Your Freewill Astrology for this Week
Aries	Libra
Taurus	Scorpio
Gemini	Sagittarius
Cancer	Capricorn
Leo	Aquarius
Virgo	Pisces

Technorati Profile

Kerry is a very old friend of mine. In addition to being an amazing web designer, (including one of the creators of web trip-out 2013) she is an amazing painter.
Anyone who likes this site should check out her paintings...in person they seem to pulse with light.
(lil' tidbit to the right- go to gallery to see entire image)

The Hive reborn: http://www.incunabula.org/hive/

techno§hamanic reborn: http://www.incunabula.org/techno/

We're still working out some of the bugs, but they're up again. Don't forget to reset your links and bookmarks.

Federal Court Spurns Recording Industry Enforcement Tactics
Rejects Music Sharing Subpoenas Sent to MIT, Boston College

From Dan Gilmor's weblog: So, I explained to my friend, there's only one person on the ballot who has to get more than half of the votes to win. That's Davis. But if he gets 49.9999 percent, he's done (I'll add here: taking those votes with him) -- and he can't run on the replacement ballot. But nobody on the replacement ballot has to get a majority. All the winner there needs is more votes than anyone else. And since there'll be dozens (at least) of candidates, the winner could end up with 20 percent or so, maybe even less.

My friend shook his head and said California must be nuts."

Rumor has it that Chasing the Wish, undoubtedly one of the most popular ARGs ever undertaken, may be coming to a head over the next few weeks, as players engage in a battle of the wits with bots, shadowy characters, strange artifacts and other oddities in e-space and meatspace.

If you're not already playing, it's probably too late to catch up, but you can go to unforum or loads of other places and watch the final fireworks as a fly on the wall.

"There is a legend, a secret whispered between confidants and passed down through the years. A mystery, hidden in folktales and myths, and echoing in our dreams and fantasies throughout the world."

Note: As usual, the gaming companies take note and slowly but surely follow.

Originally printed as centerfold models in Jeff Hoke’s Guide to Lost Wonder, these objects of wonder are now available as deluxe model kits.

The Lost Wonder Models are printed on heavy fiberstock without annoying folds or staples. Ready to color, cut, and assemble, each kit comes complete with instructions and all needed accessories.

What I truly found remarkable about the model kits is that they sell them for only five dollars apiece. I'm not trying to push capitali$m here, but these are so wonderfully unique in what they are. I've got my eye on the Theatre of the Mind and the Scrying Mandala.

Following an embarrassing leak of its proprietary software over a file transfer protocol site last January, the inner workings of Diebold Election Systems have again been laid bare.

A hacker has come forward with evidence that he broke the security of a private Web server operated by the embattled e-vote vendor, and made off last spring with Diebold's internal discussion-list archives, a software bug database and more software. [more]

These retro-rockets and other works by Jimmy Descant make me wish I had about $20K to spare.

Don't flee from the word "Phish" too fast. Even if you're not a phishhead, you may be able to appreciate that their site Livephish.com generated $1 million in the first four months by offering soundboard-quality downloads of performances within two days of their concerts. Hello, RIAA fools? Thx to Dave Allen and OEBase for the heads-up.

If you are in Seattle, Mark Mothersbaugh's show will be opening
Friday, August 15th 6-10 pm at Roq la Rue...come on by!

The summer edition of the New World Disorder Magazine is now online!

Contents include:

All Aboard the Black Magic Bus! by Adam Gorightly

In this excerpt from The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control and the Manson Family Mythos, self-described crackpot historian Adam Gorightly looks at Chuck Manson’s dark connections to Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and how they may have motivated one of the most notorious mass murders in the 20th century.

The Ong's Hat Mystery Revealed: An Interview with Joseph Matheny

NWD interviews Joe Matheny, author of Ong’s Hat: The Beginning, in order to find out what’s the real story behind the documents that claim a group of renegade scientists and ontological dissidents/adventurers had opened a gateway to a parallel dimension, went through, and settled there. Hope? Hoax? Or something cooler?

Nothing Natural///Black Planet by Adrian Gargett PhD

Using philosophers such as Sade, Deleuze, Bataille, and Clausewitz, Adrian Gargett analyzes war, death, nature, and the inescapable march towards nothingness, in this prison camp of mortal flesh.

