Month: February 2005

The British Government Is Hopeless

In February, a group calling itself The Electronic Civil Disobedience against the Fur and the Vivisection Industry vowed to launch denial of service attacks against the websites of fur companies Peek & Clopenburg; Legacy Trading; The German Fur Institute; Fur Commission USA; Fur & Fashion GmbH; Maison de Bonneterie; and the MIFUR.

A denial of service attack is normally an attempt to flood a web server with bogus requests with the hope that at some point the bogus traffic will overwhelm the web server and cause it to crash. In this case, however, the protesters apparently focused on flooding the e-mail servers of the targeted organizations.

Here’s the bizarre part — if they’re carried out in the UK, denial of service attacks are not illegal. The government has been investigating explicitly outlawing DOS attacks for the past couple years, but still hasn’t followed through.

It’s bizarre that the UK can, on the one hand, consider extreme measures such as preventative house arrest against animal rights activists, but can’t even pass an obvious and straightforward remedy such as outlawing DOS attacks

The UK is just hopeless at coming up with legal responses to extremist activities. When the animal rights activists succeed in driving pharmaceutical research out of the country, it will be because the British government continues to do little more than alternate between throwing up a white flag on the one hand and overreaching on the other.

Source:

Fur protesters launch Web attacks. Dan Ilett, ZDNet UK, February 14, 2005.

Man Arrested In Connection With McDonald’s Arson in 2003

New Jersey resident Chris McIntosh, 22, was arrested this month and charged with setting a fire Jan. 20, 2003 that caused about $5,000 in damage to a Seattle-area McDonald’s.

Shortly after the McDonald’s arson, someone called a crime tip line claiming the arson in the name of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. The caller said,

There was an E-L-F-A-L-F hit at McDonald’s across from the Space Needle. There will be more. The fire was set on the ‘M.’ Four gallons of gas. There was a broken lock, not cut. Broken. There will be more. As long as Mother Earth is pillaged, raped, destroyed. As long as McDonald’s keeps hurting our furry brothers, there will be more.

Prosecutors say that fingerprints and DNA evidence found on a can of spray paint and sunglasses left at the scene of the crime match McIntosh’s. McIntosh had been arrested numerous times before in several states including Oregon, California, Wisconsin and Illinois, and his name turned up quickly after the FBI ran his prints through their criminal database.

McIntosh’s former girlfriend, Maria Gardner, told police that McIntosh set that fire and that she acted as a lookout during the fire. Another woman he dated, but who is unnamed in the affidavit against him, told the FBI that McIntosh bragged about the McDonald’s fire to her in February 2005.

Additionally, McIntosh apparently used his brother David’s name as an alias, and a Seattle-area youth centers’ records show a “David McIntosh” stayed at the center in January 2003, including the period during which the fire was set (McIntosh, in fact, was using “David McIntosh” as an alias when he was arrested).

McIntosh was arrested in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after police there received a tip that he may have been in the area. He will be brought to Seattle by federal authorities, and if he is ultimately convicted, he could face up to five years in jail and a $250,000 fine.

The full text of the affidavit filed against McIntosh can be read here.

Sources:

McDonald’s blaze suspect held. Christine Frey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 17, 2005.

New Jersey Man Arrested In 2003 Arson At Seattle Mcdonald’s Restaurant. Press Release, United States Attorney’s Office Western District of Washington, February 16, 2005.

Man charged with arson in 2003 fire. Danielle Camilli, Burlington County Times, February 18, 2005

Agenda Fusion 7

Developer One has finally managed to release the initial version of Agenda Fusion 7 for the PocketPC. The PocketPC aftermarket organizer field is pretty much between Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant. Many longtime Agenda Fusion users, including myself, believed that AF had fallen behind Pocket Informant both in features and speed. I was close to switching, but the promise of a version 7 had me hold off and I’m glad.

The major improvement with the initial release of version 7 is a Projects view, which addresses the major complaint I had about Agenda Fusion, which was its lack of any sort of hierarchical system for organizing tasks, appointments, etc.

See, thanks to Conversant I already have the habit of tagging everything with ludicrous detail. Agenda Fusion fed that need in an organizer since it lets you create categories and assign multiple categories to tasks, appointments and contacts. I’ve got about 50 different categories.

It also has an excellent filtering system so I can create a filter, say Office Computer, which will show all of the tasks that I need to get done that can be done on my office computer. This sort of context-based task tracking is something I stole from Getting Things Done, and I love it. I also have categories and subcategories for my various websites and weblogs.

But dammit, sometimes I also needed a straightahead hierarchical view of my tasks. I got to the point where I was maintaining some tasks in both ListPro — a nice, advanced list/outline software — and in Agenda Fusion. The new Project view in Agenda Fusion takes care of that. I can create “projects” in an outliner and then assign existing tasks, appointments and contacts to them. So I can quickly switch between a project-based view of my tasks and appointments and a simple flat context-based view of my tasks and appointments (for a bit of context, I’m very anal and have about 700-1000 tasks at any given moment).

The UI for the Project view — especially adding tasks, etc. to it — still needs some work, but even in its early stages Agenda Fusion 7 really takes the software to that cliched “next level.”

Diablo-Style?

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I are having lunch at a restaurant that has real silverware. I’m purusing the menu and notice they have some sort of steak sandwich that has a notation that it can be prepared “Diablo style”.

Ignoring the small print explanation, I point this out to my wife and suggest that this might mean that we have to kill rats and imps and the food falls out onto the floor like magic.

Remembering how much time we both wasted on this sort of activity, we went with the chicken.

Presumably in another decade the same restaurant will offer its sandwich “World of Warcraft style.”

Congressional Idiots on the Jeff Gannon Affair

I really couldn’t care less about the Jeff Gannon affair one way or the other, except to point out that this Fox News story underlies what idiots our elected officials are (and this idiot Conyers is, unfortunately, from Michigan — emphasis added),

[John] Conyers and [Louise] Slaughter note in their letter that in an October 2003 interview with Wilson, Guckert referenced a memo written by U.S. intelligence officials indicating the operative suggested Wilson could investigate reports that Iraq had sought uranium.

“In and of itself, this indicates that Mr. Guckert had access to classified information,” the two lawmakers wrote. And “it appears now that Mr. Guckert memorialized his experiences at the White House.”

As has been widely reported about the Gannon affair, Gannon mentioned the memo almost two weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported on it. There’s no evidence that Gannon did anything but read the WSJ story about the memo and ask an official about the memo. Certainly the fact that he knew about the memo was proof “in and of itself” that Gannon had access to the memo only if you accept the bizarre proposition that everyone who also read the Wall Street Journal’s report “had access to classified information.”