old days, people had to come to the information. But one day it would be the other way round. Now it seems that day may be closer than we thought — thanks to Google.

Today’s Mercury News reports:

“Google is launching an ambitious effort to make digital copies of some of the world’s largest university library collections and will incorporate the texts into its vast Web index, apparently the largest project of its kind ever attempted.

As envisioned, almost anyone with a computer could instantly tap into enormous academic libraries — some with texts dating back centuries.

Stanford, Harvard and Oxford universities, as well as the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library, are participating in the program, which could span years and involve scanning and indexing well more than 10 million books and periodicals.”

One of the side effects of this project — as my friend Gerard points out — will be to reinforce the dominance of English as a global language. If I were the French government, I’d be negotiating with Google to digitise the contents of the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Head gear

Photographed at a school bazaar last week. The kids had been dressing up in Tudor costume.

Kerik redux

More on Bernard in today’s NYT. “In June 2000, two months before Bernard B. Kerik was appointed police commissioner, New York City’s top investigative agency learned that he had a social relationship with the owner of a New Jersey construction company suspected of having business ties to organized crime figures, city documents show. The city’s Department of Investigation took two days of testimony from Frank DiTommaso, the owner of the company, Interstate Industrial Corporation. It also formally interviewed Mr. Kerik himself.”

It goies without saying, of course, that “there is no indication that Mr. Kerik did anything illegal or improper”. Naturally. If there had been, surely St Rudolf [Guiliani] would never have appointed him New York’s Top Cop.

End of an era

My Observer column reflecting on IBM’s decision to sell its PC business to a Chinese company.

Wine online

The US is such a strange country. You can buy guns freely, but I’ve just discovered that it’s illegal to sell alcohol over interstate boundaries. This is, as you might expect, acting as a damper on e-commerce in the wine business. It also conflicts with the Constitution’s endorsement of free trade. So the Supreme Court is going to consider the issue. Wine buffs await the outcome with bated breaths. So, presumeably, do small wineries.

Freedom of information?

Want to see why some people are worried about the security and privacy of their personal data? Well, try this.

Thanks to James Miller for the link.

Come back, Mary Poppins — your country needs you!

In the UK we have our own little conflict-of-interest circus over the business of a visa for the ex-lover of the Home Secretary.

But over on the other side of the pond, a more encouraging little scandal has emerged, blinking into the light. Dubya had nominated Bernard B. Kerik, a macho creep straight from central casting (shaven head, big ego, bristling moustache, black belt in karate — see picture, and note Stars and Stripes drooping sadly in background), to be the next Secretary of Homeland Security.

Photo (c) the New York Times.

After a textbook start (high school dropout, fathering an illegitimate daughter in Korea, whom he refused to acknowledge and support, serving as bodyguard for Saudi royals and then becoming a New York narcotics cop) he got his big break in 1993 when New York Mayor, ‘Sir’ Rudolf Giuliani, appointed him as his chauffeur and bodyguard. Thereafter, as Sidney Blumenthal chronicled in a nice little potted bio last week, Kerik went from strength to strength.

“Giuliani made Kerik deputy police commissioner and chief of the corrections department. One million dollars in taxpayers’ money used to buy tobacco for inmates disappeared into a private foundation run by Kerik without any accounting. In 2000, Giuliani leapfrogged Kerik over many more qualified candidates to appoint him police commissioner.

Kerik spent much of his time after 9/11 writing a self-promoting autobiography, The Lost Son. The city’s conflict of interest board eventually fined him $2,500 for using three policemen to conduct his research.

Dispatched to Iraq to whip security forces into shape, Kerik dubbed himself the ‘interim interior minister of Iraq.’ British police advisers called him the ‘Baghdad terminator’, and reported that his reckless bullying was alienating Iraqis. ‘I will be there at least six months,’ he said. He left after three.”

Just the kinda regular guy, in other words, who Dubya would want to tend to the security of the United States. But this grand plan has come unstuck. Why? Nanny trouble. Let the New York Times tell the story:

“On Friday, Mr. Kerik informed the administration that, contrary to assurances he had given the White House counsel’s office before the president nominated him on Dec. 3, a nanny he had employed appeared to have been in the country illegally and that he had failed to pay taxes on her behalf. He told President Bush in a brief phone call about 8:30 p.m. Friday of his decision to withdraw, said a White House official.

White House officials were clearly annoyed at Mr. Kerik for not determining the nanny’s immigration status before this week but said they had no evidence he had sought to mislead them. ‘It was Kerik’s screw-up, it was that simple,’ the official said. ‘But it’s a mistake you can’t tolerate with someone who has oversight for immigration.'”

In the old days, mistresses were the cause of chaps’ downfalls. Now it’s nannies. Mary Poppins, where are you when you’re needed?

Supremes to take the ‘enabling infringement’ case

From today’s NYT:

“WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 – The Supreme Court, accepting urgent pleas from the recording and film industries, agreed on Friday to decide whether the online services that enable copyrighted songs and movies to be shared freely over the Internet can be held liable themselves for aiding copyright infringement.

For the entertainment industry and for everyday consumers, the case is likely to produce the most important copyright decision since the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that the makers of the videocassette recorder were not liable for violating the copyrights of movies that owners of the devices recorded at home.”

We’re back to Sony vs. Universal in 1984 when the Court ruled by a whisker that makers of the videocassette recorder were not liable for violating the copyrights of movies that owners of the devices recorded at home. Ed Felten has an entertaining account of this in his Princeton President’s Lecture