The Montauk PsyOp by Alexandra Bruce

Alexandra Bruce, author of The Philadelphia Experiment: Parallel Universes and the Physics of Insanity, investigates the origins of the Philadelphia experiment and Montauk project, and finds evidence they may be part of a long term government Psyop, aimed at influencing humanity’s consciousness.

Book Review of TSOG: The Thing that Ate the Constitution by Jaye Beldo

The Lone Nutter reviews The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger author Robert Anton Wilson’s latest tome.

Thou Sayest: Is Brainwashing Possible? By William H. Kennedy

Esoteric expert William H. Kennedy uses the latest mass media manifestation of mind control – the Elizabeth Smart case – as the launching point for an investigation into the mind control and brainwashing phenomenas (with Robert Anton Wilson and Fu Manchu making special guest appearances along the way).

AIDS by Kenji Siratori

Extreme writing by Japanese experimental writer and author of the cyberpunk classic Blood Electric.

Conquest by Convergence: The Case Against Elite Convergence by Paul David Collins

The author of The Hidden Face of Terrorism: The Dark Side of Social Engineering, From Antiquity to September 11, smashes the myth of elite convergence (“according to this hopelessly flawed view, the problems of injustice and inequity that destabilize societal order are remedied when opposing factions of the ruling class arrive at an agreement”) by using political and business intervention in the Congo as an example of how elite interests can converge, and still end up exploiting the masses.

SARS and the New World Order by Barry Chamish

Israel’s number one conspiracy theorist investigates the origins of the SARS virus and the NWO’s possible reasons for releasing it.

Memory/System/Prediction by Kurt Eckhart

Kurt riffs on how the evolution of the symbiotic relationship between the virtual and the real has lead us to this current historical moment, where the internal contractions of both Communism and Capitalism have become manifest, and how a post-scarcity anarchism that “reconciles the Utopian urges of Communism with the complex utilization of localized information inherent in Capitalism” can be incubated in the current political/economic systems about to be chucked into the dumpster of history.

Deprogramming 101 by Victor Thorn and Lisa Guliani

Victor and Lisa on anti-war rallies and the false right-left divide.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want by Jason Lubyk

New World Disorder’s editor on the failure of the anti-war movement to prevent the expansion of Empire, why it’s not necessarily a bad thing, and what to do next.

(and big thanks to Doc for the web design and Joe for helping out)

The Recording Industry Association of America sued the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday, seeking to require the Institute to identify a network user alleged to have illegally offered hundreds of copyrighted music recordings for download on the Internet.
The suit against MIT, and three similar suits against Boston College, came after the two universities balked on procedural grounds at the RIAA's formal requests under the 1998 federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, to identify the network users.

Another story on this issue.

I am pleased to announce Memeufacture's new sister site, RFID News. It will provide up to the minute coverage and commentary on the radio frequency identification industry, insight into social and privacy issues, and follow new developments in the emerging technology.

Also see: Claim: RFID Will Stop Terrorists

A bizarre internet craze called Flash Mobbing is sweeping the world - with New York, London and Tokyo all witnessing the phenomenon.
According to flashmob.info, a Flash Mob event should be "quirky, whimsical, and motivated totally by a desire to produce the sort of fun that comes from engaging others into a sort of surreal moment of wonderment".

That page has great Big pictures, but may be a bit wack in it's interpretation, who knows.

I've also predicted that they travel around Mars via the wind and are probably in almost every surface rock. If NASA shows us the truth, I'm pretty sure at least one of their pictures will have these creatures in it. The Frass Meteorite clearly shows that these creatures can make the trip from Mars to Earth alive and NASA estimates 1000 pounds of Mars makes it to Earth every year, giving them ample time to arrive and begin to propagate.

For a more scientific view, with no pictures, check Chemtrails - Bio-Active Crystalline Cationic Polymers

I have also been looking at this strange aerosolized filament technology for about three years. What I have found, after receiving samples retrieved around Seattle, WA., is a cationic reaction polymer that has an unidentified bio-active material within it. My first opinion is that this is the biological control agents released by the Federal DEA to destroy and further control marijuana growing across the United States and certain portions of Canada. We have found that these bio-control agents are genetically mutated fungal forms that have been mutated with viruses and they purportedly find and kill any plants containing THC, the active ingredient.

There are many archived articles at Rense's Chemtrails DataPage, but for the latest ones visit the Rense home page.

