Depressing or amusing?

Decide yourself:

The Dunce
Why Bush Left Texas
Burning Bushes

The Firefox Five Day Challenge

Not a new idea, but one well worth spreading: the 5 day challenge that was started by someone on Spread Firefox.

If you are an Internet Explorer user and haven't tried Firefox yet, go and get Firefox from the link below, and try if for 5 days, then decide if you'd like to go on using it or go back to IE. (So far, everybody I have presented with that challenge in real life has made the decision to stay with Firefox much sooner.) If you think it's too much of a bother because you have lots of favourites and passwords saved, don't worry, Firefox will easily allow you to import those during the installation process. And if in the end you decide after all that you don't like it - which I hope you won't - all you need to do is to unistall Firefox again; having imported things from IE into it won't in any way affect IE, it will work (such as it does), just as before.

So, here's the challenge: Get Firefox, try it for 5 days, then decide.


Take back the web



If you wonder why you should give it a try, please read the website.

If you encounter problems, or have questions, just leave a comment here and I'll answer as soon as I can.

The occassional silver lining . . .

Not that I believe this is going to be allowed to stand like this, given the current US political climate, but it is VERY good to see that occassionally, there still is a person courageous enough to speak out and insist correct legal procedures.

Irate Judge orders Gov't to Hand Over Detainee Records

In a victory for human and civil rights groups, a federal judge has given the government 30 days to turn over or identify all documents relating to the treatment of detainees held by the United States at military bases and other detention facilities overseas, including at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The ruling by Judge Alvin Hellerstein, which may be appealed by the government, was the latest development in a lawsuit filed in June by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and several other rights groups to compel the government to disclose records bearing on the possible abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody pursuant to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests first submitted 11 months ago.

Declaring that "no one is above the law," Hellerstein said, "merely raising national security concerns cannot justify unlimited delays" in complying with the requests. The government had requested that the judge delay the release of all documents until 2005.

"Ours is a government of laws, laws duly promulgated and laws duly observed," he said in the order issued by his office in New York City Wednesday. "No one is above the law: not the executive, not the Congress, not the judiciary."

"If the documents are more of an embarrassment than a secret, the public should know of our government's treatment of individuals captured and held abroad," he noted, criticizing the "glacial pace" with which the George W. Bush administration had responded to the groups' requests.

The original FOIA request, which was directed to the Pentagon and the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State, asked them to immediately process and release all records of the abuse or torture of detainees held at Abu Ghraib and other overseas detention facilities, including the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and records of investigations and inquiries that resulted from reports of abuse.

The initial FOIA request also asked for records of the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody and any records of investigations into those deaths. According to recent news reports, several dozen detainees have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq since late 2001; at least 16 of them have been classified as homicides.

The FOIA also requested all records regarding policies governing the interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody and the "rendition" of detainees to other countries known to use torture.

Ironically, the original request was filed at around the same time that abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were being photographed by soldiers participating in the abuse. The disclosure of those photographs and their reproduction in the world's media in April set off a major scandal which the administration is still trying to overcome.

When the initial request was filed, however, relatively little was known about the treatment of detainees. At the time, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had privately conveyed its concerns – provoked by visits to detention facilities – to the administration about conditions in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Some articles about alleged abuses, based largely on interviews with released detainees, had appeared in the U.S. press, while human rights groups, notably Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW), also said that they had received reports of abuses.

Several months after the initial request, the groups, which also included the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace, asked for additional records that described measures taken by the government to address concerns expressed by the ICRC.

Until April, the government agencies rejected repeated appeals by the groups to expedite processing of the requests, arguing that "the life or safety of any individual" would not be jeopardized by delay and that the requests did not raise "questions about the government's integrity which affect public confidence." After the April disclosures, however, those arguments were severely weakened, according to the groups' attorneys.

In June, they filed an unprecedented lawsuit aimed at compelling the government to disclose records under the FOIA. The lawsuit followed both the disclosure of the photographs depicting the sexual and physical abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, which in turn spurred several Congressional hearings, as well as outraged editorials in the U.S. and global press.

A series of internal Pentagon investigations – as well as several courts martial to date – ensued, indicating that the abuse was much more widespread than initially maintained by the administration. A series of press leaks also disclosed that high-level political appointees in the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the White House and the vice president's office had prepared memos that appeared intended to justify abuses and torture of detainees under certain circumstances.

As a result, a number of organizations, including the American Bar Association (ABA), as well as rights groups such as HRW and Human Rights First, have called for a comprehensive, independent and bipartisan investigation of detention and interrogation policies and practices on the order of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. These appeals have been ignored by the administration, which has insisted that such an effort is unnecessary in view of the steps already taken by the Pentagon to remedy the situation.

Last week, eight senior retired military officers – most of whom held top legal positions in the armed services – joined the call for an independent investigation, insisting that the Pentagon's own inquiries and courts-martial were too limited in scope and could not address the issue of high-level responsibility for abuses.

The FOIA lawsuit, however, may provide yet another avenue for obtaining information about detention policies and practices.

