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DaveNet: Patents and the W3C. I got a note from Adam Bosworth at BEA. They voted against the new patent policy. Bravo. Wes: "Patents and standards don't mix." Slashdot thread on patents and the W3C. Ted Kuster's report on the Seybold panel on Wed. Brent Simmons: Tips for Frontier and Radio Developers. Mark Pilgrim has glue that connects Python to Manila. This is a big deal. My Jamaican uncle poses in front of a picture of my Russian great-grandfather. Yeah they're related. Can you tell? Weblogs.Com corner-turn continues OK, today's focus, Murphy-willing, is getting ready for the Weblogs.Com corner-turn. I gave a few people advanced tips on how the XML-RPC handler works and there's already been some development and discussion on various weblogs. XML-RPC: Weblogs.Com Interface. New spec. John Robb explains, from a users' point of view, the potential of this new approach. Bill Humphries has done PHP and AppleScript clients. I released a client for Frontier and Radio last week. Dries Buytaert wants to do a distributed updates crawler, and I support this. Ultimately that's how it's going to scale to cover hundreds of thousands of weblogs. I started a mail list for announcements and technical discussion and a companion Manila site for docs and philosophy. Mike Krus is working on NewsIsFree and Drupal.
NY Times: "Falling victim to the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the At Home Corporation, a once-mighty Internet portal, said that it planned to file for bankruptcy protection." If you're taking Computer Science 417 at Rutgers you have to answer questions about XML-RPC. Let's see if I get it right. a. Explicit. b. Encoding and decoding XML. c. No lock-in. The Poynter Institute posted an internal NY Times publication (in PDF) with some interesting stories first hand from Times staffers of the WTC attack. Dan Gillmor: "We need to recognize what Farber and the webloggers implicitly grasp -- that our readers, listeners and viewers collectively know more, vastly more, than we do." Tamara Shelton: "Suddenly, I wasn’t trapped alone in my little house watching this one-way box." John Robb: "Talk about a bad time to file an IPO." Since Exodus is bankrupt, we're again looking for a new place for our servers. I've started a mail page with current co-lo advice from experts. Ed: "I put the 'Ed' in Ed's Garage." In these uncertain times when no one knows which end is up, simple little statements make me feel good. I imagine there's someone out there who will object to Ed making that claim, but I want him and everyone else to know that back him one hundred percent! Zero tolerance for racism, part II A conversation with a friend. He heard that Muslims in New York had been warned to stay away from Manhattan on the 11th. I groaned. I said shame on you. Not only should you not be passing on that kind of BS, you should be dousing it. People with minds have to use them, if only to balance the numerous people who don't. Radio 7.1 leakage OK, I'm going to start leaking about Radio 7.1 now. First, it'll be priced competitively with Groove. But unlike Groove which is a closed box, Radio 7.1 will be totally open. Easy to replace. Its purpose is to manage static sites from your desktop. The cursor moves out of the cloud and onto your desktop. We've been building new light cloud-level services, using XML-RPC and SOAP of course, minimal stuff, easy to replace, and we'll specify all the interfaces. We'd love to see clones develop on both sides. This is what open means to me. One more bit of leakage -- there will be a Mac OS X version as well as a classic Mac version. Our roots are showing. Heh. A cloudy morning Have you noticed that my first posts in the morning tend to be a little dark and crufty? I have a theory about this. I have to spiritually clear the deck to get started working in the morning. Irritations. There's so much good news in the world. Yah. Time for more coffee! Apple Computer describes "how to use Apple Script and the Apple Event Manager in Mac OS X to make remote procedure calls using the XML-RPC and SOAP protocols." In their docs they refer to UserLand as a "third party" without naming us. Fascinating. Just shows that the term means nothing, because in this context, if anyone is, Apple is the third party. Words. I noticed the other day that I keep saying how much I like two-party systems. Amen to that. Glad to have Apple on board, glad Microsoft and IBM are on board too. It'll help keep things balanced. This morning I got an email from a reporter at a BigTechPub asking if I worked at Microsoft when we did the design for XML-RPC. It's not true, I worked then as now at UserLand. There is a published report somewhere that Don Box and I were MS employees. Is that a job offer? LOL. They would never hire me, because if they did, I would insist on my title being CPP, which stands for Chief Poison Pill. Disclosure: I Hate Big Companies. How do you know you work at a BigCo? Your company doesn't have a culture of reciprocal linking on its sites. What is reciprocal linking? It's a hat-tip, a hand-hold. Thanks for the pointer. Back at ya. It's a basic good business concept, applied to the Web. Have you noticed how the tech development mail lists are coming back to life after the biggest outage of all time. It wasn't of course a technical outage. The wires still worked, as did the servers and the workstations. It's the minds that were out, looping infinitely over a major security issue. The first posts on the lists are mostly saying "Hi I'm still here." The irritating people re-introduce themselves by saying irritating things. The worker-bees say hello by re-starting their projects. There was only one protocol hijack attempt during the processing period. It failed miserably. I guess people weren't being childish while their adult-selves were busy trying to figure out if anything made sense anymore. It's good to see everyone back at work, it's disheartening to see that much of the baggage survived the outage. Hey we'll probably get another chance. Maybe, in some ways, terror is good for us?