A historian credited with predicting the downfall of the Soviet Union in the 1970s now says that the US has been on its way out for the last decade.

The power and influence of the United States is being overestimated, claims French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd. "There will be no American Empire." "The world is too large and dynamic to be controlled by one power." According to Todd, whose 1976 book predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no question: the decline of America the Superpower has already begun.

AlterNet: Setting It Right: "The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, 'This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history...This is not normal government policy.' In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America's future, Akerloff added, 'What we have here is a form of looting.'" | Via AlterNet

Its worth spending a few minutes of your time to read the whole thing.

"You can send your name crashing into Comet Tempel 1 by going to Send Your Name to a Comet. Once you have filled in and submitted the form, your name will be recorded along with many others on a disc mounted on the impactor spacecraft."

Thanks to Zak for the link.

Incredible artwork... an excellent use of flash, too. I really think you'll enjoy spending some free time playing with this site. He has some sweet wallpapers, and you just have to check out the grafitti-art section.

(in case you get lost, there's a dropdown control... red arrow, top-center, that will take you back to the main page and control the volume)

danyboy is a member of TeamcHmAn

(via)

"I swear they're out there, I swear" - Sheryl Crow

(The Electric Warrior) - The online search for extraterrestrial intelligence began five years ago on August 4, 1998, when computer scientists from the University of California at Berkeley announced an innovative software program that used the idle time of a personal computer to crunch data in search of ET. The distributed data processing model now known as grid computing resulted in more than 1.5 million hours of aggregate CPU time, and produced a list of repeatable candidate radio signals that has been rendered onto a skymap...

Please note that you'll have to select the article from the menu on the top right. I can't link it directly because of how Kurt Jonach has his blog set up.

The KPFK, Radio Alchymy interview is now available as a MP3 download or stream. Thanks to New World Revolution for grabbing and sharing this resource.

Craigslist: The Movie follows the stories of various people who posted ads for jobs, poodles, husbands, a '70s-style backup band and more, all on the same day: Aug. 4, 2003.

Directed by San Francisco-based actor and filmmaker Michael Ferris Gibson, the 90-minute movie aims to capture the zeitgeist of the popular site, which has been serving the Internet community as a digital commons since 1995.

Gibson and producer Simon Johnson, his partner at Zealot Pictures, are shooting the movie with nine crews using digital cameras and plan to submit the production for competition at the Sundance Film Festival next year.

As early as 1997, long before multiplayer online games generated a massive following, one gaming firm executive predicted to the Monitor that MMORPGs would become more of an excuse to hang out online: "In the end it's about the social interaction," he said. "That's what's going to sell massively multiplayer games."

In recent years, dozens of studies have kicked up a flurry of media coverage about the effects video games might have on those who play them.

Gary for Governor!

Schwarzenegger announces bid for governor

L. Stuart Vance is planning to run for governor. He wants you to run, too.

A shy 18-year-old who never won a high school election. A racy Hollywood billboard vixen. And a former homeless man who now lives at a rest stop.

Don't forget Larry Flynt and the TSOL lead singer

F-'em all. I'm still casting my vote for the THONG PARTY!

A complete list of all individuals who have obtained candidate papers from their local county elections office, as well as other useful candidate information can be found at the California Secretary of State - Elections & Voter Information web site.

Brion Gysin (1916?1986) was a multifaceted artist whose fertile mind and wide range of original ideas were a source of inspiration for artists of the Beat Generation in Paris, as well as to innovative artists and performers such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Keith Haring, and Laurie Anderson in the next generation.

Painter, writer, sound poet, tape composer, lyricist, and performance artist, Gysin is remembered particularly for his evocative paintings of the North African desert in the 1950s and his original calligraphic abstractions based on Japanese and Arabic scripts. The chance discovery by Gysin of the cut-up technique (later developed and refined by William S. Burroughs) and the concept of permutated poems gave rise to new and original forms of sound art wordplay, striking not only in print but also in recordings or live performance. Gysin's inventive ideas also extended to the Dreamachine and to collages of text and photographs. | Via BB

The Church of Scientology, has obtained an injunction against the showing of the independent film The Profit. (Internet Movie Database entry here.) Scientology is currently facing a lawsuit for the abuse and wrongful death of one of its members, Lisa McPherson, who died while being held against her will at the cult's headquarters in Clearwater, Florida. The supposed purpose of the injunction is to prevent influencing the jury pool in that upcoming trial.

