Day: April 9, 2003

Somebody Get That Woman a Fur Coat

Here’s a short item that appeared in the February 14th edition of Scotland’s Daily Record. It bears repeating in its entirety,

Four models were left shivering yesterday after cheeky thieves stole their clothes as they stripped off for animal rights. Carefully-placed lovehearts helped spread the message “Fur Out, Love In” in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street. Model Katie Black, 20, from Erskine, Renfrewshire, said: “I thought I was going to have to go home in my birthday suite when I saw a young guy nick our dressing gowns. We were really cold.”

Where’s a fur coat when you need one?

Heartfelt protest. The Daily Record (Scotland), February 14, 2003.

Moblogging SARS In China

The BBC has an interesting story about SARS in China. Specifically, the Chinese government at first had a media blackout about SARS altogether. It has relented somewhat, but is clearly not telling its own people, much less the rest of the world, the true extent of SARS cases in China.

So people in China are using text messaging on their mobile phones to route around the lack of information in regular media channels.

This, in turn, pissed off the government which in some cases has gone so far as to block most text messages that originate in foreign countries as well as complaining that text messaging is a threat to national security.

Of course the main problem with that approach is that those acts in themselves are helpful bits of information that practically screams out that the government is lying about SARS.

Source:

Chinese txt for virus information. Holly Williams, BBC, April 9, 2003.

When Democrats Do It, It’s Not a Litmus Test

John Kerry has said that, if elected President, he will only nominate Supreme Court Justices who are pro-abortion. But, he is quick to add, this is not a litmus test,

Litmus tests are politically motivated tests; this is a constitutional right. I think people who go to the Supreme Court ought to interpret the Constitution as it is interpreted, and if they have another point of view, then they’re not supporting the Constitution, which is what a judge does.

Yeah, that’s a lot clearer now.

Of course this is Kerry’s version of what Gore had to do when he was running for president — try to explain away his previous votes and stands on abortions. Specifically, Kerry voted to confirm Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and apparently now fears that vote will be used against him by Democrats in the primary.

Kerry is running his campaign as if he thinks he only has a small shot at winning and so needs to appeal to the Left of the Democratic Party. But, at least from here, he doesn’t handle flip-flopping on the issues very well — certainly not as well as Joseph Lieberman does.

Radio Userland Comment Problems

The other day I mentioned the problems that Scott Rosenberg was having at his Salon.Com blog with some folks who filled up the comments section of his site with posts that were hundreds of kilobytes long. The person(s) in question were posting so much text so quickly that according to Rosenberg it was bringing the server to a crawl. Because of the way the Radio Community Server is configured, Rosenberg and other users aren’t given the ability to delete such irritating and pointless posts, or IP block them, etc.

Userland appears to have responded with two interim solutions.

The first is pointless but harmless,

UserLand has implemented a maximum limit on the length of a comments thread. The good news is that this deals with the problem. The bad news is that this limits the length of comments threads.

Okay, that might help maintain the server performance, but it simply means that this spammer’s efforts will result in all of the threads on Rosenberg’s weblog being closed so no discussion can take place — not much better than simply turning off the feature in the first place.

The second solution (for Manila) is a personal pet peeve of mind that I’ve seen elsewhere and really gets my blood boiling — publicly displaying the IP address of people who post.

Jake Savin describes this new feature,

Today we released a new feature for Manila — IP address tracking. This feature helps to prevent spammers from attacking your site.

Whenever a new discussion group message or comment is posted, Manila now records the IP address along with the discussion group message.

People who might abuse public comment systems and discussion groups will be discouraged to do so if their IP address is made public.

I think publicly displaying IP addresses is behavior that is even worse than the spammers. Sites that implement this are making public a good deal of information about the person posting — information which, when combined with other things, could get people in a lot of trouble.

VegSource is a site that displays the IP addresses and illustrates the danger of posting this. For example, I once read a rather pro-animal rights post in the middle of the day on VegSource. Doing a DNS lookup it turned out that she was posting from a computer at a pharmaceutical company. Based on the things the person said, it was likely she worked in some sort of accounting department.

Somehow I don’t think this company would have been happy to find out that one of their employees as an activist posting to activist sites on company time.

In some cases you can get even more information. I’ll never understand why some libraries don’t use dynamic IP addresses for their public machines. Giving a public machine a static IP address is just asking for trouble (for example, one of my more irritating posters used to post from the same machine at a library in Cleveland — if I lived in the area, it wouldn’t have been too hard to track him down if I was so motivated).

Certainly site administrators have valid uses for tracking IPs, such as IP-blocking people who abuse their systems. But broadcasting the IP address of everyone who posts to the entire Internet? A Very Bad Idea (TM).

New Meningitis Vaccine Could Save Lives in Developing World

The Meningitis Vaccine Project recently announced that it will soon begin clinical trials of a vaccine for Meningitis A that is designed to be commercially viable in the developing world where the disease has reached near-epidemic proportions in some countries.

A number of vaccine candidates for Meningitis A have been produced in the past but along with being too expensive for developing countries, they tended to offer only short term protection from the disease and did not work at all in the most vulnerable population — young children.

The newly developed vaccine candidate would likely cost under $1 per dose and researchers believe it will provide long term protection even when give to young children.

Dr. F. Marc LaForce of the Meningitis Vaccine Project told the BBC,

Clinical trials for the new vaccine could start as early as 2004 and the new vaccine could be ready for wide use in sub-Saharan Africa within the next four to five years . . . Our goal is to eliminate epidemic meningitis as a public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa, thereby alleviating the social, human and economic disasters these epidemics cost.

In sub-Sharan Africa, Meningitis A kills 5,000 people in non-epidemic years, and epidemic outbreaks have claimed upwards of 20,000 dead annually.

Sources:

Meningitis A vaccine hope. The BBC, March 18, 2003.

Milestone Reached in 100-Year War Against Meningitis. Press Release, Meningitis Vaccine Project, March 17, 2003.

Hib meningitis vaccine. Research Defence Society.

Vaccine to Fight Meningitis in Africa Ready To Be Tested. David McAlary, Voice of America, March 18, 2003.

Vaccine hope for meningitis A. Rebecca Oppenheim, HMG, March 20, 2003.

Military Replaced Chickens With Pigeons

When the military tried to use chickens as an advanced warning system against biological or chemical attack, almost all of the animals died within a week and a half. Not to be deterred, the Marines decided to try again only this time using pigeons.

The Marines were doing everything they could to keep the pigeons fro meeting the same fate, including giving them bottled water and finding people with experience caring for pigeons to take care of the birds.

But even if chemical or biological weapons are used in Iraq (which, obviously, looks like it’s not going to happen at the moment), pigeons likely have the same flaw as chickens — biological and chemical weapon are going to affect the birds differently than human beings.

Source:

Marine pigeon force may detect attack. Ravi Nessman, Associated Press, March 16, 2003.