Good morning sports fans. And thank you to the world's terrorists for not blowing up anything overnight. Charles Deemer: An Open Letter to the Peace Movement. "I believe there is no middle ground here: You either fight or you don't fight, and doing nothing amounts to surrender." Sneak preview of a fun new feature coming soon for Manila. Henry Norr reviews Mac OS 10.1. Economist: Is globalisation doomed? News.Com: "Record labels have long sought technology to curb the practice of ripping, and they are on the verge of success with some new copy-protected releases." Dan Gillmor: Journalism 3.0. Doc Searls: Amateur Rules. Scoble: The Bay Area Weblogger User Group. Adobe is doing something new with XML, but it's hard to figure out what it is from the press release. Two years ago today I asked: "What if SOAP or XML-RPC connected Linux and Mac? You'd get PhotoShop connected to Zope. Dreamweaver and PHP. Quark and MySql. AppleScript and Apache. Don't forget Director, Illustrator, BBEdit and WebSTAR. Think different." Now that Apple has adopted XML-RPC and SOAP, maybe Adobe should just get with the program. Here's a sign of Silicon Valley getting back to its roots. Centralized productivity tools is a good first step for Yahoo. Then let's work to upgrade the user experience of writing for the public Web. Microsoft must protect Office, so this is a good zig to their zag. It's a sign of things straightening out. Two-party system. Good. Note to Yahoo, make sure it's easy for users to get a copy of all their data on their desktop computer. ToDo is a browser-based outliner. A time capsule Due to a DNS outage of some kind that just cleared I was not able to read Brent's site for a couple of weeks, and now as if by magic, I can. Brent said quite a few things in the last couple of weeks that are worth quoting. Like this. "Gandhi was fighting opression with civil disobedience, with peaceful means. But his enemy was the 20th century British. They could be shamed into being their better selves." And this. "I heard that the passengers on the flight that crashed into the Pennsylvania cornfield voted on whether or not to try to overpower the hijackers. They voted! Americans to the last. Voting, it's like an instinct with us, even when the most horrible thing is going on, we stop to vote. You can't kill democracy, you can only kill people." Check this out. "My kitten lives in what Sheila calls his 'safe happy kitty world.' He knows nothing. He just wants to play with his green yarn and curl up in the sun." Life goes on, for now. Let's do I was interviewed by a BigPub yestereday, at length, about the role that amateur journalism is now playing. I sense a real change in the professonal's view of amateurs. Please don't see us as a threat, see us as allies in getting ideas and information from people to people. The Seybold writeup of the session on Wednesday suggested that amateurs have less integrity than the pros. I think it's provable that this is not true. But let's not go there. That's fear. Let's find ways to get the information flowing to and from places where it doesn't. Let's draw an accurate picture of the world, and expose places where inaccurate pictures are being drawn. That should be our common goal -- amateurs and pros, working together. She asked how the events of 9-11 changed us. I said it was pretty obvious. Go look at the archive for 9-10. I released a piece on open source in 2001 that I had spent a couple of weeks preparing. I even took a couple of extra days to work with Bryan Bell on a beautiful graphic rendering of my hand-drawn graphic. I fully expected that I would rewrite the piece in September 2002. Now things are moving so much more quickly. But again we're getting to work on technology and that's good. We've learned so much in the last couple of weeks as our systems have stretched on both ends, and there's a new can-do attitude in our community. That's what I've been waiting for. So let's do. Corner turn in weblog-land Yesterday I reported on the coming corner-turn in the implementation of Weblogs.Com and the Updates page on UserLand.Com. Today I have the first result to show you. Here's an XML file that's being maintained by rpc.weblogs.com of the participating Manila and Radio sites that updated in the last hour. As people update their software the list will become more inclusive. Today I'm going to rewrite the Updates page so that it displays data coming from this XML file. (Caveat: Do not write apps that depend on this file until it is documented. I can already see changes coming.) This is a multi-step rollout. We will publish a spec that allows any blogging tool or CMS to particpate in this network. I'll probably start a mail list for this soon. There's already a website ready to take the place of www.weblogs.com. One step at a time. We're signaling this corner-turn slowly, we want the transition to work for everyone, and to be able to increase the flow of news to the growing community of weblog-lovers. Don't give an inch to racism Lots of email this morning. Notably one correspondent who requests anonymity says that Jorn Barger is not a racist. I must be missing something. In what other context is it necessary to say that the Deputy Secretary of Defense of the US is Jewish? Yesterday I pointed to a person I respect and wondered if it was necessary to say that he's Jewish. See how the poison spreads. Then I remember how much shame I felt as a child growing up in post-war NY, having school bullies blame me for the death of their uncles and fathers in WWII. I was just a child, so I believed them. Their parents said it was the Jews' fault. I'm Jewish. OK, can't blame the kids either. As an adult I do not give one inch to racism. I never thought I would live this again. My grandfather warned me. I have zero tolerance for racism. I hope you do too. The way I choose to fight this, now, is by finding and promoting positive visions of Jewish culture. Albert Einstein is a good example. You'll see more of those as time goes by.