However, Senior Circuit Judge Robert E. Beach did not stop there. He crossed out the proposed language limiting the scope of the injunction to the geographical jurisdiction of his court. The injunction he issued in April 2002 applied worldwide, and continues to this day! It has completely prevented release of the film. This type of denial of First Amendment rights is unprecedented in the history of US cinema. | Via Orlin Grabbe

Professional gaming has grown steadily over the last seven years and now is pursuing mainstream acceptance and financial success.
The video-game industry has outpaced Hollywood (PDF) in terms of revenues over the last few years, yet gaming has remained part of the pop culture gutter. However, big money and media exposure is helping change that. Top tournaments now offer as much as $200,000 in purses and draw thousands of international players.

Twenty-year-old Jacqueline Milla grew up believing that her father was a priest. Now she knows it's true. Modern DNA testing, some recent changes in the Catholic church, and a court order made the testing of seven priests possible, to finally conclude which of them had fathered Milla.

Joseph Matheny will be on KPFK radio tonight/this morning on Radio Alchymy.

Listen to KPFK, early Thursday morning, (2 A.M. PST) live on-line at http://www.kpfk.org/listen.shtml or listen to the archived show of Radio Alchymy at http://www.radioalchymy.com/listen/listen.html.
An archive of this show is now available on our MP3 page.

They're calling it Munchausen by Internet Syndrome. Some people are manufacturing on-line personæ that are complete with realistic pathos, tragedy, disease, and trauma, and then they go on to suck up the virtual sympathy of other folks on-line.

Just as self-serving, but a little less creepy - how about inventing an on-line persona who dashes about the internet defending you and giving good reviews to your book? | Yes, yes. Culled from the previous article, but worth pointing out.

If you've ever wanted to make a name for yourself, you're bound to take some inspiration from the stories of people who took things one step further and manufactured entire selves.

Fictional characters have been known to walk the earth, either when allegedly real folks like you and me have taken on assumed identities, or when whole people have been invented for one use or another. Of course, there's a long tradition of using pseudonyms or noms de plume, so it will take something exceptional to be worth a mention here.

"Hal Robins was the key voice of our scientist character in Half-Life, and plays the role of Dr. Kleiner in Half-Life 2. He is also of course a brilliant illustrator and Subgenius of note.
--
I am an Ordained Minister of The Church of the SubGenius. Retired now, I was Rev. ByTheShortOnesTheyGotYou. And lest you think it's all a Joke, read THIS.

"Oh my God, they're doing that thing in our store," says a cashier, "that swarming thing."

With the New York Times article today, and now the Christian Science Monitor and CNN.com, the Flashmob phenomenon -- can we call it a "movement" yet? -- has reached the attention of mainstream media outlets.

Laser weapons? This may not be as exotic as fans of Han Solo once thought, thanks to recent leaps forward in the development of a powerful free-electron laser, or FEL. Free electron lasers have been shown to generate very large amounts of power, tunable from the microwave to the visible spectrum.

The Office of Naval Research is part of a team that is developing an electrically driven, tunable laser that could transmit infrared light for use in ship-defense systems.

Guy goes on Jerry Springer. Guy dumps his girlfriend of seven years on Springer. Guy talks with girlfriend about their seven year old child. Guy is 29, girl is twenty-two, which makes him 22, and her 13, at conception. Jailtime ensues.

A federal judge sentenced a 20-year-old man on Monday to a year in prison for creating an anarchist Web site with links to sites on how to build bombs.

U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson sentenced Sherman Martin Austin of Los Angeles to more than the prosecutor had recommended under a plea bargain, indicating he believed the deal was too lenient.

Van Gogh is an unwitting extra in some of the earliest film stock ever shot in the Netherlands, according to a group of Dutch film-makers who have constructed a documentary around the short clip.
However, the claim has been contradicted by a Dutch news service, which said the man who had discovered the footage had admitted it was a hoax.

Also see: Van Gogh film footage a fake

Ethical? Legal? Unusual? "Perverted Justice" cons unsuspecting pedophiles and wannabe pedos into chats with supposedly underage girls, tries to get their phone number, address, and a picture, and then publishes it all on their website.