"The court today vindicated the public's right to know who is responsible for the systemic abuse of detainees held in United States custody," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU attorney working on the case. "The truth must be known, no matter how embarrassing it might be to the government."

IE out(fire)foxed

Well, maybe not really yet, but early adopters among the tech savvy seem impressive and the Firefox downloads at Spread Firefox topped 300.000 on day one after the 1.0PR release.

Naturally Firefox is still a long way from gaining a major share of the browser market, but given IE's inbuilt advantages of distribution, even the relatively small margins Firefox gained are impressive - and important, for those of us who want the IE monoply GONE - and hasn't gone unnoticed elsewhere, even in mainly non-technical publications like, for example, Businessweek here, talking about A Firefox in IE's Henhouse.

On a slightly more personal aspect of the Firefox developement and such, the New Zealand Herald has done an interview with lead engineer - and Kiwi boy - Ben Goodger: Kiwi leads effort to build a better browser

And that's all for the moment from the Firefox front. ;)

Satellite Pics Going Dark?

More moves towards total information control: Satellite Pics Going Dark?

Dr Goebbels would have approved . . .

Harry Browne comparing speeches

This is a comment I have been meaning to post here since I forst saw it a few days back. It's probably still a comment that is more read on the web than to be found in mainstream media, but it's good to see that finally some people are catching on to what is happening.

Which anyone familiar with German history could have predicted long since. Unfortunately though, history, and even more so history of foreign countries, seems not to be among the common knowldge in the USA 2004.

IE critical error in jpg processing

Or in other words: now it's not even save anymore to just look at some very common image file in Internet Explorer anymore.

Details can be found here: Buffer Overrun in JPEG Processing (GDI+) Could Allow Code Execution (833987)

Translated into normal English, this means that because microsoft can't get there screwed up code to handle jpg processing correctly, some hacker could use that to run an executable file - as in: a possibly malicious program - on the picture viewer's computer.

GREAT coding once again at Redmond! Blah!

Though then again, just one more reason to dump IE and Get Firefox!

Three out of three: Firefox 1.0PR is out!

As the title says, it's three out of three for the Mozilla Foundation today: after the releases of Seamonkey and Thunderbird that I posted about earlier, Firefox is out now, too, in the 1.0PR version.

To download, the best bet just now might be at http://mozilla.org/mirrors.html just now, since the main sites probably are or soon will be hopelessly overloaded . . .

Still, congrats to the MF folks to the full version!

Thunderbird 0.8

A new release of Thunderbird, the Mozilla Foundations stand alone email client, has also taken place just now. With Firefox 1.0PR planned for tomorrow, that should make for nice triple news.

To download the new Thunderbird version, go here, .

Seamonkey (Mozilla Suite) 1.7.3 released

Fresh from the horse's mouth, ie the guys on irc.mozilla.org, the news that the latest version of Seamonkey, the Mozilla suite - browser, email, chat etc - has been released: http://mozillanews.org/?article_date=2004-09-14+01-49-37 has been released.

To download, click one of the links above.

Additionally, it seems the release of Firefox 1.0PR is planned for tomorrow.

Search profiles

Does anyone know how to do this? I can't seem to find any link to search for common interests on the blogger page. Stupid really that there isn't a very obvious one.

Reminder to myself: use a url like this

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=i&q=History

and replace "History" with interest to search for . . .

That'll work it seems, but it's a dratted clumsy way to do it!

"My name is Detective Bell"- Mangling the English Language

The above quote is a line out of "The Vanished Man," a Lincoln Rhyme mystery by Jeffrey Deaver. Leaving alone numerous issues about internal consistency of a story as well as the laws of averages, that rather contradict the likelyhood of any number of events in the story happening as they do, never even mind the WAY too obvious plot, what really annoys me is the sloppy use of language - and the lack of correction by his, obviously asleep at his or her desk, editor - by a New York Times top ten fiction list author.

In case of the example above, either "I am Detective Bell" or "My name is Roland Bell" would have worked; however, "My name is Detective Bell" does not, as detective is not a name but a title. That probably will be called minor stuff by most people, especially since it seems that now in the USA phonetic spelling and non standard abbreviations - 'cuz instead of because, for example - and on chat and the internet all grammar and spelling rules have been abandoned by a large number of users, but I personally would expect adherence to common standards from a published author, his editor, and for that matter reviewers who don't seem to pick up on such errors anymore.

Deaver isn't the only offender, and it will probably not be the last time I'll be complaining about something like that, but to me "language as a living entity" simply isn't any excuse for sloppiness.

Grrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!

Bare bones browser

is a description that a lot of reviewers seem to use when talking about Firefox, and one that gets to me everytime, because it gives such a misleading impression, especially when the ladies and gentlemen in question also fail to talk about extensions (and themes).

Or in other words, yes, Firefox "out of the box" - or more likely, freshly downloaded - is indeed very bare bones (which incidentally makes it a pleasantly fast ), but with some 150+ extensions and serveral dozen themes, it's both in functionality and appearance the most configurable browser around.

Now it just needs more media people to get and spread that message!