Postscript: Amitai Schlair suggests that it's also racism to promote positive visions of Jewish-ness. My values are different. I posted a picture of Pakistani women saying no to terrorism and war. That they're women and Pakistani are relevant facts. That Einstein was Jewish is relevant too. He even went on the record about it. You can't be a survivor of racism, as Einstein was, without saying something about it. Maybe another way of saying this is that Jews demand equal protection. We all seem to agree that being anti-Muslim is not smart or in any way supportable. Jews have a long history of being left to fend for themselves. Enough of that. As I said to Amy Wohl the other day (is she Jewish, probably) you can't love us without loving our home. Perhaps that adequately explains why Israel exists, and why our country supports it, but that does not absolve us of the responsibility of being loving and careful of the Palestinians who also have a great culture and a long history of not being respected enough, and are searching for security in their homeland, which is something we all must understand now.
Heads-up to all our users. We're beginning a transition to a new implementation for the UserLand updates page, starting shortly. There will probably be some outages tomorrow, but Murphy-willing we'll fix them quickly. This is the beginning of a big corner-turn for Weblogs.Com, believe it or not. About the change that's coming, the new version of Weblogs.Com will not depend on polling. To participate a site must be able to send an XML-RPC or SOAP 1.1 message to weblogs.com, and that will schedule a poll event for sometime in the next hour. Our server will only read sites that claim to have updated. This change is necessary in order for Weblogs to scale to support the number of sites that it now works with. In other words, as so many people already know, it's already outgrown itself. Another BTW, the new version will not have a user interface. It will only produce static XML files that can then be picked up by search engines, and user interfaces running elsewhere, including Radio 7.1 (coming soon). I've been exchanging email with Daniel Chan, the developer of Daypop, and he plans to support the new feeds. This can make his excellent just-in-time search engine even more responsive. He can read sites that he knows have updated, and re-index them immediately. In our own small way this will be an upgrade for the Web, and a boost for serious bloggers, and an incentive (perhaps) for Google to upgrade their already wonderful service. (I love two-party systems.) I also love that the Web has become so much smaller with all the dotcom distractions flushed out, it's easier to see who's alive and doing interesting stuff. Watch the lights come back on. Still diggin. Totally 1.0. BTW, I am intrigued by my TiVO, and pretty overwhelmed by it too. So much stuff to watch. Who has the time. One thought occurred to me though. I wish it had a built-in 802.11b compatible HTTP server built-in. I'd like to access the TV schedule via my laptop web browser and be able to program the TiVO from anywhere in the house. As if from heaven. "The Tivo Web Project is designed to give you a web interface to your TiVo using Open Source software." Today's song: "So if you're down on your luck, and you can't harmonize, find a girl, with far away eyes." Jabber.Org: "The Jabber-RPC spec has been approved as a Draft protocol." Tom Brady: "While several participants expressed satisfaction about Web sites’ abilities to post stories quickly, especially compared to the Web sites of major newspapers, one audience member warned them not to gloat. 'It’s easy for you to say you can put up stories on the Web faster than The New York Times,' she said, 'but they have issues of integrity, accuracy and legality that you don’t have.'” Hmm. Albert Einstein: "If relativity is proved right the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew." News.Com: Exodus battles to keep customers. This site is hosted at Exodus.
The FBI has pictures of the hijackers of the four planes. Lance Knobel: "Some US commentators are suggesting that any questioning of US actions now places the critic in the enemy's camp. This is absurd." I agree. Lance's point of view is especially valuable because: 1. He's in London. 2. He's an American. 3. He has a mind and uses it. We have so many more great minds on our side, we have to use them if we want to win. And until and unless we develop confidential idea processing systems, we have to use the public airwaves. The only choice is defeat, imho. I could write a piece, I think, entitled How to Win The War On The Internet, but it would be a very simple adaptation of How To Make Money On The Internet, which I wrote in February 2000. Bottom-line, it's worth building out the Internet, now, so it reaches individuals in Central Asia, so information can flow, person-to-person, between Europe, North America, the Far East and Central Asia. We win if we can get the information to flow more smoothly. We're the open alliance, the bad guys depend on privacy, we thrive on open access.
Another idea for Davos. Finally create a virtual Davos that's year-round and does not require plane travel. Facilitate communication between the minds 365 days a year, this way when they come to a meeting, they'll be better prepared to do real work. Davos is unique, in my experience, that it reaches into minds and doesn't numb them, too much. Now it's time to do more. Let the circus begin. Karlin Lillington: "A doctor, a lawyer, a rabbi, a priest, an Irishman, an Englishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The barman says: 'What is this, some kind of joke?'" Dylan Tweney: "In the hours and days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, millions of phone lines went silent, but e-mail and the Web continued to work." I heard a report on NPR that 14 people have been killed in a Swiss government building by a disgruntled citizen. It wasn't the first item on the news. What is going on in the world? Reuters: Gunman storms Swiss local assembly. Scoble: Does your Intranet suck? Three pictures from London of a post-apocalyptic NY.