SANTA FE, N.M. - Municipal Court might be the last place you would expect to find offenders meditating and learning to balance their chi.

But this, after all, is Santa Fe.

And it's where Judge Frances Gallegos has placed offenders in her new alternative sentencing program — a tai chi class complete with a Japanese-style tea service and meditation aided by acupuncture.

Offenders have a choice — they can either sign up for the tai chi class or participate in a community service program that involves picking up trash.

Via the contact form: "Thanks for posting my information on how to stop alien abductions, stopabductions.com. See my new website, aliensandchildren.org for more information about alien abductions and the thought screen helmet."

This website features a series of drawings made by children who were abducted by aliens for the alien purpose of creating a new race of alien/human hybrids. The drawings show different aspects of the alien abduction phenomenon and include cruel medical procedures performed on children, children boarding alien spacecraft with other aliens, children playing with alien/hybrid children so the alien/hybrids can learn how to be human, and children being taken by aliens against their will, and the types of aliens encountered by the abducted children.

The pictures were drawn by children who successfully resisted the aliens by using a "thought screen helmet" which blocks the telepathic control aliens have over humans. The helmet is a leather hat lined with eight sheets of Velostat, an electrically conductive plastic used to prevent static electricity damage to electronic components. The girl in this photo has two other cloth hats lined with Velostat which she wears to school.

Richard Hoagland will be guest on tonight's COAST TO COAST to discuss this highly unusual image of "The Fortune Cookies Of Mars".

Hear tell also of a manuscript of the same name, penned but never published, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

A device that produces electricity from blood could be used to turn people into "human batteries". Researchers in Japan are developing a method of drawing power from blood glucose, mimicking the way the body generates energy from food.

Theoretically, it could allow a person to pump out 100 watts - enough to illuminate a light bulb. But that would entail converting all the food eaten by the individual into electricity. In practice, less power would be generated since food is needed by the body.

However the scientists say the "bio-nano" generator could be used to run devices embedded in the body, or sugar-fed robots.

Do-It-Yourself page for artificial intelligence (DIY AI) that invites programmers for any given "XYZ" language to commence coding "Mind.XYZ" simply by coding the Main Program Loop (Alife) with stubbed-in
calls to six mind-module subroutines as found on AI4U p. 208: Security; Sensorium; Emotion; Think; Volition; Motorium

Also see: Overview and Brain-Mind Diagram for Artificial Intelligence Programming in Perl

THE MAGNETIC CLOCK described in Athanasius Kircher's magnetic encyclopedia, the Magnes, published in 1641, linked the magical world of Baroque experimentation with the cosmological debates surrounding the Galileo trial of 1633.

A version of the device was constructed by an English Jesuit professor in Liège, Fr. Francis Line, and was described in the book De symbolis heroicis, published in 1634. The device consisted of a small solid orb, marked with the twelve hours and balanced by a secret balancing of its mass at the centre of a glass sphere filled with water. The orb was perceived to rotate by an arcane force, following the motions of the heavens from West to East. The time of day was indicated on the orb by a small fish, poised in the water.

The Turing Test is a very ambitious Grand Challenge. The "Feigenbaum Test" is more manageable: focus on natural science, engineering, or medicine with conversation in the jargonized and stylized language of these disciplines. There are two other grand challenges in achieving Computational Intelligence: Build a large knowledge base by reading text, reducing knowledge engineering effort by one order of magnitude; and the "Grand Vision": distill from the WWW a huge knowledge base, using ontologies and building a system of "semantics scrapers" that will access the semantic markups, integrate them appropriately into the growing knowledge base, and set up the material for the scrutiny of an editorial process.

Few things exemplify the chaos of Liberia more than the sight of doped-up, AK-47-wielding 15-year-olds roaming the streets decked out in fright wigs and tattered wedding gowns. Indeed, some of the more fully accessorized soldiers in Charles Taylor's militia even tote dainty purses and don feather boas. Why did this practice begin and what is the logic behind it?

Hacker legend, author, editor, poet and reader Judith Milhon (AKA St. Jude) died on July 19, 2003. After outrunning cancer through several rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, recurring metastases led her to
decline additional treatment with her characteristic black humor.

