Good news, bad news

The unlovely Iranian government provides good news and bad.

The good news is that it appears that they are providing rather less IEDs and other munitions to the anti-US forces in Iraq. The bad news is that the country is still lawless, judicial murders are so frequent that they only attract attention when a particularly eggregious sentence is commuted.

The worse news is that the lawlessness in Iran is not atypical of the region with rape victims in Saudi Arabia and Dubai receiving sentences from the barbaric administrations.

All of which makes the fiasco in Iraq a worse problem, not less. Iran is with all its faults amongst the more liberal, democratic regimes in the region. The best outcome that can be expected from the US invasion is that Iraq will end up not quite so bad as Iran. Arguably this is an improvement in that Iraq is no longer capable of invading other countries in the region, but this has been true since the end of the first US-Iraq gulf war and in any case the chief beneficiary is Iran.

MAKE: Blog: Tesla coil super mario duet

The coils are making the sound.

Real Internet Crime

For while I have been complaining that what is commonly referred to as 'Internet crime' isn't. Its just plain old burgalry or fraud or shoplifting with an Internet twist.

The BBC reports what might be a real honest-to-goodness (OK dishonest-to-badness) Internet Crime, theft of hotel furniture from an online hotel.

Its being treated as a crime because the goods were paid for with real money.

More Whitehouse Email

A federal judge has just ordered the Whitehouse not to erase any backup tapes that might contail email messages.

Quite how this could become a problem by accident is a mystery to me. I know from personal experience that an archive system was in place at the start of the Clinton Presidency. Every email was to be archived, no exceptions.

The system did in fact break down once during the Clinton administration, backup tapes that should have backed up some of the Vice President's email were somehow corrupted during the transition from All-In-One. But the fact that it broke down under Clinton only makes the alleged breakdown under Bush even more inexplicable. The Federal government is far from perfect but when something breaks they know how to put procedures in place to make absolutely sure it never happens again. For the system to have broken down a second time there must have been some sort of forcing function.

Sub Prime Explained

H/T: Michael Froomkin

From the deprtment of 'you don't say'

BBC News

How to save net bandwidth

While at the W3C TPAC today, someone who does not wish to be identified suggested a surefire means of saving vast quantities of network bandwidth: Every new disk drive is filled with porn before it ships.

Using IRC at meetings

Instructions for getting onto the IRC channel for the meeting are in the agenda.

To find the agenda, follow the link just sent out on IRC

Writers strike

Let us for the sake of argument stupulate that the studios are telling the truth when they claim that they make next to no money from Internet content.

Let us further stipulate that the studios are correct in their assertion that the amount that the writers stand to gain is trivial compared to the amount that they stand to gain.

I don't know what the writers earn but I am willing to bet that it is a whole lot less than the amount made by the studios from the shows that have gone off the air this week. So if it is 'stupid' for the writers to go out on strike over a trivial amount of money as Eisner claims, what does that say of the studios?

One possibility is that the strike is really about setting a precedent for future division of royalties but it seems much more likely to me that the money at stake here is very real.

The screenwriters are in a much stronger position than most strikers. Some writers are going to be missing a paycheck at the end of the week but most writers don't see a regular paycheck anyway, apart from their residuals checks that are going to come in anyway. And even though its officially 'pencils down', that only really means that the writers are not going to be delivering material to the studios. The writers can still work on non-script projects such as books, catching up on reading, administrative work, networking and such.

None of this really seems to make it through to reports of the strike in the establishment media.

The IRS Phish amount just went up

So now I learn by email that my IRS refund is $343.56, thats more than double since last week's $147.59. Both are of course completely fake, the IRS does not notify people about refunds by email.

There is a strange synchronization problem for the attackers. If they all use different refund amounts they create suspicion and their response rate goes down. But some attackers are still using $147.59 which was last years scam amount while others seem to think a change will be more effective.