Andy Edmonds is optimizing the user interface of Mozilla. Last night I worked on a DaveNet piece while I was sleeping. I'm not kidding. I didn't let myself wake up until it was finished. Unfortunately I don't remember what it was about but I think I can figure it out. The mind is really weird.
Good morning. It's going to be a very light day. I'm going to San Francisco to moderate a panel at Seybold, and have a few meetings and schmoozings. Scoble is going to blog the session in real-time. Four years ago today I got an email from Bill Gates about privacy and the Internet. "I am spending a lot of time on this - calling Congressman and Senators. However the FBI and the administration are suggesting that restricting the software industry is key to fighting criminals. Of course they don't say that criminals will still find it very easy to pre-encrypt the information they send." Zimran Ahmed: "I was at a Microsoft presentation today where they spoke about their .NET strategy and XP." News.Com: Sun alliance targets Microsoft's Passport. Infoworld: Sun, others to issue competitor to Microsoft Passport. The Onion is back.
Content-Wire: "OPML is an XML format that allows exchange of outline-structured information."
Reuters: "Sun Microsystems said it would announce a 'digital identity' initiative on Wednesday, a move that appeared to take aim at an old foe -- Microsoft Corp and the software giant's Passport system for Internet commerce." NewsMax: "Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., warned Monday that the US is vulnerable to nuclear attack by terrorists who may have access to as many as 60 briefcase-sized tactical nuclear weapons now missing from the former Soviet Union." David Rieff: "Bin Laden wants to eradicate Western modernity, not liberate Palestine, and the US has no choice but to fight him." Joe Zirilli: "I have an existing application writen in VB6 and we now have a Linux Beowulf Cluster that we would like to use to speed up the application. I would like to strip out some of the application and port it to the Linux environment and then call it from the VB application using XML-RPC. What will I need to do this and how is it done?" Sam Cohen: "My offhand guess is that the majority of Americans couldn't care less how we 'do in' the Taliban and bin Laden and company" Amy Wohl on being an American. "I'm frightened -- for all of us -- but I am sure that we have to simply go about our business and let our government go about its business." CNBC: Market ends slightly up.
Edd Dumbill: "All releases up to and including version 1.0 of XML-RPC for PHP have a serious security vulnerability, allowing hostile remote clients or servers to execute arbitrary code on your machine." NY Times: US Says No Plan to Topple Taliban. Today Apple did a better job of announcing support for XML-RPC and SOAP in the latest version of Mac OS X. They still didn't get it quite right, XML-RPC is not part of the W3C, and the SOAP support they implemented is SOAP 1.1, which also didn't come from the W3C. It's kind of like saying the Mac user interface came from Microsoft. Oh well, it's still grrreat that they're moving forward here. "thinkusaalignright"Paul Boutin: "Installing the Code Red patch isn't enough. Netcraft's latest crawl found nearly half of all IIS servers still have a WebDAV configuration known to be vulnerable. Cross-site scripting is still unsecured on one in five machines, with many other long-known security holes still turning up on one in every five to ten sites pinged by Netcraft. And it looks like admins who install the Code Red patch often fail to remove the root.exe program the worm adds to the machine. What Code Red didn't do with it, a future worm will." Joel: "Gartner seems to suffer the common but moronic falacy that new or 'completely rewritten' code is somehow less buggy than old code." Robb Beale has discovered a new source of Great Energy on Mac OS 10.1. NY Times: NY Crime Has Plunged Since Attacks. Zeldman: "When I hold my woman we seem to fall under a spell, as if it is up to us to begin repopulating the earth." Michigan State University session on reporting of the 9-11 disaster. "Area journalists and faculty members of the Victims and the Media Program respond to questions and comments from students and members of the MSU community about news coverage of the events on Sept. 11." WSJ: "Online-advertising spending has plummeted since Sept. 11, raising new doubts about the business models of Web companies like Yahoo Inc. that depend heavily on such spending." Register: "Redmond is telling its sales channel that a rewrite of IIS is underway for version 6.0." Screen shot of today's NY Times home page. The same page, two weeks ago, on the day of the tragedy. Here's a question for tomorrow. Does the Times archive their home page? GIFs are nice, but HTML would be better. John VanDyk: "The Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 could land you life in prison if you don't have a firewall. Suppose someone launches an attack from your machine and you can't prove it was not you? Zip...you're in the slammer." Reuters: New 'War Vote' Virus Deletes Computer Files. DaveNet: Seybold 2001 -- Publishing In Crisis. A personal note of thanks to the people at Seybold. As always, they're the best conference producers I work with. They do their jobs with courage and excellence, and they never second guess me. I appreciate the amount of trust they show in me, personally (that's why this is a personal note). At one point in the discussions last week I said -- "Let me do this, it will work." And of course they said yes, and they swung into action and we recruited a fantastic new panel. We've now got a string of great collaborations dating back to 1997 and that's worth noting. Thanks! Here's a question I'm going to ask tomorrow for people who keep weblogs, who didn't cover the attacks and the aftermath. Why? (Don't consider this a challenge -- it's a straight question.) If you can, respond on the Seybold mail list. Jason Kottke: "Doing a little