Considered by many to be the first woman hacker of the personal computing era, Jude was an early programmer, co-founder of Community Memory, senior editor of Mondo 2000, writer of several essential books on the cyberpunk movement and a co-founder of the Cypherpunks encryption cabal. As St Jude,
she is a central figure in Steven Levy’s seminal book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, about the enthusiasts who made personal computing a reality.

The alarm bells started ringing a few years ago. I was showing a friend around my campus when we encountered a group of undergraduates absorbed in watching Teletubbies in the bar.

There was a time when nostalgia was the prerogative of elderly grandparents, evoking memories of the Second World War or the 1950s. Today, nostalgia is promoted as a cool pursuit for people barely out of their teens. The 'good old days' are increasingly associated with the 1980s - if not the 90s. The success of the BBC TV series I Love the 1970s/1980s/1990s (culminating with I Love 1999, shown in summer 2001) indicates that young people have become nostalgic at a historically unprecedented early age.

Astronomers debate Hubble's future

Mars hotspots may be best hunting ground for life

Mars moving closer to Earth than ever

Geologist: Hunt for Mars life should chill

Deeply embedded stellar clusters found in Milky Way

Search for life could include planets, stars unlike ours

If you're feeling paranoid about the RIAA coming down on you for doing the digital equivalent of loaning out your albums to your friends so they could tape them (which millions of people did before the internet age, and did not get sued for doing it) you can feed your username or IP address into the Electronic Freedom Foundation's search database, which updates regularly from a publically-available subpoena database called PACER. Also check out How Not To Get Sued By The RIAA. Apparently the sharks are leaning heavily upon users who have "Supernodes" on the FastTrack P2P System. (Thanks to Henry Fnord, for passing this on.)

An extreme sports fanatic today became the first man to cross the English Channel in an unpowered flight.
Felix Baumgartner jumped from a plane about 30,000ft above Dover shortly after 5am and glided 22 miles across the Channel in a 10-minute flight wearing a specially-adapted suit with a wing-like carbon fibre fin attached to his back.

"The Book (sTaRe posse member, FSCK) has been nominated for 'Best Undefinable Project' and 'Best Blog' by the participants of this year's Blogathon." -Congrats!

"In the most of the world, psychopaths have gotten a bad rap. That, of course, is quite understandable since almost all of the world's religious and social philosophies have little use for the individual except as a tool to be placed in service to their notion of something else: 'God,' or the 'collective,' or the 'higher good' or some other equally undefinable term. Only rarely, such as in Zen; in Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism; in some aspects of Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism; and in some schools of Existentialism, is the individual considered primal. Here, finally, is a book which celebrates, encourages and educates the best part of ourselves --- The Psychopath."

COMING SOON: SECOND REVISED & EXPANDED EDITION & THE PSYCHOPATH'S CD

Don't be surprised if you see some scribblings in this new edition from a few of the individuals that hang around these parts. ;)

The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars and criminals? Is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there's hardly a soul on these shores who doesn't know it. The reign of George II practically revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and ExxonMobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen buying even "watchdog" liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb's connivance in Florida. All of the details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, television newscasts and books, yet it's perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn't a secret. The real secret is that it wasn't a secret, and certainly wasn't a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of a public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines of "scandal," when in fact it's all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it. The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our "entertainment" and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it! | Via Weblogsky

According to the India Tribune, a new Bollywood horror film, Cheeeeekhein, is being launched in a big way, with some novel promotional ideas:

• Cheeeeekhein candies — "Just one bite will give you a fright".


• The Khooni Gudiya, a doll which squirts blood from its mouth when you press its belly button.


• "The Loudest Scream" contest held in different cities, tests your lungpower — scream loudly enough and become the proud owner of a life-size skeleton.


• A music album, which has no songs but a compilation of eerie tunes and screams, a creaking door, a shrieking bell, a mewing cat is also available as -- you got -- downloadable ringtones.

Online vandals are using a program to compromise Windows servers and remotely control them through Internet relay chat (IRC) networks, system administrators said Saturday.

Several programs, including one that exploits a recent vulnerability in computers running Windows, have been cobbled together to create a remote attack tool. The tool takes commands from an attacker through the IRC networks and can scan for and compromise computers vulnerable to the recently discovered flaw in Windows.

As the war over P2P downloading heats up, and the record companies launch the novel marketing technique of suing their customers, I think it is an appropriate time to settle some of the pervasive myths about U.S. copyright law which fuel both sides of the debate.