research for the panel on Wed dredged up the following links." Doc Searls: "If this had happened ten years ago — and given the technology involved, it easily could have — the mainstream media would have told the whole story. Some small percentage of the rest of us would have written letters to editors or something; but the prevaiing wisdom would have been almost entirely received." Adam Curry: "I once was late filing tax papers and awoke to find all my money gone, transferred out of my accounts to the feds." NY Times: "Napster said that it had agreed to pay $26 million to settle a copyright lawsuit with songwriters and music publishers, and to make royalty payments once it started a for-pay service." Highlights of a 60 Minutes piece on brain fingerprinting. Lance Knobel: "I spent two days last week in a brainstorming session about Davos 2002. Rightly and inevitably, our discussions were dominated by the events of 11 September and their aftermath." Oliver Wrede: "I am not Anti-American. I am Anti-Bush (or rather against the politics he represents)." About Love Manila Month -- September is winding to a close, and great lists are still coming in. Thank you. So I hereby declare October as Love Manila Month II. Keep the good vibes, and the great wish lists, and we'll keep adding features and fixing bugs. Bush and the doves
We want the support of the Afghani people, and Muslims everywhere. Good idea. And what a brilliant move it was to choose Colin Powell, one of the leaders of Desert Storm, to head the State Department. No hotheads calling the shots at the BigCountry with a heart. Powell gets it better than any of our correspondents, and Bush, like any good exec, listens to the people who work for him, and saves the oral gymnastics for the press corps. Net-net my country is doing it just right. And one more thing -- it's been not-correct for most of my life for Americans to say we love our country. That's a big bug. We're the world's greatest country and we know it. I love the USA. It gave me life, an education, role models and a philosophy. And if you think we're stupid or decadent, just try fucking with us. USA -- All The Way. One more thing and then I gotta go I'm on stage tomorrow at 8:30AM that means I gotta get up early, but first I want to correct an outdated assumption many people make about American role models in the 21st century. A lot of our critics think the ultimate American male role model is still John Wayne. That's cute, but that's not who we are now. I gave it some thought this afternoon -- which movie actors do I admire most? I thought of Marlon Brando, for his role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather and for the fat but beautiful NY psychologist in Don Juan de Marcos. Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets. Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, Scent of a Woman, Any Given Sunday. Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. My movie role models are men who think, who are crazy, and struggle to be great. They're not one-dimensional, they are rich and complex, like real people. I also think of Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan. Einstein, of course, wasn't born in the US, and that makes him all the more appropriate as an American role model because so many great Americans were not born here. And Carl Sagan had the courage to confront our greatest fear, knowledge. He made it easy to understand that the universe does not revolve around us. It's very scary to realize that probably very little of the universe gives a shit whether our planet lives or dies. In all likelihood, they don't even know we exist, whoever they may be. Where this goes is a subject for more thought and discussion over the coming days and weeks, Murphy-willing. Morning notes Good morning. We had our first rainstorm of the season last night. What a thing to behold. Thunder and lighting. Huge. Power outages. Everything is wet. Lovely smells. Happy garden.
Tony Kern: "Every American citizen was in the crosshairs of last Tuesday's attack, not just those that were unfortunate enough to be in the World Trade Center or Pentagon. The will of the American people will decide this war. If we are to win, it will be because we have what it takes to persevere through a few more hits, learn from our mistakes, improvise, and adapt. If we can do that, we will eventually prevail." MSNBC: WHO warns of biowarfare threat. On Slashdot, Philip Zimmerman, the developer of PGP, says that the Washington Post misrepresented him in their article about software used by the terrorists. "This misrepresentation is serious, because it implies that under the duress of terrorism I have changed my principles on the importance of cryptography for protecting privacy and civil liberties in the information age." Salon: "The day the twin towers disappeared, ex-spouses, former crushes and old lovers reappeared in many lives. As if a voice from on high granted an across-the-board reprieve, people began dialing telephones with scarcely a thought for the consequences." Infoworld reviews Jabber. "For companies not already using integrated collaborative environment solutions -- such as those provided by IBM Lotus and Microsoft, which already include embedded IM functions -- Jabber is clearly a solution to consider." Jason Kottke: "The Internet did not replace TV, newspapers, magazines, Sears, the US Postal Service, Barnes and Noble, or grocery stores in people's daily lives,.it augmented them." Standard: "Most of the assets of Standard Media International were sold at auction today for a combined $1.4 million, plus assumed subscription liabilities." Wired: Why Liberty Suffers in Wartime. NY Times: "Stocks rose sharply today after Wall Street's worst week in the markets since the Great Depression." SF Chronicle: "He was the California connection to Osama bin Laden's fearsome terrorist organization -- an architect of horrific acts of violence against his adopted country, even as he lived a quiet suburban lifestyle in Silicon Valley."
Is this pic real or Photoshop? Stan Krute: "Photoshop. Clues: lighting, contrast, focus anomalies." Rahul Dave: "Photoshop, because the visitors platform didn't open till 11AM. Thank god for that, since 50K people used to visit the WTC every day. Photoshop, as the plane is too high compared to the building. Photoshop, as there is no way that camera could have survived." The RAWA site is off the air. RAWA stands for Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Omar Javaid sends pointers to alternate RAWA sites. Thanks! NY Times: Travelers Warm Up to Teleconferencing.
Mike Krus loves New York (and Paris). Carey Hackett loves New York. It's nice to see that our Australian friends haven't lost their sense of humor. And the Brits too. Here's a pic of Uncle Osama at age 14, on vacation in Sweden in 1971, with 22 of his brothers and sisters. Lookin groovy! News.Com: "With the emergence of the Nimda worm -- the latest in a long series to attack Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) and other software -- Gartner believes it's time for businesses with Web applications to start investigating less vulnerable Web server products." Gary Stock: Twin Towers Tenant Lists. My philosophy OK, there's a lot of confusion. I shouldn't have to explain, but I want to be kind. First, I truly and desperately hope we don't have a nuclear war. But I also believe (as I've written) that there are loose nukes and I also believe that some are some already in US cities. What about that? Do you care more about Baghdad than Chicago? If so, you can't think of yourself as a friend of the US or depend on our help to defend you. Now does any of this matter? I have no idea. But I like to keep my eyes open and think, and then say what I see and listen to what other people say in response. This is how I learn more quickly, and to me, that's very important to being alive. Now some links to stories that further explain my philosophy. Carl Sagan: "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark." 5/7/97: "When a friend changes you can find the bond that's connecting you at a deeper level. The surface stuff isn't a good thing to depend on. Physical bodies change as they grow. So do emotional bodies and intellectual ones. Take a deep breath. People move, life is more like a wild dance than a ceremony. You just can't tell what's coming next." 4/24/95: "In baseball, like other things in life, eventually you have to choose sides. In baseball, someone has to lose. You can't have a win-win. That's just the way it is! You have to have an opinion. You Gotta Believe!" 5/6/98: "Over and over we learn the lesson that we're just little pups with grand visions, waiting to lead a revolution, wanting to be heard by someone, anyone, lest we die in anonymity. In the end we die, and who cares? Probably no one. It happens every day." That's who we're up against. Not a terrible foe. Just a scared chihuahua who thinks his shit doesn't stink. He'll die, so will I, and the universe will probably go on. I believe in miracles, meaning I don't pretend to have any unique understanding of the purpose or intent of the universe. Live and let live. Do the best you can. Stand up when it's time to stand up. Our friends will die Here's another assumption I've factored into my thinking, and it's time to say it publicly. No matter what the US does, one or more of the leaders of friendly countries will be deposed and killed. Here's a list: Egypt, Jordan, Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, ??? They're under tremendous pressure. So when you hear them stand up for freedom, even in small ways, know that they're being incredibly courageous. Yes, I know they're not democracies. There are all kinds of reasons to despise them. But in all likelihood you will live to see their death, and they must know it. Morning rant This comment from yesterday got quite a strong reaction in my mailbox. So did this one. Mostly, people are responding to things I didn't say. I didn't ask for us to drop a nuke on Baghdad, I said I wouldn't be surprised if we did. People are saying our strategy is stupid, but they don't know what our strategy is. Hello. Earth to Europe, get a clue. The US is not weak or stupid. We're scared, but we're not giving up. That so many paint us with a single brush and a single color says they don't understand what the US is. You watch too much TV. Get on a plane and come have a look at the real US. We're the world's country. Where I grew up, and where I live now, you see people of every race, every religion, on the face of the earth. We're the most open and tolerant BigCountry on the planet. We have a great philosophy. And everyone, everywhere on the planet has a relative in the US. Some of the pushback says the reason people read my site is that I think for myself. I do, except in time of war. This is a new thing for me. I think of ways I can help my country survive and win. I listen to the President and wonder if he's up to the challenge. But what choice do I have other than to support him? I don't see that I have a choice. And, get this, I don't think you have a choice either. Forgive me for loving my country. I wish you loved it more than you do. Earlier this morning there was a press release from the head of the Taliban saying that if we kill him we'll pay for it. He blinked again. He doesn't want to be killed. Hah. Gotcha. See we have more in common than you might think. He's not such an awful enemy. He's a little guy with a troop of assholes that want to make everyone like them. Yeah, where have we seen that before? If we survive this, we'll be stronger for it. We'll learn how to use technology to exchange information and points of view, and we'll learn how to listen to others and ourselves, and understand the difference. I'm finished avoiding saying things that might evoke other people's fear. I was never a big fan of that way of life, and now I'm finished with it once and for all. I invite you to join me. Say what you think and let's have fun, while we still can.
Patrick at Zill: "If we wiped out bin Laden's top 12 lieutenants we would make it tough on their DNS system to keep up. Remember, in a good terrorist organization very few of the people involved know the full scope of the operation." A personal note. Talking on the phone yesterday with UserLand's COO, John Robb, an ex Air Force pilot, I remarked that we have a Wartime COO. When we first started working together I was kind of horrified to see how calmly he talks about killing bad guys. "What did I get into?" I wondered (to myself) then. Yesterday I told him about this, I must have had some kind of premonition that we'd need to be able to calmly talk about warfare. He's certainly influenced my thinking, in a good way. Thanks John! Stratfor says that the US is preparing to attack Iraq, not Afghanistan, and I think that's obvious. Make a list of mistakes that US has to undo. One of them was leaving Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq after the Gulf War. It would not surprise me if we dropped the first nukes since WWII on Iraq this week. I wonder why they're not evacuating Baghdad right now. The purpose of such an attack would be two-fold. One, the linear one, it will immediately get rid of one of the sources of world terrorism, the easiest and least defended such target. Second, the curve ball, it will send a message to our so-called allies that the "with us or against us" position has teeth. Mick Hume: "I am opposed to the war planned by President George Bush with the support of Prime Minister Tony Blair. The problem is that I find many of the arguments offered against America as incoherent as Bush’s war talk." Another angle. On the ScriptingNewsWorldTradeCenter mail list, Christoph Pingel quotes an article about global terrorism and Uncle Osama: "It's a loose network of individuals with the same ideology and the same thirst for blood. If he were taken out, the rest of the network would be in place. It's not clear that you'd dispose of the problem." That's daunting for sure, but a similar statement could be made about their enemy. "If you knock down one of their skyscrapers and attack the Pentagon, the rest of the network is still in place. It's not clear that you'd dispose of the problem." And of course we're both a loose network of individuals and a powerful army with nukes, and biological and chemical weapons, and we've got a pretty solid idealogy. BTW, we also know how to use the Internet, in fact, we invented it. I guess my bitch with Europe comes down to this. Much of what you say about us is that we're stupid and decadent. One otherwise intelligent British person dismissed something I said by saying I was watching too much TV. Heh. You watch too much American TV. Hop on a plane and come to Seybold next week and participate. We're all scared shitless. But we'll do what we have to do to stay alive and free. I'm glad we won't go down without a fight. I'm not scared to hear what you have to say. I just wonder when you're going to finish, and decide that you want to stay alive and free too. Then something interesting will happen between our two continents. JD Lasica: What to tell children about terrorism and war. Reuters: "The United States has warned its allies of a possible second round of attacks by the end of this week following the deadly strikes on New York and Washington, Jiji news agency quoted Japanese government sources as saying." Pew Research: "Fully nine-in-ten Americans are getting their news about the terrorism attacks from television. As in recent years, more people are turning to cable TV news outlets (45%) than network news (30%) or local TV (17%). Radio, newspapers and the Internet all lag well behind television as a source of news on the crisis." Thad McIlroy: "But after I'd watched the crashing planes and crashing towers 101 times, there came a point where I found myself asking (a la Peggy Lee) 'Is that all there is?'" NY Times: "For many Iranians, America is a country full of the scantily-clad, available women of Baywatch and MTV. First-time visitors to the United States are often shocked by the more spiritual and socially conservative side of America. 'What surprised me the most when I came to the United States was how many churches there were,' said Mohammad Atrianfar, the head of Teheran's town councils and editor of the daily newspaper Hamshahri. 'I certainly didn't know how religious Americans are.'" Now, from a US citizen who is fully commited to victory, to my government, now is not a good time to be trading off freedom in favor of corporate profits. It wasn't a fair deal before, now it's absolutely bizarre. I'm sure the proponents of this bill, some of the largest media companies, can find things to do that will better protect shareholder value now that realities have shifted. (For example, show the rest of the world what the US is really like.) To the government, save freedom-hits for things that matter to the nation's security. This bill is a completely misplaced priority. Dan Gillmor: Safety in spreading out. Something netizens can do to undermine terrorism. Create a list of places informants can go on the Web to send anonymous emails to the FBI. Circulate their locations widely. Another thing we can do is build better communication systems, with replicated data. We've become pretty lazy on the Internet -- letting other people store our archives for us. This is a defense issue now. Decentralization is something we must become more conscious of. Here's another thing we can do. Stop all discussions about evolution of SOAP now. To the BigCo's consider backing off SOAP altogether and use XML-RPC to build distributed systems. I watch the hair-splitting arguments that are still going on with increasing impatience, and wonder if these people have a clue what's going on around us and what a strategic advantage the free world has when we build powerful flows of information. Perhaps the egos of the BigCo's can take a backseat now. These technologies are essential to building effective distributed systems. "thinkUsaalignright"I'm glad I started this thread. Another takeaway. If it wasn't clear before, it should be clear now how indefensible Microsoft's architecture for Passport is. One bomb in a building in Redmond would probably knock out the network they're planning. Could we have the resources of the most powerful software company in the world applied to making the world safer and stronger instead of more vulnerable? And instead of executing three-year plans, think about what you can do for the USA, today. GlobalSecurity.Org: Afghanistan Military Guide. This site also includes satellite imagery of terrorist camps. Some good PR for the Taliban. Now to balance that, consider that until Vietnam, the US had never lost a war. We learned from that one. No more wars without the support of the people and clearly defined goals. I'd like to see the British press run some stories about what a terrific fighting machine the US is when we're provoked. Christoph Pingel: "Thinking people all over the world are forced into a moral dilemma: 'Either you are for us, or you are for the terrorists.'" NY Times: "For the past few years, the government has interpreted the existing pen register and trap and trace laws, which were designed with telephones in mind, to allow them to swiftly garner certain information from ISP's about a suspect's e-mails -- for example, the to/from header information." Adam Curry: "I added a blogrolling list to my homepage template today. Seems that's the blogging way. To automate some of the positions I'm writing a macro for my Manila server that will place the BlogRolling links in priority order based on number of referers from each site." I love it when two famous bloggers get together. Nice. And it makes me proud when one of our friends gets his college diploma. Wes says "At UT you're not just a number, you're a really big number." I've started a new mail page with comments from Europe and the US, heavy-duty and light-weight. One thing's for sure, in the war between freedom and fear, our side is going to have better t-shirts.
NY Times: The Search for Intelligent Life on the Internet. A reminder that many in Europe and elsewhere do care about the US. A Sunday (London) Times article on thoughtlessness and arrogance among Europeans in response to the tragedy in the US. Thank you. Andrew Scott: "I don't think it's possible for us here in Europe to experience the depth of feeling that you Americans must experience over the attack on your nation. Quite simply we are not there." Andrew, I think we could heal from the experience of 9/11, if there are no more attacks. But I think most of us know that there will be more and they will likely be worse. This is not like an earthquake or hurricane, acts of god, that we clean up from and move on. This is a war. Many of the Europeans I'm hearing from are not getting that. Now here's a fact that Europeans are going to have to deal with. Overwhelmingly this country supports its government, and its President. Ultimately you're going to have to too. Better sooner than later. I think the terrorists made a fundamental mistake. It was too strong a wakeup call. They would have been smarter to have aimed lower. Now in the US we have little to lose. John Perry Barlow pushes back, and I return the respect.
Brent Silver: Be a FUD-Fighter. John Robb's thinking has changed over the last few hours, much as my own has. People are right when they say that the old world is gone. You can't reason based on the past anymore. None of our experience counts. WSJ: "Before last week, real estate was one of the brightest spots in the fading economy. Now, from Orlando to San Francisco, there are already signs that the terrorist disasters have had a broad — and remarkably varied — impact on housing prices." Al Ahram: "Egyptian officials did not miss the opportunity this week to promote their decade-old call for organising an international anti-terrorism conference as the best means of stamping out terrorism worldwide." James Spahr: "Holy cow! You can easily fit Denver's Mile High stadium inside of the devastated area."
Lots more email from Europe. I gotta write about it. In the meantime, I encourage you all to look inside yourselves and make statements about that, instead of pissing on the USA. Are you scared? Great. That's real. Are you scared of the power of the US? That's OK too. Now who scares you more, Uncle Sam or Uncle Osama? Guys and gals, our President was right -- it's time to make a choice, and decide what you stand for. From the US, it's damned simple. We don't want our cities to get nuked. It's probably going to happen anyway. Then, what? If not now, when? NY Times: NY Loves America. Thanks for the reminder! I love New York. "New York gave me so much. An education. A philosophy. Role models. A sense of confidence that comes from being raised in the greatest city man has ever created." Membership is open. You can create your own Love New York page. No problem.
Charles Cooper: When Blogging Came of Age. "All in all, I’ve revised my earlier views about the usefulness of blogging, moving full circle from my earlier position. Yes, there's still a lot of chaff out there, and it's the reader's responsibility to sift and choose. But in the best spirit of grassroots participation, these new information gatekeepers are helping to rewrite the rules." Deborah Branscum: Small-scale heroics. "If Silicon Valley couldn't supply brawn during a national disaster, it could supply bits--and companies large and small did so with a vengeance." Nick Denton: "The online news sites are useful for a quick check of breaking news, but I am looking for something more. And that I have been finding on weblogs. Some, such as Kottke.org and Dave Winer's Scripting.com, are well-established technology weblogs which have interrupted normal service to bring their take on the crisis." We're getting so much recognition. Thank you. Entertainment Weekly is out with a story about how the Web covered Time Zero, it's not on the Web, but they're discussing it on Metafilter. Perhaps it's worth a review. Here are the archives of SN from the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th. Doc: "What we're witnessing here is the exposure of an economic imperative that has been there since the Dawn of Trade, but which we have lately forgotten." Susan Kitchens: "Gee, for some reason, saying that today's the last day of summer sounds almost, well, apocalyptic." DaveNet: Time Zero? "The site of the tragedy is referred to as Ground Zero -- so then, is the moment Time Zero?"
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